Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign the city of Toronto. Approximately 25 to 30 pedestrians are killed as they're walking around the city. And a big reason for that is people simply are driving too fast. Hence the reason for speed cameras all around Toronto and many municipalities in the gta. However, not everyone is a fan of it, as we've seen with recent reports of vandalism and speed cameras all over southern Ontario. To talk more about it, thrilled to be joining me, Anthony Fury. Anthony, how are you doing?
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Great, Jim, how are you doing? Good to see you.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Good. Good to see you. I'm a big proponent of the speed cameras, especially in school zones. Doug, for the previr Ontario would like to get rid of all of them. But you have some news regarding speed cameras as well?
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I understand that there's going to be a lot of debate coming up at city council chambers across Ontario about this because he's really sort of thrown the gauntlet out there. He said that if municipalities don't get rid of these, he will bring in provincial legislation to get rid of them. So I've learned that next week Vaughan City Council is having an emergency session where they're gonna sit down and do a vote on it. Vaughn actually paused speed camera enforcement earlier this year and it was a really tight vote and there was a lot of debate after a lot of residents complained and said, this is a cash grab, we don't support it.
Reduce speed, do traffic safety, but we don't like these, get rid of them. So they paused it, which I thought was good leadership from Mayor Steven Del Duca. And they said they're going to take another look. That was set to expire around now in the fall. The pause and then they would say, what do we do next now? Well, it really looks like they're going to have to talk about just scrapping all of these.
One city council in Toronto made a post saying, oh, we can't have all these taken down, being vandalized. We need to protect them. And I responded with a post and we've gotten a lot of traction and, you know, thousands of likes and comments and responses back and forth, right? Said, look, just do away with this stuff right now because it's causing more headache than good. I don't think this is the path forward.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: I, I, for me, it's school safety. I mean, our daughters now are past university, but we live near a couple of elementary schools in a high school. And Anthony, quite frankly, in the school zones, drivers are not observing the crossing guards, they're not observing the stop sign on the side of the buses, it's, it's carnage out there in the roads in these school zones. And at the very least, if you want to tweak the speed camera system in all the municipalities, they've got to keep them in the school zones. And I have no sympathy for people getting a speeding ticket in a school zone in Ontario.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Jim, you're talking my language with the school issue. I have three children in elementary school. We walk them to school. I see people running red lights. I've said to the crossing guard multiple times, like, I hope you know you're okay, because I worry about this lady. I think she's going to be the one who gets, she's the one there every crossing rather than the kids. So lots of concerns for sure, with all this, lots of lawlessness going on. But I think actual enforcement from police officers is something we need to do. We have far too few police officers in Toronto. We actually have 500 fewer today than we had 10 years ago, despite the fact the population has grown. So I'm all about enforcement. So many people running red lights like it never used to be. But the speed cameras, there's an inherent sense of lack of fairness. There's a gotcha moment. I got dinged on one at 10:30pm on like a Thursday evening a few months ago. And it was a street that used to be a 40 limit, it's now a 30 limit. There's a school nearby, but I wasn't that close to the school. And obviously there's no school activity at 10:30. And the ticket says 41. So I got dinged, you know, 80 bucks for 41 or whatever. That's the lie. I didn't fight the ticket because that's the way it is. But you think, like, come on, like, good grief, we're clearly just, just trying to get a cash grab from people. If you're, we're charging someone where there's no cop present, you gotta pay 80 bucks because you went 41 kilometers an hour on, on this street. That was 40 up until yesterday kind of thing. And that's the inherent sense of, of lack of fairness.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: So, Anthony, here's my proposal. In, in a lot of municipalities, you have areas where you can't park in certain hours of the day or you can't do this. And at the same time, police officers will tell you if you're going 2 or 3 kilometers over the speed limit, they are not going to give you a ticket. So how about this? In school zones, we'll keep it strict from 8am to 4pm during school hours, but at 10pm on a Saturday night in a school zone where there's no school and if you're 2km over the speed limit, you're not going to get a ticket. I think that would be fair for a lot of people. You would still make your money on the tickets, but you wouldn't be getting a ticket for 2k over on a Saturday night, late at night.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm happy to do a reasonable test here. And I think what you're talking about is, is, is reasonable. I think we've gone too far. There are many speed cameras in school zones, some that aren't. They came up with this community safety zone phrase, but you can just call anything a community safety zone with, you know, a pass of a, of emotion and so forth. At city council, I think that's where people felt like they were definitely being aggrieved. And the reason we're seeing this extreme reaction, not just the people knocking these down or the one person or whatever, it's kind of funny we can't find out who this person is, but we.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Can find everybody else.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: We got cameras everywhere in society don't understand that.
So it really makes me kind of chuckle that this person's been able to do all this. And I do not support vandalism public property. It's not a good situation we're at. But it is reflective of the pulse of the city that this is a metaphor for how people feel.
And if we first approached it in the type of scenarios you're talking about here, people I think would have gone, okay, I got this ticket, but man, you know, the kids are coming out for lunch hour. I get it. Like why were you going over 40 when there's clearly little kids walking around right in this moment? So there's. To your point, there are better ways to have done it out of the get go.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: And you raised a couple of very salient points, Anthony.
Every police force in this country are short staffed. Most often officers go in their cruiser alone. When they call for backup, they have to wait for another car because they simply don't have enough people. Enough officers, men and women manning their respective platoons and their timeshift to cover all parts of the city and municipalities. But there's no question Olivia Chow and the city of Toronto are facing a dire cash crunch. And the money from these tickets are paying a lot of bills, otherwise wouldn't get paid.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: And yet the challenge to your point about the policing issue is there are real stores. I know someone who had this story they call the cops, they say, there's a person hammering on my door, yelling and screaming, and she has a knife, crazy lady with a knife. And their response was, does she have a gun? And they're like, excuse me.
And they have to triage their calls because they're only showing up. And they say, just tell her to go away. Yell out the window to go away. Excuse me. Oh, and then the next day, you get a ticket for $80 for going 42.2km. It's like, okay, so I'm the criminal, and yet these guys, other guys are getting bail for murder. You're not coming to my door for crazy people. So that's where I think societal trust breaks down. I think the speed camera issue is. Is a societal trust component.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: And it's very fair because, I mean, people of all political stripes, no matter what spectrum you fall on, far left, fall right in the middle. Young and old. There is a sense of frustration with justice in the legal system, of the bail system in this country from coast to coast. We see it all the time, Anthony. And they're like, well, wait a second, why am I being paid? Yeah, I only went 2k over. But let's come to some common sense. We can have common sense in Canada, have your speed community safety zones in the school zones, like from one end to the other. And it's well marked that you're in a school zone. This is the speed limit. And from this time to this time, if you go over, you will get a ticket. And. And I. I can't find any logical reason why someone could complain with that. Because if you have any sense of decency and you're speeding in the school zone during school hours, you should get a ticket.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm not sure if we even have seen that specific example really happen anywhere in the gta, what you're proposing. So, sure, let's give it a shot and see how that unfolds. But that would be. That would be too reasonable. And we know not to expect that from our officials. So.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: But. But to have the premier weigh in as forcefully as Doug Ford did, one.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Of the only way it goes, you know, all or nothing.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: It's all or nothing. But I was like, wow. And I mean, I live in the bedroom community north of Toronto, and a lot of communities across the country, Anthony, are reverting to speed cameras. A, because they simply don't have enough officers to have speed traps everywhere. B, they're like, that's a good way to make money. And how it changes, I don't know. But we haven't heard the last of it, but I'm glad you brought that up above Vaughn. It's something we'll be watching very closely.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: He's in.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Anthony Furey. I'm Jim. And now you know.
