York Region to get tough on those who have tickets and haven't paid their fines

Speeders, drunk drivers and other fines add up to $46 million in unpaid fines for region

Yorkregion.com
May 21, 2016
By Lisa Queen

Do you have a ticket for speeding, not wearing your seat belt, being drunk in a public place or selling alcohol or cigarettes to a minor that you figured you could just blow off?

Think again.

With $46 million in unpaid fines on the books, York Region is about to crack down on people who don’t pay their provincial offences penalties.

Regional council is expected on Thursday to approve what it is calling “aggressive steps” to make deadbeats pay their tickets.

“Unpaid fines are lost revenue to the hard-working taxpayers of York Region,” Richmond Hill Mayor Dave Barrow, chair of the region’s finance committee, said.

Allowing people to not pay their fines “makes a mockery of the whole justice system,” Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti, chair of the region’s police services board, said.

“We have to do whatever it takes to get this money into our coffers. It’s about increasing the revenues, but it’s about increasing the revenues because we’ve spent a lot of money to make sure our bylaws and the Provincial Offences Act are adhered to. It’s also about the integrity of the justice system and we might as well not have it if, at the end of the day, there’s no ability to (force) the people that have committed the offence to pay up.”

Regional chair Wayne Emmerson agreed.

“It is important all steps are taken to ensure offenders live up to their responsibilities and pay court-ordered fines,” he said.

But while some legal experts defending York Region clients sympathize with the region’s goal of retrieving unpaid fines, they doubt the steps will make much of a difference.

“I think it’s cheap PR. You can’t really believe these are effective collection methods if you know anything about what provincial offences courts are like,” criminal lawyer Yaro Obouhov said.

“I’m guessing it’s some city bureaucrats who know nothing about that, who pitched that idea. It seems like a good idea and we look tough on people who don’t pay their fines and don’t respect the law. Instead of studying the root causes, they just came up with some Band-Aid solutions and this is going to go nowhere in my view.”

The region administers the second largest provincial offences court system in the province, based on the number of charges filed, with courts in Richmond Hill and Newmarket.

People can be charged with provincial offences (or non-criminal charges) for a number of infractions, including speeding, careless driving, not wearing a seatbelt, using a cellphone while driving, driving with no insurance, selling booze or tobacco to a minor, smoking in a prohibited place, trespassing, failing to obtain a construction permit, noise complaints, transit fare violations or provincial occupational health and safety violations.

The region’s proposed beefed-up enforcement strategies would include more than doubling the number of collection agencies it uses to recoup unpaid fines, up to 10 from the current four, partnering with local municipalities to collect fines through property tax bills, administering property liens or garnishing wages and adding additional administrative charges to defaulted fines to recover the full cost of collection.

But the worst offenders are people who have no interest or ability to pay hefty fines against them, Obouhov said.

“The average citizen, it’s not going to affect because they just pay their fines and move on. The worst offenders, they won’t pay no matter what you do to them,” he said.

“They tend to live outside the realm where York Region can collect these fines, in that they tend not to own property and the job they have, it’s not that easy to garnish a wage of somebody who works for their cousin’s roofing company and gets paid in cash and that typically is your worst offender.”

There are offenders who drive without insurance despite being charged repeatedly because they need their vehicles to make a living and others who don’t pay their fines because they don’t care, Obouhov said.

Either way, recouping money from either group is extremely difficult, he said, adding the region should consider reducing fines to a level where people have a chance of paying them off.

“It’s the stick and the carrot. To me, if you have somebody who can’t work because they lost their licence and they lost their licence because they owe $35,000 or $50,000 in fines, then do something to give them a way out - a reduced payment so they can pay something,” he said.

“They will probably pay you something rather than pay you nothing and continue to break the law. If you want some of your money back, make it possible.”

But politicians are likely not going to go that route because they would get flak for imposing full fines on residents who readily pay their fines and giving a break to people who don’t pay, he said.

Often, people who wrack up thousands of dollars in unpaid fines do so in early adulthood when they are irresponsible. As they mature, they aren’t able to pay the fines and continue to break the law because they have to drive a vehicle for work and fulfill other responsibilities, Chris Conway, president of paralegal company OTT Legal and a retired Toronto traffic police officer, said.

Imposing harsher penalties will create more hardship on those people, he said.

For example, referring people to collections agencies often means offenders aren’t given the opportunity to negotiate a payment plan to pay their fines off over time, Conway said.

At the same time, he advocates police using existing authority to immediately seize the vehicles of drivers with suspended licences.

That would lower the number of people on the roads without valid licences and insurance and would also prompt drivers to pay their fines immediately and refrain from breaking the law again, he said.

The only new idea proposed by the region is recouping outstanding fines through property taxes, criminal lawyer Arman Farjoud said.

He doubts the measure would have much of an impact on paying down the outstanding $46 million.

“How many of these people (with hefty fines) actually own property and how effective will that be? I highly doubt people who own property are not paying these fines,” he said.

“I almost feel like this is a complete waste of resources, in terms of trying to gather up how are we going to collect this money. They will probably be spending a significant amount more money trying to get that large number ... than actually collecting any of that. Certainly slapping on more fines is only going to increase that number.”

In addition to the region’s proposed crackdown, Queen’s Park passed legislation last June that expands licence suspension to include plate denial for people who do not pay certain Provincial Offences Act fines, according to the region.

However, 59 per cent of all fines currently in default are not eligible for licence suspension or plate denial and require the use of other collection tools, a report from regional solicitor Joy Hulton and CAO Bruce Macgregor said.

The region was saddled with $13 million in unpaid fines when the Provincial Offences Act court was transferred from the province in 1999.

About $4.4 million of that has been written off as uncollectable, while the region still feels it can collect the outstanding $1.7 million.

To check if you have any outstanding fines, contact supervisor of collections Brian Popowich at 1-877-464-9675, ext. 73339.