The Progressive Conservatives had been in power for roughly a year and a half when Doug Ford told his transportation minister to allow towns and cities to begin installing automated speed cameras.
Until December 2019, despite a sustained lobbying effort by then-Toronto mayor John Tory, municipalities had been forbidden from operating cameras capable of automatically issuing tickets to speeding drivers.
Although the previous Liberal government had passed legislation to pave the way for the cameras, Ford waited 18 months before his government passed new provincial regulations to make the policy official.
When he finally did, Ford’s transportation minister said the cameras would be an important way for local officials to reduce speeding
“These regulations… provide the framework to support municipalities in developing responsible, transparent and effective programs to promote road safety in their communities,” then-transportation minister Caroline Mulroney’s office said in a statement.
Kinga Surma, who served as associate transportation minister in 2019, issued a similar statement. Her spokesperson said the cameras would reduce the number of deaths and injuries caused by speeding drivers.
“This is about protecting vulnerable road users,” Surma’s office said at the time. “That is why it is allowed only in school zones and community safety zones with speeds of less than 80 km/h.”
New position in 2025
Almost six years after greenlighting a network of automated speed enforcement cameras and allowing municipalities to charge drivers who cross the speed limit, Premier Ford appears to be signaling a U-turn.
“This is nothing but a tax grab, folks,” Ford recently proclaimed. Later, the premier offered evidence from the City of Toronto suggesting drivers were being unfairly dinged for minor speeding infractions.
“I’ll use the stats just in Toronto because I know 32,000 tickets for going two kilometres over, four kilometres over, sometimes 10, 15 kilometres over — in three months,” Ford said.
“All municipalities are collecting hundreds of millions of dollars. I don’t believe that slows it down.”
While it’s unclear what caused the sudden change of heart, the premier’s position appears to be firm – Ford has dismissed criticism and calls from experts to keep the speed cameras in place.
A study from SickKids and Toronto Metropolitan University over the summer found speed cameras reduced speeding by 45 per cent in Toronto.
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police both released statements urging Ford to back his 2019 decision and keep the cameras.
The premier has promised at recent news events that he would “show you” how to slow traffic or “bring it to a halt” without relying on cameras.
Critics, however, say it’s part of a growing pattern for Ford – reversing policies he himself introduced only a few years ago.
“Doug Ford just simply wants to do what’s popular — he wants to be popular,” Ontario Liberal MPP John Fraser said.
“Sometimes you need to do things to make sure schools are safe, and you’ve got to stick to your guns. You can’t be a weather vein; you can’t just blow in the wind all the time. Three years later, is he going to go back on his word and put them back in?”
Previous policy reversal
The U-turn on speed cameras follows a similar pattern to the government’s push to ban supervised drug injection sites.
Last summer, the province announced it would be closing supervised consumption sites, places it said were making drug use worse and neighbourhoods less safe.
More than half of the 10 sites announced for closure by Health Minister Sylvia Jones, however, were opened and funded by the Ford government in early 2019 as politicians grappled with a provincial overdose crisis.
In October 2018, shortly after the Ford government took office, then-health minister Christine Elliott unveiled the findings of a review of supervised consumption and overdose prevention sites.
To inform the report, Elliott had visited several safe consumption sites and toured neighbourhoods to get a better feel for the impact of the facilities on the surrounding community and businesses.
The application process opened in January 2019. By March of that year, the province felt comfortable enough to fund more than a dozen sites with high instances of surrounding drug use.
Five years later, however, the rug was pulled out from under many of those sites. Seven of the 10 sites slated to close by March 2025 under the government’s new rules were opened in March 2019 by the same administration.
Fraser said the reversals showed the government was less focused on policy and more interested in how decisions played in the eyes of the public.
“To the premier, this whole exercise is all about personal popularity,” Fraser added. “Just take a look at what’s been going on this summer, it’s been like a sideshow, pouring out alcohol, telling us what he’s eating for a snack at night.”