Canadians Troubled by Outbreak of Violence : Crime: A drive-by shooting and a killing during a restaurant robbery are fueling fears.

TORONTO —  Four young gunmen crash into an upscale Toronto cafe to rob and pistol-whip the customers; one inexplicably fires a blast from his sawed-off shotgun, killing a 23-year-old woman.

A British engineer, who recently moved to Ottawa, is murdered in the city’s first-ever drive-by shooting. Three boys--two aged 16 and one 17 years old--are charged with the crime.

Lawyers in the Niagara Falls area prepare for the trial of a self-employed accountant accused, with his wife, of the sex slayings of two teen-age girls. There may be at least one more victim--the wife’s 14-year-old sister.

A deadly new brand of heroin starts selling on the streets of Vancouver, followed by a surge in fatal overdoses.

Is this peaceful, orderly, crime-free Canada? That’s the question more and more Canadians are asking themselves these days. Although overall crime rates here are relatively stable--and far below those in the United States--recent outbreaks of high-profile violence are leading to fears that Canadian cities are headed the way of their crime-plagued U.S. counterparts.

The latest example was the murder Tuesday night of Georgina Leimonis, a telephone operator shotgunned while having cake with friends at Just Desserts, a crowded restaurant in this city’s trendy Annex district. The bloody deed tapped into the Toronto psyche as much as the recent murders of two students from Japan and the 1988 gang killing of Karen Toshima have in Los Angeles.

There have been no arrests as yet, and the murder is the No. 1 topic in the city’s three daily newspapers, on news broadcasts and on radio talk shows, pushing aside such favorite topics as the upcoming Stanley Cup playoffs and the seemingly endless winter.

“Mindless violence belongs to New York, to Los Angeles, to Miami--not to Toronto and Ottawa. Our robbers and our teen-agers aren’t supposed to behave that way,” wrote columnist Michael Valpy in Thursday’s Toronto Globe & Mail, the nation’s leading newspaper.

Toronto Police Chief William McCormack called the murder a “filthy act of . . . urban terrorism.”

The department’s top homicide detective urged residents to clip the fuzzy front-page photos of the suspects taken off the cafe’s video surveillance camera and “tape them to your car’s visor, so that you will recognize them when you see them.”

A cartoon in Friday’s editions of the Toronto Star depicts a local couple watching televised footage of U.S. crime while muttering “Crazy Americans!” Meanwhile, their own front door is being kicked in by someone firing a bullet into their ceiling.

Local and provincial politicians and callers to local radio talk shows have voiced the predictable calls for tough new legislation: further tightening of Canada’s already restrictive gun laws; a crackdown on youthful offenders (although the age of the killers has not been released); some even have suggested a return to capital punishment, abolished here in 1976.

“Every time this sort of thing happens in Canada it’s such a shock to the system that a lot of the questions we thought we had the answers to are brought back into focus,” said radio talk show host Andy Barrie, who has fielded calls on the murder for two days.

Crime rates in Canadian cities remain startlingly low by U.S. standards.

Last year, in metropolitan Toronto, population 2.27 million, there were 58 homicides reported, down from 65 the year before. In greater Montreal, population 1.77 million, there were 71 homicides.

Compare that to Los Angeles, population 3.6 million, where 1,058 homicides were reported in 1993.

Statistics for other violent crimes are much the same. The exception would seem to be gun-related robberies in Toronto, which have risen from 270 in 1989 to 1,072 last year, according to a Globe & Mail report.

But no matter how low the crime numbers are, they are still profoundly disturbing to Canadians--after all, noted Barrie, “if we have one more drive-by shooting in the country, it would be twice as many as we had before.” And Valpy observed that the recent violence strikes at the Canadian self-image of an orderly, peaceful people.

“What happened at Just Desserts and in Ottawa goes so far beyond our experience of predictable behavior in Toronto or Ottawa or Canada for that matter . . . that it pushes all the buttons,” Valpy said in an interview Friday.

Four young men entered Just Desserts around 11 p.m. There were about 30 customers present, including a 7-year-old boy. Although some customers resisted turning over their valuables to the robbers, Leimonis did not, and it was still unclear Friday what prompted the fatal gunshot.

Reaction to the killing was also strong because it occurred in The Annex, a gentrified area just blocks from Bloor Street, Toronto’s version of Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive.

Anthony Doob, professor of criminology at the University of Toronto, citing Canada’s low crime rates, said the “it can happen to anyone” rhetoric is blown vastly out of proportion: “What’s special about this (case) is that it’s unusual. That’s why people are still talking about it three days after it happened. But the fact that it is unusual seems to have been lost in the discussion.”

What is not unusual, he added, at least from a historical standpoint, is complaints that U.S.-style crime is creeping northward.

In addition, an undertone of racism has been evident in some comments. Leimonis was white, her assailants black.

Although Canada, by law, does not compile criminal statistics by race, one white member of the local police commission suggested Thursday that “a very large percentage” of violent crime was committed by blacks. He was immediately repudiated by some other board members.

Meanwhile, the closed restaurant has become a shrine of sorts. There were so many floral tributes, some with handwritten messages, piled in the window Friday morning that it looked like a florist shop. Read one of the notes: “In memory of innocence lost.”