TORONTO - More than $1 billion in unpaid traffic tickets in Ontario has been accumulating for more than a decade, and the government admitted Tuesday some if it will never be recovered.
The province gave municipalities the right to collect traffic fines in 2002, and said they could try to collect $485 million in unpaid tickets it was owed at the time.
By 2002, that figure had grown to $900 million, and has since ballooned to $1,048,600,000.
The Ontario Association of Police Services Boards called on the province to give municipalities more power to collect unpaid fines.
However, Premier Dalton McGuinty said the province gave municipalities extra powers to do just that last fall, and he wants more time to see if they are working.
"We made some changes recently through one of our good government bills to give some new authority to our municipalities when it comes to attacking these kinds of outstanding fines," said McGuinty.
"I'm not sure we've had enough time to determine whether or not it's working fully."
Some of the unpaid tickets date back many years, said Attorney General Chris Bentley, who admitted some of the fines will never be paid.
"I suspect there's a lot of historical unpaid fines in there going back many years that nobody's ever going to collect anyway, and that municipalities long ago gave up on," said Bentley.
Municipalities also have the power to decline to issue licence plate renewals for drivers with unpaid tickets, and to add unpaid fines to the property tax rolls, and it's up to them to collect the outstanding money, noted Bentley.
"They're on the front lines of enforcing and collecting, and I think they need to make sure they're doing everything that they can," he said.
"It doesn't matter to me how much it is. The fact that money is outstanding is something that I'm interested in."
A large portion of the unpaid tickets in Ontario are from American drivers, said Alok Mukherjee, president of the Association of Police Services Boards.
"There's a small proportion from Ontario who don't pay their fines, but the vast majority come from out of province," said Mukherjee.
Bentley said he would ask other provinces and Ottawa about expanding reciprocal agreements with various U.S. states.
"We'll be raising it with our colleagues at the federal-provincial-territorial level," he said.
"I think we need to have a serious discussion about what the proposals are, what the implications of any proposal are and what our reciprocal obligation might be with any colleagues south of the border to enforce their fine issues."
Some American police forces make out-of-state drivers immediately pay the fine directly to the police officer who gave them the ticket or else take them to jail until they can get the money.
Bentley said he would want to know all the ramifications of immediate fine payments before going down that road.
"I don't want to close the door on anything, but all of the suggestions have implications," he said.
"What we need to do is very carefully take a look, not just at the headline, but at the implications of any suggestion that's made."
Ontario's auditor general has been raising the issue of the unpaid traffic tickets for years, noting in 2008 that municipalities felt they needed stronger enforcement measures to collect outstanding fines.
