If your Toronto parking ticket is blank, do you still have to pay?

A woman from Barrie, Ont. reached out to Speakers Corner after receiving a mostly blank parking ticket on her windshield after a trip to Toronto. 

“We were just doing local deliveries there, and the truck was parked on Dufferin Street,” said Zelda Sadler. 

The problem is that the ticket did not contain any information. 

“It was a handwritten carbon copy ticket, and the only information there was the officer’s signature and badge number, nothing else. It’s absolutely blank.”

Sadler, a licensed paralegal, decided to look at the law. 

“According to the Ontario Highway Traffic Act, it has to have certain items on it like my licence plate, where I was parked, the offence, day, time and the fine,” she explained, citing Ontario Regulation 472/21, which states “an offence could be defective if a citation does not include a description of the alleged offence, including reference to the provision of the statute, regulation or bylaw in respect of which the offence is alleged to have occurred.”

“My ticket had none of that,” said Sadler.

Ticket not fake, woman says

Sadler was able to track down the ticket by using the City of Toronto’s parking ticket mobile app. Turns out it was registered.  

“I thought it might have been a fake ticket, but it wasn’t,” Sadler told Speakers Corner. “It was a $75 ticket for parking on the street.”

She called parking enforcement to explain her case, citing the Highway Traffic Act. 

“A supervisor told me they are aware of the situation, and they have an issue with the manufacturer creating the ticket books; that’s what I was told.”

Speakers Corner reached out to the Toronto Police Service (TPS) about that, and while they said it wasn’t one of their officers who wrote the ticket, they told us there was no manufacturing issue. 

“It rests with the individual officers and their completion of this paperwork. i.e. type of pen/pressure applied to the violation, etc.,” a TPS spokesperson said.

“If identified, we will follow up with each individual or company to ensure they are made aware.”

“This type of ticket is unfair”

Sadler points out the officer should have noticed the parking ticket they placed on her vehicle was blank. 

“If we go by the way I am reading the [Highway Traffic Act,] I should not have to pay this; it should be invalid,” she said. 

Speakers Corner has contacted the City of Toronto’s prosecution department to see if the ticket will stand

“While we understand the inconvenience of not being able to read the details on the parking violation notice members of the public should not assume that these violations are not valid,” said spokesperson Shane Gerard. “Information with respect to the violation can be accessed on the City of Toronto’s Parking Violation Lookup tool by using the violation number – which will always be legible.”

Sadler, meanwhile, requested that her case be investigated. 

“A supervisor told me they were getting a legal opinion on whether the ticket is valid,” she said. “But this type of ticket is unfair, and I think anyone who gets a blank ticket needs to check and look into it because that charge should be withdrawn, in my opinion.”

If you have an issue, story or question you’d like us to look into, reach out to Speakers Corner.