Traffic law: offences, licences and the rules of the road

At 22:15 on the Friday night, three hours before the Kingsway collision, Constable Sofia Reyes and her field training officer, Constable Dev Malhotra, stopped a grey minivan on Harbour Road for going through a red light. The driver produced a licence, but the registration in the glove box belonged to a different vehicle, and the insurance card had expired two weeks earlier. In ten minutes at the side of the road, Reyes dealt with three different kinds of traffic law: the rules of the road, the licensing and registration of drivers and vehicles, and the requirement to carry insurance. She also had to decide which of the possible charges were worth laying.

Desjardins uses the minivan stop to introduce the structure of traffic law. 'Most of what you enforce on the road is not criminal law,' he tells the class. 'It is provincial law, written to keep traffic moving safely, and it has its own rules about how offences are proven and punished. You need to know where your authority comes from, what the offence actually requires, and what happens to the ticket after you hand it over.'

Where traffic law comes from

In Canada, the Constitution gives the provinces authority over highways, licensing and most rules of the road, while the federal Parliament makes criminal law. Ontario's main traffic statute is the Highway Traffic Act, which sets the rules of the road, licensing, vehicle registration, equipment standards and penalties. Other Ontario laws cover insurance, notably the Compulsory Automobile Insurance Act, and off-road vehicles. The Criminal Code adds the serious driving offences, such as dangerous operation, impaired operation, failing to stop after a collision and operating while prohibited. Municipal by-laws cover parking and some local matters.

The split matters for officers because it decides which court hears the case, what the officer must prove and what penalties are possible. A careless driving charge under the Highway Traffic Act is a provincial offence prosecuted under the Provincial Offences Act, with fines, demerit points and possible licence suspension. A dangerous operation charge under the Criminal Code is a criminal offence that can lead to a criminal record and jail.

Kinds of traffic offences

Provincial traffic offences are regulatory offences, meant to protect the public rather than to punish moral wrongdoing. In R. v. Sault Ste. Marie in 1978, the Supreme Court of Canada described three categories of offence. Offences requiring a guilty mind, called mens rea offences, are mostly criminal. Strict liability offences are the default for regulatory offences: the Crown proves the act, and the defendant can escape conviction by proving, on a balance of probabilities, that they took all reasonable care, which is called the defence of due diligence. Absolute liability offences allow no due diligence defence at all. Courts have held, for example in the Ontario Court of Appeal's decision in R. v. Kanda in 2008 on seat belts and in decisions on speeding, that some Highway Traffic Act offences are absolute liability offences. Because absolute liability with the possibility of jail would offend section 7 of the Charter, Ontario's law removes jail as a penalty for those offences.

Licensing: who may drive

Ontario uses graduated licensing for new drivers. A G1 licence holder must drive with an experienced driver, cannot drive on some highways and must have a blood alcohol concentration of zero. A G2 licence holder may drive alone but still has zero tolerance for alcohol and passenger limits at night for young drivers. A full G licence comes after road tests and time. Drivers 21 and under, and all novice drivers, must have zero alcohol and zero drugs. Ontario's demerit point system adds points for many convictions; a fully licensed driver who reaches 15 points has their licence suspended.

Driving while suspended or prohibited is one of the offences most closely linked to serious crashes, because drivers who have lost their licence have often lost it for dangerous behaviour. A licence suspension under the Highway Traffic Act is enforced under section 53, and operating a vehicle while prohibited by a court order under the Criminal Code is a criminal offence under section 320.18. When Reyes ran the minivan driver's licence, it came back valid. Had it come back suspended, the stop would have become more serious, and the vehicle could have been impounded.

Registration and insurance

Every motor vehicle on a public road must be registered to an owner and carry valid plates. Registration links the vehicle to a person who can be held responsible for it, and it lets police identify stolen vehicles, unpaid tolls and vehicles involved in crimes. The minivan's registration permit belonged to the driver's previous van, which he had sold a month earlier. The van he was driving was registered in his name but he had left the new permit at home. The Highway Traffic Act requires drivers to carry the vehicle permit and produce it on request. Reyes confirmed the registration through records in under a minute.

Insurance is a separate requirement. Ontario's Compulsory Automobile Insurance Act makes it an offence to operate or permit the operation of a motor vehicle without insurance, with a minimum fine of 5,000 dollars for a first conviction, and requires drivers to produce proof of insurance. The penalties are severe because an uninsured driver leaves victims without compensation. The expired insurance card turned out to be the old card; the driver's insurer confirmed by phone that the policy had been renewed. Reyes noted the confirmation in her notebook and did not charge him.

Malhotra uses this to make a point about discretion. 'The law gave her three possible charges. One was a real safety offence, the red light. Two were paperwork that turned out to be fine. She charged the red light and let the rest go once she confirmed it. That is a good use of discretion. A ticket for a permit left at home does nothing for road safety.'

The rules of the road

Most of the offences that cause collisions are found in the rules of the road: speed, signals, right of way, turning, lane use, following distance, passing and the duties at crosswalks and school buses. For investigators, the most important rules are the ones that decide who had to yield. At the Kingsway collision, the central legal question was the left turn. Section 141 of the Highway Traffic Act requires a driver turning left at an intersection to yield the right of way to traffic approaching from the opposite direction that is in the intersection or close enough to be an immediate hazard. The rule raises an obvious question that the rest of this course tries to answer: how close is close enough to be an immediate hazard, and does it matter that the other vehicle was speeding?

The answer in both countries is that the right of way is not a licence to drive dangerously. A driver with the right of way is still expected to drive at a lawful speed and to take reasonable steps to avoid a collision. If the approaching vehicle was travelling far over the limit, the turning driver may have judged the gap correctly for a vehicle travelling at the limit. Investigators therefore need both the legal rule and the physical evidence of speed before they can decide who, if anyone, should be charged.

Speed limits and how they are set

In Ontario, the default speed limit is 50 km/h in cities, towns and built-up areas and 80 km/h outside them unless signs say otherwise. Municipalities can lower limits on their streets, and many have set 40 km/h or 30 km/h limits in residential neighbourhoods and community safety zones, where fines are increased. Provincial highways are usually posted at 80, 90 or 100 km/h, with some sections of 400-series highways at 110 km/h.

Officers sometimes forget that the posted limit is the maximum for ideal conditions. On a rainy night, in fog or in heavy traffic, a driver can be travelling below the limit and still be driving too fast. The Highway Traffic Act's careless driving section and the requirement to drive at a speed suitable for conditions cover this situation. Investigators often find that the most important speed question in a collision is not whether the driver exceeded the limit, but whether they could have stopped in the distance they could see.

After the ticket: how traffic cases move through court

Most Highway Traffic Act tickets are issued under Part I of the Provincial Offences Act, where the officer gives the driver an offence notice with a set fine and files a certificate of offence with the court. The driver can pay, request a meeting with a prosecutor, or request a trial. More serious offences, such as careless driving causing bodily harm, are started under Part III by a summons, and the driver must appear in court. At trial, the officer is usually the main witness, which is why notes matter so much.

Haddad, who supervised Reyes and Malhotra that night, reminds the class that the court sees only what the officer wrote down. 'You will testify about a red light six months later. You will not remember the colour of the van or what the driver said. Your notes will. Write down what you saw, where you were, what the light was doing and what the driver said, in that order.'

Equipment and vehicle fitness

Traffic law also sets standards for the vehicle itself: working headlights, tail lights and brake lights, tires with adequate tread, brakes that work on every wheel, a clear windshield, mirrors and, for heavy vehicles, detailed rules on loads, axle weights and inspections. Section 82 of the Highway Traffic Act allows an officer to require that a vehicle be examined for mechanical fitness, and to order it off the road if it is unsafe. Equipment defects rarely cause serious crashes on their own, but worn tires, failed brakes and missing lights can turn a driver's mistake into a collision. That is why a collision investigation always includes an examination of the vehicles' mechanical condition, as lesson 12 shows.

Equipment stops also raise fairness questions, because they give officers wide discretion over which vehicles to stop. A burned-out licence plate light is a lawful reason to stop a car, but it does little for road safety, and stops for minor equipment defects have been shown to fall most heavily on drivers with older cars and on communities that are already stopped often. Many services now encourage officers to use warnings or repair notices for minor defects and to focus enforcement on the defects that actually make a vehicle dangerous.