Have a parking ticket problem? Take it up with the city, not the province

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/08/2016 (3380 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeggers upset about their parking tickets will now plead their cases before city screening officers instead of provincial justices of the peace.

The system, first announced by the Selinger government in 2013, comes into effect on Monday.

Colin Stewart, a policy analyst with the Winnipeg Parking Authority, said the new system will be more efficient and quicker for people.

“Before you would go to see a provincial justice of the peace,” Stewart said on Friday. “Now you’ll see a screening officer, a city of Winnipeg employee who has been hired and trained.

“They have the power to uphold the ticket, reduce the penalty, or cancel it.”

Stewart said if you decide to appeal the screening officer’s decision, you’ll have to pay a $25 fee to appear before a provincial adjudicator, but if you win you’ll get it back.

The city issues between 150,000 to 160,000 parking tickets per year — 25 per cent of which are for expired parking meters and 10 per cent for violations of snow parking bans — but Stewart said they have no idea how many will be contested in the new system.

Stewart said they know there are some people who wonder about the optics of the city handing out parking tickets and then the city initially adjudicating the same tickets.

He said to address that they plan to randomly sample tickets that have gone through screening to see the outcomes and they are also looking into the possibility of having an external audit of the results.

The provincial government replaced the 50-year-old Summary Convictions Act with Bill 38 the Provincial Offences Act and Municipal By-Law Enforcement Act.

Former Justice Minister Andrew Swan said at the time that instead of having a trial in provincial court, a hearing would be held in front of a municipal screening officer to “take the expense and delay of court proceedings and turn it into something much more effective.”

The new system made it mandatory for jurisdictions which issue parking tickets to set up its own system with screening officers.

Shauna Curtin, assistant deputy minister of courts, said the Association of Manitoba Municipalities pushed for these changes.

Curtin said the new system will be more cost efficient for small communities and municipalities across the province who up until now had to hire lawyers to pursue payment of tickets and bylaw infractions.

Curtin said the new process for parking tickets is “not intended to be unfair. It is designed to discourage vexatious applicants.

“People would prefer to deal with their matters as quickly as they can.”‘

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca