It's a message that typically plays well in the suburbs, especially in the bedroom communities that cradle Toronto, and it's a platform on which the Conservatives have traditionally stood strong.

Cracking down on crime. In the wake of the tragic Boxing Day shooting death of a 15-year-old Toronto girl shopping with her sister, it's what many voters want to hear.

But outside the city, in ridings such as Oshawa and Newmarket-Aurora where the race for votes is sure to be tight, does a get-tough-on-crime approach resonate?

For Henry McKelvey, the Conservative offensive against what party leader Stephen Harper called "the tide of gun, drug and gang crime plaguing our cities" is overdue.

"Anybody caught with a gun, whether they've done a crime (or) they haven't even done a crime, they should get 10 years," said McKelvey, 78, while having a dinner coffee with his wife at Newmarket's Upper Canada Mall.

"Give them a sentence (so) they're going to melt their life away in prison."

Crime is the top issue in this federal election, said Margaret Brown, an 85-year-old lifelong Liberal voter of Sutton, Ont., who says she's reconsidering who to check off on her ballot Jan. 23.

"It's terrible what's happening," Brown said.

"When a teenager is arrested and he goes to court and they almost just slap him on the wrist and let him go and he just does it over again? You hear that every night on the news, and I think they should serve their time."

It's that kind of sentiment among the electorate that Harper is hoping to score points with under his five-year, $500-million plan to combat crime that would see anyone convicted of holding an illegal, loaded handgun spend a minimum of five years in prison.

The Tory anti-crime platform, unveiled last week, also calls for the elimination of house arrest for serious crimes and trying suspects as young as 14 in adult court for serious or repeat offences.

"If they do a grown-up crime, they should do a grown-up time for it," McKelvey said in apparent approval.

In his plan to cut down on crime, also introduced last week, NDP Leader Jack Layton expressed support for so-called "reverse onus" bail conditions for all gun crimes and promised four-year minimum sentences for the illegal possession and sale of restricted weapons such as handguns.

The Liberals have pledged to ban all handguns, but for Gloria Oliveros, a resident of Markham, northeast of Toronto, the promise doesn't come down hard enough on gangs.

"It's so dangerous, but I think this is a product of the past government," said Oliveros, a stay-at-home mother of three teenaged children who added that she fears Toronto's gang violence will creep northward.

"We know it's coming. You can see some areas (are) very violent."

The statistics so far prove otherwise.

York Region, which includes the towns of Markham, Sutton and Newmarket, is a comparatively safe enclave of 900,000. In 2003, it recorded fewer murders, assaults and robberies per capita than Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Montreal, Halifax and Toronto.

David Docherty, a political science professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., says while gun crime may be the topic du jour for Toronto voters, he doesn't believe it will sway many votes in the crucial ridings north of the city.

"I'm not convinced that it's catapulted to the front burner," Docherty said.

"Most of the crimes that we're reading about in the paper don't take place in 905," he added, referring to the belt of suburbs that surround Toronto known by their area code.

Sarah Blanchard agrees, saying that the gun violence that has plagued pockets of public housing in Toronto is not an election issue for her.

"I'm far enough away from the Jane and Finch area that I'm not really worried that it's going to come up to Richmond Hill," the 25-year-old said.

But it may be the crimes that don't make national headlines that push votes, said Pat Couturier, a retired hairdresser from Sutton.

"Even the crime in our own little town (has risen) - break-ins and drugs, grow-houses," Couturier said.

"It's just gone too far. They didn't start clamping down hard enough and quickly enough."