John Robson is an Ottawa-based journalist, historian and documentary-film makerIt’s been 25 years since my younger and more careless self got a speeding ticket. Or at least it had been until I suddenly got five in rapid succession across Ontario, all from photo radar, all for driving normally. I’m fighting them all as a gross breach of the social contract and the rule of law. And you should too.Wait, you may cry. Don’t I deserve all those tickets? Doesn’t the law say that if the speed limit is 50 km per hour, you can’t go faster without risking punishment? Not quite. Rather, the law is what everyone knows it to be.As philosophers going back to John Locke have explained across the centuries, the rule of law means “a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it.” And every driver knows the standing rule for Canada’s roads is that a human police officer won’t give you a ticket for going just slightly over the speed limit, unless you are weaving around, smoking a joint, texting or engaging in some other dangerous activity. We all get some leeway, at least in good weather..Unfortunately, once governments began smelling an opportunity to grab some of the cash sitting pointlessly in our wallets, that time-honoured rule went out the lens with their ticket-dispensing Robocops.Alberta was a surprising early adopter of photo radar, with its first device installed in 1987. More recently, it earned for itself the title of Canada’s most one-eyed-highwayman-ridden province, with 2,400 of the wretched things raking in $171 million in 2022. One single digital Dick-Turpin-meets-the-Sheriff-of-Nottingham in Edmonton fired off 52,558 tickets a year. Which so infuriated Albertans that the provincial transportation minister finally vowed to “kill the photo radar cash cow.” The result has been a promised 70 percent reduction in the devices.Cash cow. There’s the rub. Promoters of speed cameras always preen about safety; one notice from rapacious Wellington County in Ontario, where five newly installed cameras promptly ticketed seven percent of all drivers, hollered “SLOW DOWN! SAVE A LIFE.” But they are lying..Driving slightly over the limit on a four-lane street in broad daylight endangers nobody. Except now you, because you’re the cash cow. And whether we all spontaneously quote John Locke or not, virtually everyone senses in their gut that there’s something dishonest, unfair and even dangerous about this misuse of language and law enforcement resources.We the public don’t object to enforcement of laws, including traffic laws. If any normal person is pulled over by a live police officer in whose judgement our speed, or speed plus other less tangible things, creates public danger, we blush, fess up and pay up. We don’t even mind photo radar nabbing stunt-driving speed demons. But if you’d been sitting at that Edmonton intersection (Baseline Road and 17th Street) with your own radar gun watching traffic, how many of those 52,558 vehicles do you suppose you’d have jumped up and gone, “Whoa nelly, dude, slow down!” or “Don’t you know what a red light is?”.When I say everybody knows, I mean everybody. Do you think cops, traffic court Solons, or municipal councillors drive at or below the posted limit to work, shop or play? Of course not. Yet they sit there sanctimoniously plotting. In the case of Waterloo Region, in southwestern Ontario, the plan is to ramp up speed camera tickets from the current 70,000 to 875,000 tickets a year by 2029, which works out to more than one per ticket per driver annually. And not because their inhabitants are maniacal scofflaws, but because in the spirit of Bad King John these authorities have found a way to tax you without representation.If you held a referendum asking whether posted speed limits should be ruthlessly enforced on everyone the result, I am confident, would be massively against. If you asked whether they should be raised significantly then enforced rigorously, it might be different. But the point is, we haven’t been asked. Governments just fell in love with the lucre they could extract and began putting them everywhere. And if you contest the tickets, the conviction rate would have embarrassed Joseph Stalin..Oh, and in Ontario they increase the fine if you presume to insist on your day in court. They say it’s not meant as a deterrent, but I say try lowering the fine for anyone who fights and loses and see if incentives matter. I say it’s not just financially dangerous, but socially and politically dangerous as well. As famed 19th century writer Alexis de Tocqueville once warned, governments that succeed in smothering independence of spirit with petty regulations will eventually turn their populace into sheep, surly or just depressed. And self-government cannot be sustained by sheep.On the bright side, nearly everywhere this nasty experiment has been tried, from Texas to Ontario under Bob Rae, the public managed to put a stop to it, at least temporarily.So far my efforts to contest these tickets have been met with surprising contempt about my arguments regarding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and its promise of “fundamental justice.” As my quest to get a fair hearing in court continues, readers outside of Alberta should be warned that they too could soon be plundered for driving normally under the guise of public safety, by governments so chronically unable to manage their own finances that they raid yours.My advice: don’t let them do it to you. Fight it in the public arena, in the voting booth and yes, in the courts. They’ll convict you, of course. But if their administrative costs exceed the booty, they’ll eventually stop.John Robson is an Ottawa-based journalist, historian and documentary-film maker. The longer, original version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca
