If police classified your report as unfounded and you are looking for help right now:
- Assaulted Women's Helpline — 1-866-863-0511, 24 hours, across Ontario
- Talk4Healing — 1-855-554-4325, 24 hours, for Indigenous women, by Indigenous women
- Your local sexual assault centre — most offer free counselling and accompaniment, whether or not you reported
- Your own police file — you have a statutory right to it, including who coded it and which supervisor approved that: how to get it
An "unfounded" classification is a coding decision made by a person, recorded on a file, and reviewable. It is not a finding that you lied.
If police told you your report was unfounded
"Unfounded" is a clearance code an officer enters on a file, meaning they concluded no offence occurred or was attempted. It is a police classification — not a court finding, not proof you were disbelieved by anyone but that investigator, and not the end of your options. You can request the file and see exactly what was recorded and who approved it. You can ask the service to review the classification. And support does not depend on any of that.
The national ledger, verified
The trajectory is the point: rates fell by half nationally once someone counted in public — evidence that the coding was discretionary all along. Two caveats travel with the numbers: Statistics Canada's definition of "founded" changed in 2018, so pre/post comparisons are imperfect; and smaller communities continue to run higher rates.
Durham and Thunder Bay: the two cells this page exists to fill
| Service | 2010–14 baseline (Globe FOI dataset) | Current rate (StatsCan founded/unfounded series) | Announced reforms & published outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Durham Regional Police | Retrieval queued | Retrieval queued | Compiling |
| Thunder Bay Police | Retrieval queued | Retrieval queued | Compiling |
Publication rule: these cells fill only from the original investigation's per-jurisdiction data tables and Statistics Canada series, cited to the specific table — not from secondary summaries. Empty cells are honest cells.
Why this belongs on a records site
"Unfounded" is a records decision — a clearance code entered on a General Occurrence file by a specific officer, approved by a specific supervisor. That makes it FOI-measurable per service, and it makes every complainant's statutory right to their own file the audit mechanism the national reviews never institutionalized: a person coded "unfounded" can obtain the GO, the notebook entries and the supervisory approval, and see exactly who decided their report was baseless, on what recorded basis. The Records Guide is how.