Parking authority’s plan in violation of common sense and should be towed away

Winnipeg has no shortage of real problems to solve — from crumbling roads, violent crime and addictions to homelessness and an overstretched police service.

So what is the Winnipeg Parking Authority focusing on? Apparently, reinventing the city as a neighbourhood surveillance state where residents snitch on each other with cellphone cameras.

The WPA’s 2026 business plan, released this week, includes a proposal to “explore a photo-based public reporting system for parking violations.”

Translation: they want Winnipeggers to pull out their phones, take pictures of one another’s vehicles and send them to the parking authority so tickets can be mailed out after the fact. It’s hard to imagine something more unnecessary, more divisive or more destined to backfire.

This isn’t a modest technical tweak. It’s a fundamental shift in how parking enforcement works, and not in a good way. The WPA imagines this as “community involvement.”

But most people will recognize it for what it really is: outsourcing enforcement to the general public while the parking authority collects the fines.

That is not “community involvement.” It’s a guaranteed way to spark confrontations.

For starters, some parking violations aren’t instantly clear from a photo. Was the car stopped to load a senior with mobility issues? Was someone waiting to avoid blocking traffic? Context matters — but a smartphone photo strips context out entirely.

And that’s assuming everyone acts in good faith, which they won’t.

What about images generated by artificial intelligence, where AI can be used to produce fake photos? What safeguards would there be to protect the public from that?

And what happens when some people challenge the ticket in court? The WPA would then be dragging residents into courtrooms to testify about cellphone photos they took of strangers’ cars.

That is not only absurd, it is unworkable. How many people will actually want to take time off work to defend a photo of someone they don’t know, in an incident they only half understand?

This program falls apart the moment it meets the justice system.

The WPA claims the program would allow it to “redeploy officers to priority complaints.” Translation: we don’t have enough staff to enforce parking laws, so we’d like you — the public — to do it for us.

Meanwhile, city spokesperson Pam McKenzie says the public already can submit photos of violations, but before any ticket is issued, a trained parking officer reviews the situation and either confirms the infraction or dismisses it. That, at least, offers a thin layer of common sense.

Under the proposed change, however, some infractions would be enforced solely on the basis of the public’s photos, without an officer ever visiting the scene.

That is a remarkable lowering of standards and a stunning admission: the WPA wants to do less work while issuing more tickets.

Instead of investing in the staff required to properly enforce the rules, the agency prefers to crowdsource the job. This is not modernization. It’s abdication.

Perhaps the clearest sign the WPA has misread the room comes from Coun. Janice Lukes, who chairs the committee overseeing the agency.

Lukes is no opponent of enforcement. In fact, she’s been vocal about the need to crack down on unsafe driving and chronic parking abuses.

“It seems a lot of Big Brother to me,” she says, calling the idea “a little too far” even for someone who supports stricter enforcement.

The WPA seems determined to treat parking enforcement like a revenue-generating scavenger hunt, with residents acting as unpaid agents collecting fines.

But parking enforcement is the WPA’s job — not yours, not mine, not the person standing in line behind you at the grocery store.

The parking authority’s photo-snitch proposal is not innovative, efficient or community-minded. It is lazy policy dressed up as modernization and it risks turning Winnipeg’s streets into battlegrounds of smartphone vigilantes.

If the city wants better parking enforcement, it should invest in more officers, clearer rules and smarter urban planning. It should not ask Winnipeggers to spy on one another so the WPA can send more tickets in the mail.

Some ideas deserve further study. This one deserves to be abandoned immediately.

The city should shut this down before it goes any further. The last thing Winnipeg needs is a snitch-based ticketing system that fosters anger, mistrust and unnecessary conflict. Enforcing the law should never depend on who happens to be holding a smartphone at the right moment.

The WPA should park this foolish idea and leave the ticket writing to the professionals.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca