City of Toronto withdraws 880,000 parking tickets
Posted September 6, 2015 1:55 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Dig out those yellow parking ticket Torontonians, you may not have to pay it.
The City of Toronto announced on Sunday that approximately 880,000 parking tickets have been withdrawn because ticket-holders had been awaiting trial for more than a year.
These infractions are less than three per cent of all parking tickets issued between 2002 and 2014 and even include ones for which a trial request had been submitted or ones where a retrial had been ordered but not scheduled.
The tickets withdrawn represent an estimated $20 million in potential revenue for Toronto — but had trials been conducted for them, the cost to the city for hearing them in court would have exceeded $23 million.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that a trial should be within a reasonable time, which is about 12-to-16 months for a parking ticket.
According to a press release from the City of Toronto, “The ticket withdrawal does not directly impact the City’s budget because the City annually identifies an amount within the budget to account for parking tickets that may be withdrawn, remain unpaid or historically reduced in court.”
If you’d like to check if your parking tickets were withdrawn you can check online here. If it was withdrawn the status box will read “cancelled, withdrawn or complete.”
