International Law

London (City) v. Young

If the “set fine” box on your Ontario Certificate of Offence is inaccurate, do nothing. The proceedings should be quashed.

So says a majority of the Ontario Court of Appeal. An incorrectly entered set fine is not “mere surplusage” but means the certificate is not “complete and regular” on its face. In dissent, Doherty, J. A. held that the “set fine” box on the certificate was a mere bit of administrative convenience, that the section giving a judge power to quash the certificate has nothing to do with receiving all the information necessary for a defendant to decide whether or not to respond to the charge, and that a judge in imposing a set fine is not amending the certificate of offence.

A story in the Toronto Star provides a little more background, and suggests a reason why the police should be expected to get their act together (emphasis added):

In some cases, officers who handed out the tickets relied on fine schedules that led them, inadvertently, to miscalculate a “victim fine surcharge” added to every fine.

That miscalculation resulted in the total amount payable to the court being inflated, sometimes by $5 or $10.

Because the charts were in use for a decade, the province may have ended up collecting “millions” more than it was entitled to, contends Adam Little, a lawyer who began researching the issue while in law school and acted on behalf of the 16 defendants.

“It’s been a very big problem for years and nobody realized it,” Little said yesterday.

He added that anyone ticketed can check the Ontario Court of Justice website to see if their fine is accurate or ask a paralegal.

Just how big a problem, though? The majority are not concerned:

There is no evidence before this court to suggest that there is a widespread problem with incorrect set fines, or that requiring the set fine to be correct would result in a massive number of quashed proceedings. There is also no reason to suspect that that would be the case.

I hope they’re right. But if it is a widespread problem, all the more reason to fix it.

Full post as published by Criminal Review on May 31, 2008 (boomark / email).