I live in Toronto, we keep our doors (and windows!) locked–but our neighbourhood’s fairly safe, I doubt anything would happen if we did leave it unlocked. (Most likely the worst that would happen is that our puppy would run out…)
Please note, though, that I live in a safe neighbourhood–Jane and Finch, for example, would not be a place to leave doors unlocked.
Just thought I’d add my two cents.
Growing up in Western Virginia I stayed with my grandparents often, their door was never locked. Once I went over to their house to get something while they were on vacation, and I locked the door as I left. I just did it sort of instinctually because they were on vacation, well it seems they use the door lock so infrequently they didn’t even have a key for it and had to open a window and my grandpa had to climb in.
I never have locked their doors since :).
My parents also never lock their doors, but they lock their doors when they go on vacation.
I personally always have my doors locked. I’m one of the paranoid security types, though. Most of my neighbors never lock their doors in this community.
I live in Mississauga, which is the municipality bordering the west side o Toronto.
Always lock it when we’re out. Lock it, and every window, at night. I USUALLY lock the front door when we’re home during the day but I’m not totally consistent about it.
i live in toronto, downtown. rarely lock the doors. usually if there’s gonna be nobody around for a day or more, the house’ll get locked up. but otherwise? nah. (then again, there’s almost always somebody home, so…)
and the same for where i grew up. (another largish city in ontario) locked the doors when we went on vacation, but otherwise not usually ever. hell, most of the people i went to public school with never even carried a house key.
and even when i lived at approximately the notorious jane & finch… for just under three years… i rarely locked the doors.
i always figgered, whats the point? if someone wants in bad enough, they’re getting in. no sense having them break a bunch of shit to do so.
and no place i’ve lived in has ever been burgled. knock wood.
Suburban Cleveland, Ohio but close to some not-so-nice city neighborhoods checking in …
When I’m home, I leave the doors unlocked. At night, I lock them. When I leave the house, I lock the doors behind me, but nothing has ever happened when I accidentally left a side or rear door unlocked anyplace I lived in the US.
The only time I had someone break into a residence of mine was when I was living in a gated apartment complex in Denver; not even pedestrians could get in or out. (Gated complexes were very rare in Denver, and most of the US outside of a few Sunbelt areas.) My bike was stolen off my balcony. The culprit turned out to be one of the apartment complex maintenance staff.
Downtown Ottawa here (~1,000,000 people).
I never lock my door at night and 75% it isn’t locked when I got out for a quick bite to eat or whatnot. I ususally lock it before going to work, but not always. If I am going away for a weekend, it does get locked, but most times it stays open.
Urban Vancouver. Usually the door is unlocked if I’m home, but it is always locked if I’m going to be away for more than 5-10 minutes. Don’t want my computer paying for somebody’s fix.
Calgary here - doors are always locked at my house.
Oh - unless I’m in the backyard, in which case the back door will be open.
Growing up the front door was nearly always locked, but the back door was only locked at night.
When I lived in Antigonish (small town Nova Scotia) my roomates and I never locked the door, unless we were all in at night. No one had a key, and no one had anything worth stealing.
Victoria here - my door is always locked at night or if I’m out. I’ll leave it unlocked when I run down to the laundry or something - I can’t be bothered fiddling with keys when I’m also juggling a laundry basket. I normally lock my door when I’m home, but that’s mostly an ingrained habit from when I was growing up. For some reason my mother is completely and utterly paranoid about leaving doors unlocked (I grew up in White Rock, which is not exactly a hotbed of crime).
To give an example of my mother’s paranoia, she freaked out when she came to see my new place this summer and discovered that I left the balcony door open while I was at work. I live on the 10th floor. Frankly, anyone who manages to get in through my balcony deserves whatever they can take. Plus my apartment faces south, so leaving the door open is the only way to keep the place at a half-way livable temperature, even now if it’s a sunny day.
I probably leave my door unlocked about as often as the typical paranoid American – long enough to get inside or outside, never longer. But I have a thing about leaving doors unlocked, so what I do personally isn’t necessarily a good indicator of what other Canadians do. Still, everyone I’ve ever known who lives in a big city has locked their door, even when they’re inside. One exception was when I was at college. Most people would leave their doors unlocked and open a bit if they were in their rooms, but this is in a college residence with a particularly strong sense of community. I’ve been in other residences where this didn’t happen.
My parents, who live in a smaller city, sometimes didn’t lock their door if they were in, or if they were going out for a short time. This was in a neighborhood where everyone knows everyone, though, and I’m not sure if they still do it. Most other people I knew there, as far as I know, did lock their doors.
One other thing about BfC: the ‘ghetto’ that Michael Moore gives as an example of what a ghetto looks like in Canada. The ‘ghetto’ he shows isn’t actually a ghetto; it’s a co-op housing development near the waterfront in Toronto. Co-op housing is a rent-geared-to-income scheme, where people who have higher incomes pay more than people with lower incomes. Everyone in co-op housing contributes some of their time to the building’s maintenance (volunteering in the daycare center, working in the gardens, attending meetings on the building’s rules and budget) – not something that’s likely to be attractive to a gangster or crack dealer. There are low-income people in co-op housing, but they’re subsidized by people who live in the co-op and have higher incomes, not really by the government. (There’s also government-subsidized housing in Canada, but the waiting lists are very long and they’re not associated with high levels of crime.) So it’s not really appropriate to compare a co-op building with a HUD housing project in the US.
Although the example in BfC wasn’t a great one, there are ghettos in Toronto. The buildings don’t look nearly as desolate and run-down as US inner-city ghettos, because ghettos in Toronto are comprised mostly of privately-constructed apartment buildings from the 60s and 70s that look just like all the other apartments from that era. You’d have to look at crime rate figures, or see how the rents in the ghettos have been driven down by crime and low demand, or actually step into one of these apartment buildings to know that you were in a ghetto. In my experience, the worst ghettos in Toronto don’t look as bad as some working-class neighborhoods in American cities, but I’d certainly rather live in the latter. (I’m only speaking of Toronto, though. Some places, like the Lower East Side in Vancouver, probably rival the worst NYC had to offer in the 80s.)