August 24, 2022

Hon. Caroline Mulroney, Minister of Transportation

5th Floor 777 Bay Street

Toronto, Ontario M7A 1Z8

Dear Madame Minister:

We are once again writing to you about issues of continuing concern to the Town of Mono. This letter is also being sent to Premier Doug Ford, MPP Sylvia Jones and Attorney General Doug Downey. Some of the issues raised here are within the purview of the Attorney General but should also be of interest to you and your Ministry.

Automated Speed Enforcement

As far back as January 2020, I personally spoke with you about problems with restrictive conditions that effectively rule out deployment of Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) in all but urban and built-up areas. I followed up with detailed emails to your staff and subsequently raised the issue with you again at a ROMA delegation meeting.

ASE is currently permitted only in designated Community Safety Zones where the speed limit does not exceed 79 km/h and School Zones (HTA Section 205.1 (1) (a) and (b)). This ties our hands and deprives us of a needed tool to discourage speeding and reckless driving. We desperately need the option to deploy ASE on 80 km/h roads where speeding is chronic, epidemic and out of control.

When the Province launched ASE, a spokesperson for Premier’s Office told the CBC, “Municipal governments are in the best position to determine what needs to be done in order to improve road safety on municipal roads.” We totally agree.

For us to deploy ASE under the current rules, we would need to reduce the speed limit by one km/h and declare long stretches of roadway a Community Safety Zone. To declare School Zones where there are no schools likewise would be absurd and make a mockery of the concepts of Community Safety and School Zones.

If there is any doubt we need to make ASE available without strings attached, I would like to invite you, our MPP, and the Premier to join me and members of our community to witness Airport Rd. speeders and reckless drivers on a Friday afternoon and evening. We will work with your staff and the respective staff of the Premier and MPP to arrive at an agreeable date, time and location.

The Town of Mono was one of the first municipalities in Ontario to embrace OPP contract policing and augment the level of regular enforcement with an additional part-time officer dedicated primarily to traffic enforcement. Since then, we contracted for additional enforcement. Despite this, speeding and reckless driving remain a chronic and disturbing reality on many of our roads. Police officers can’t be everywhere and municipalities are hard pressed to pay for any more enforcement, especially with massive declines in POA fine revenue. ASE must be an option to consider and not something out of reach due to rules that work in Toronto but not the rest of Ontario.

Speeding Fines under the Highway Traffic Act

You as well as the Attorney General are in receipt of correspondence from the Town of Mono as far back as 2019 regarding inadequate set fine levels for speeding offences. We also wrote to the Chief Justice of the Ontario Court of Justice who notionally sets POA fines. She deferred back to the Province.

Basic set fines for speeding have not increased in a quarter century while speeding has become increasingly epidemic on our roads. As stated in one of our previous letters, “the amount of the fines should be increased to a level that will provide a deterrent commensurate with the risk such offenders pose to the safety and wellbeing of other drivers and pedestrians”.

Fine revenue was intended to partly offset municipal policing costs. It comes nowhere close to doing this. POA administrative and court costs have soared while fine revenue has cratered due to three factors.

  1. As previously mentioned, no increase in speeding set fines for years. Factoring for inflation, a dollar in fine revenue in the mid 1980s equals only 58 cents today. All other costs associated with running the system have increased significantly.

  2. COVID dramatically affected the operation of POA courts and collection of fine revenue. This is not, however, the only reason revenue is down.

  3. Chronic judicial resource shortages and uncreative administration of POA courts by the judiciary. Courts are being cancelled, charges plead out (or simply withdrawn) with fines dramatically discounted and charges withdrawn to purge court dockets.

All these factors have caused a decline in POA fine revenue for Mono from a high of around $180,000 annually to a low of $35,000. We count on this revenue to partly offset the cost of policing our roadways. This reduction of POA fine revenue is occurring across Ontario. I plan to send a separate letter to the Attorney General further addressing POA fines and court operations.

Local Highway issues in Mono

Over the years, we have brought a number of issues to the attention of your Ministry. In no particular order they include among other things…

  • The need for signalization at the intersection of Highway 10 and Dufferin Road 8 (Camilla)

The volume of traffic on Highway 10 has increased dramatically and will continue to do so making turns onto Highway 10 extremely hazardous.

  • The outside westbound lane on Highway 9 just beyond the 1st Line EHS Mono vanishes only to reemerge a number of metres later. This presents an unsafe and confusing experience for traffic.

  • The absence of advance green signals at the intersection of Highway 10 and Dufferin Road 16/7 (Hockley Road)

There are accidents at this location due to heavy traffic volume, problematic sight lines, speed and no advance green signalization for north and southbound traffic on Highway 10. Inexplicably, there are advance green signals at many intersections to the south of this location that are less busy. Recently both Mono and Dufferin County Councils passed motions calling on MTO to improve signalization at this intersection.

  • Modernization of highway lighting, in particular on the south side of Highway 9 east of Orangeville.

Over 20 years ago, MTO installed a string of lights along this stretch of highway which was already well illuminated by businesses on the north side. While the Ministry updated lighting on Highway 10 north of Highway 9 and south of Dufferin Road 16/7 (Hockley Road) with modern energy efficient luminaries that cause less light pollution, this section of Highway 9 remains over lit with inefficient polluting fixtures. We request modernization of all MTO highway illumination in Mono.

Other issues were also raised in a written submission presented to you when we last appeared as a delegation at ROMA. Madame Minister, we respectfully request your attention on these matters and; hopefully, you and your colleagues will visit Mono to see firsthand what we experience with speeding and reckless driving.

Yours Truly,

John Creelman

Mayor, Town of Mono

Minister’s Response