Mitch Heimpel: Ford will win on speed cameras. The cities made it easy

There was always a smart use of the cameras. But municipal leaders chose the dumb use, instead.

By: Mitch Heimpel

I have a confession to make. I find it difficult to get worked up about speed cameras. I got busted last February for doing 61 in a 50, paid my ticket, never sped again in that area, and became very attuned to where the speed cameras were in my municipality.

Many others have had the same experience. Right now, in Ontario, 40 municipalities have more than 700 speed cameras installed. When you consider that there are 444 municipalities in Ontario, this initially sounds like a very small number. But this means that the 40 municipalities that do have them have constructed close to 20 speed traps each. This can understandably start to feel a bit much, and may explain why people have repeatedly vandalized these cameras. In some cases municipalities even resorted to putting up cameras to watch the cameras.

This is why Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, always one to sniff an opportunity to appeal to The Folks, plans to legislate the cameras out of existence.

He’s right, and he’ll win.

Some of these speed cameras make a degree of planning sense. They’re in school zones. They’re in hospital zones. Places where, on the whole, you will get people to admit they shouldn’t speed. Some people won’t love it, but arguing that you should be able to speed through a school zone is a losing argument.

Except municipalities didn’t just do that. Shifting cameras from place to place randomly, outside of a defined safety zone, gave away the game — they truly are cash grabs, and they’ve pissed people off. Ford has picked up on that, and he’s responding.

Defenders of the cameras say this is an attack on public safety, but they’re ignoring a very basic political reality here. Municipalities didn’t communicate with the public about why the cameras were needed. They failed to coordinate on what the fines would be paying for, or explain that to the public. And, finally, since municipalities moved the cameras often, it became impossible to deny that they were being used as a cash grab — the deterrent effect of a camera in a school zone is lost when the damned camera gets moved.

It didn’t have to be this way — there was a way to make cameras work. For years, municipalities have cried foul over their rising police costs; some have abandoned their local forces and turned policing over to the Ontario Provincial Police. Speed cameras should have provided a partial corrective to that. Speeding is objectively illegal. Speed cameras could have helped municipalities avoid having policing costs crowd out even more of their budgets — officers would have been freed up to focus on more important jobs, and, yes, there would have been some revenue. They could have set up reserve funds for the speed camera revenue. They could have used it to fund increases to police services at a time when the public is getting increasingly nervous about the state of public safety.

That would have been smart. That, combined with placing the cameras strategically only in critical areas around schools, daycare centres and hospitals, would have made the case for the cameras even stronger. Municipalities could have defended that. They would have had a powerful ally in their police organizations, schools and parents.

But municipalities liked the revenue. So, they moved the cameras. In many cases, out of easily explainable areas to places like four-lane roads near major 400-series highways, where they’re going to catch way more people speeding. Once they did that, they proved Ford’s point — this isn’t about safer streets, it’s a backdoor way to collect additional revenue.

There is an undeniable culture-war element to all of this, too, of course. It is not a coincidence that speed cameras are favoured by progressive politicians who get their votes from walkers, cyclists and transit-riders. They’re collecting the additional revenue off perceived-to-be wealthier suburban motorists. The whole thing feels very progressive and satisfying for them. For conservatives, it hits all the same culture war buttons the Trudeau-era carbon tax did — it’s another cost added to just trying to live in areas where transit and cycling aren’t really practical options.

But there was a way to ignore all that, and just make the concept work. To meet the legitimate public policy needs of most municipal taxpayers.

Municipalities chose not to do that. And you should feel no sympathy for the mayors now begging Doug Ford not to shut down their slot machine.

Mitch Heimpel is a former senior advisor to federal and Ontario Conservative politicians.

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