(Bloomberg) — Crime has surged to the forefront of Brazilians’ minds in recent months, supplanting economic issues as their top concern and sparking consternation inside President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration over how to respond.
Roughly 60% of Brazilians now rank crime as the biggest issue facing the country, according to a March survey released by AtlasIntel, four times the share that said it was the economy. The worries have helped drive overall approval of the leftist Lula — whose winning 2022 campaign focused largely on rebuilding the economy and combating poverty in the wake of the pandemic — to the lowest levels of his term.
Brazil has long suffered from alarmingly high rates of violence, and rising concerns about security are hardly unique in Latin America. Crime has come to dominate the region’s politics, driving many leaders to begin mimicking the hard-line approach of El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele.
What separates Brazil from many of its neighbors is that its overall number of homicides has been falling: The country experienced 47,398 murders in 2022, about 10,000 fewer than it had just four years prior, according to the most recent data available the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, a research organization.
Read More: Bukele’s Brutal Crime Crackdown Gets Mimicked in Latin America
Other forms of crime, however, have become more common, experts say, while the end of the pandemic and the Brazilian economy’s better-than-expected performance last year have caused the public to return their focus to other hot-button issues.
“The irony right now is that Brazil is actually doing better than it has in years on economic grounds and in terms of political stability,” said Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarape Institute, a think tank in Rio de Janeiro. “Yet, that gives space for people to be preoccupied with other issues, including public security.”
While Brazil has avoided the sort of homicide explosion that Ecuador has seen, it has not solved lingering issues that helped Lula’s right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, win the 2018 election on the back of campaign promises to take an iron-fisted approach to public security.
Organized criminal groups still exert control over swaths of major cities like Rio de Janeiro, and battle for control of drug and smuggling routes from jungle borders to urban ports.
“The pandemic hit and we stopped talking about it,” said Joana Monteiro, a professor of public policy at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.
Headline-grabbing incidents related to those problems have helped return the focus to crime, including the torching of public buses by organized criminal groups in Rio last year and the escape of two inmates from a maximum security prison in northern Brazil in February. The fugitives, who took part in the country’s first prison-break of its kind, remain at large.
Read More: Rio Ratchets Up Crime Surveillance to Keep Streets Safe for G-20
Available data also suggests that criminals’ tactics are shifting. While Brazil saw a big reduction in robberies since the pandemic, embezzlement and phishing scams — known locally as “golpes” — have exploded.
Many of the crimes that most affect Brazilians’ perceptions of public security, meanwhile, are likely under-reported. A recent survey showed that nearly one of every three residents in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city and business capital, have had their cell phone stolen — occurrences so common that many victims never report them to police.
Lula Concerned
In a nation as divided as Brazil, political leanings also have large effects on how citizens perceive the security situation, experts say. Leftist leaders who typically focus their messages on root causes like inequality — or avoid the subject altogether — often face backlash on public security, and polls show that Brazilians routinely rank Lula’s government as weak on crime.
Bolsonaro and his allies in congress and key governorships have seized on the issue, continuing to advocate for more lethal responses to criminals, including by doing more to empower the police.
Privately, Lula has complained to cabinet members that his government is losing the narrative on public security to critics, according to a people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity to discuss the matter.
“Right or wrong, these messages resonate, especially to far-right supporters who are paranoid that the situation is deteriorating,” said Muggah.
That is the case even in Latin American countries with far lower rates of insecurity. In Chile, the perception that President Gabriel Boric is weak on crime is one of the factors that have pushed his popularity below 30%, while Argentina’s Javier Milei won a hard-fought election last year thanks in part to his law-and-order platform.
With municipal elections just months away and no major policy changes planned, Monteiro said the debate over crime in Brazil is only bound to get louder before the next presidential race in two years.
“It’s going to be a key topic not only this year but in 2026,” she said.
–With assistance from Simone Iglesias, Beatriz Amat and Robert Jameson.
OTTAWA – Canada’s unemployment rate held steady at 6.5 per cent last month as hiring remained weak across the economy.
Statistics Canada’s labour force survey on Friday said employment rose by a modest 15,000 jobs in October.
Business, building and support services saw the largest gain in employment.
Meanwhile, finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing experienced the largest decline.
Many economists see weakness in the job market continuing in the short term, before the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cuts spark a rebound in economic growth next year.
Despite ongoing softness in the labour market, however, strong wage growth has raged on in Canada. Average hourly wages in October grew 4.9 per cent from a year ago, reaching $35.76.
Friday’s report also shed some light on the financial health of households.
According to the agency, 28.8 per cent of Canadians aged 15 or older were living in a household that had difficulty meeting financial needs – like food and housing – in the previous four weeks.
That was down from 33.1 per cent in October 2023 and 35.5 per cent in October 2022, but still above the 20.4 per cent figure recorded in October 2020.
People living in a rented home were more likely to report difficulty meeting financial needs, with nearly four in 10 reporting that was the case.
That compares with just under a quarter of those living in an owned home by a household member.
Immigrants were also more likely to report facing financial strain last month, with about four out of 10 immigrants who landed in the last year doing so.
That compares with about three in 10 more established immigrants and one in four of people born in Canada.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information says health-care spending in Canada is projected to reach a new high in 2024.
The annual report released Thursday says total health spending is expected to hit $372 billion, or $9,054 per Canadian.
CIHI’s national analysis predicts expenditures will rise by 5.7 per cent in 2024, compared to 4.5 per cent in 2023 and 1.7 per cent in 2022.
This year’s health spending is estimated to represent 12.4 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. Excluding two years of the pandemic, it would be the highest ratio in the country’s history.
While it’s not unusual for health expenditures to outpace economic growth, the report says this could be the case for the next several years due to Canada’s growing population and its aging demographic.
Canada’s per capita spending on health care in 2022 was among the highest in the world, but still less than countries such as the United States and Sweden.
The report notes that the Canadian dental and pharmacare plans could push health-care spending even further as more people who previously couldn’t afford these services start using them.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
As Canadians wake up to news that Donald Trump will return to the White House, the president-elect’s protectionist stance is casting a spotlight on what effect his second term will have on Canada-U.S. economic ties.
Some Canadian business leaders have expressed worry over Trump’s promise to introduce a universal 10 per cent tariff on all American imports.
A Canadian Chamber of Commerce report released last month suggested those tariffs would shrink the Canadian economy, resulting in around $30 billion per year in economic costs.
More than 77 per cent of Canadian exports go to the U.S.
Canada’s manufacturing sector faces the biggest risk should Trump push forward on imposing broad tariffs, said Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters president and CEO Dennis Darby. He said the sector is the “most trade-exposed” within Canada.
“It’s in the U.S.’s best interest, it’s in our best interest, but most importantly for consumers across North America, that we’re able to trade goods, materials, ingredients, as we have under the trade agreements,” Darby said in an interview.
“It’s a more complex or complicated outcome than it would have been with the Democrats, but we’ve had to deal with this before and we’re going to do our best to deal with it again.”
American economists have also warned Trump’s plan could cause inflation and possibly a recession, which could have ripple effects in Canada.
It’s consumers who will ultimately feel the burden of any inflationary effect caused by broad tariffs, said Darby.
“A tariff tends to raise costs, and it ultimately raises prices, so that’s something that we have to be prepared for,” he said.
“It could tilt production mandates. A tariff makes goods more expensive, but on the same token, it also will make inputs for the U.S. more expensive.”
A report last month by TD economist Marc Ercolao said research shows a full-scale implementation of Trump’s tariff plan could lead to a near-five per cent reduction in Canadian export volumes to the U.S. by early-2027, relative to current baseline forecasts.
Retaliation by Canada would also increase costs for domestic producers, and push import volumes lower in the process.
“Slowing import activity mitigates some of the negative net trade impact on total GDP enough to avoid a technical recession, but still produces a period of extended stagnation through 2025 and 2026,” Ercolao said.
Since the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement came into effect in 2020, trade between Canada and the U.S. has surged by 46 per cent, according to the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
With that deal is up for review in 2026, Canadian Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Candace Laing said the Canadian government “must collaborate effectively with the Trump administration to preserve and strengthen our bilateral economic partnership.”
“With an impressive $3.6 billion in daily trade, Canada and the United States are each other’s closest international partners. The secure and efficient flow of goods and people across our border … remains essential for the economies of both countries,” she said in a statement.
“By resisting tariffs and trade barriers that will only raise prices and hurt consumers in both countries, Canada and the United States can strengthen resilient cross-border supply chains that enhance our shared economic security.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
