Violent weekend for Toronto and Vancouver

Toronto's sunny months of 2005 were once unfortunately dubbed the 'summer of the gun', while the warm days of 2008 could yet garner the dubious nickname 'summer of the knife.'

Four separate incidents in less than 24 hours beckoned police overnight and into Sunday, leaving no less than seven men seeking treatment for stab wounds with varying degrees of severity.

The latest happened Sunday evening just before 8pm in a plaza near Islington and Rexdale and reportedly involved two men who had been arguing prior to the bloodshed.

At least eight violent incidents occurred in Toronto over the weekend, including seven stabbings and one shooting.

On Saturday, there was a shooting and also a stabbing in the east end.

A 30-year-old man showed up at Toronto East General Hospital with a gunshot wound to his leg.

Two shootings and one stabbing in Vancouver over the weekend have broken a period of relative calm for the city.

An argument at Davie and Thurlow early Friday evening ended with one man shot in the leg, Vancouver police said.

Then, in a separate incident eight hours later, another man was shot dead outside an East Vancouver Vietnamese restaurant.

And in a third incident, police arrested a man in an alleged stabbing incident in a Downtown Eastside rooming house.

Constable Tim Fanning said the incidents were bucking a recent trend in Vancouver which saw shootings and other violence decline.

In February, Statistics Canada ranked Vancouver as worst among Canadian cities for gun violence, with shootings becoming increasingly common across the Lower Mainland.

Vancouver had 45.3 violent offences involving guns for every 100,000 people, with Winnipeg's rate 43.9 and Toronto's 40.4.

After 17 people were killed in targeted shooting across the Lower Mainland in the first 11 months of 2007, the City of Vancouver police established the Gang Task Force last November to crack down on organized crime groups that they believed were responsible for most of the incidents.

But by July 2008, Lower Mainland police have already identified at least 12 targeted shootings across the region. It is widely believed that criminal gangs battling for control of the region's lucrative illegal drug trade are responsible for many of the events.