29 Mayors (Including Guelph) Out of 444 Municipalities Push to Keep Speed Camera Revenue Machines

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 - 9:49 am
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Only 29 of Ontario’s 444 mayors – through the group Ontario Big City Mayors (OBCM) – have signed a letter urging Premier Doug Ford to preserve Ontario’s automated speed-enforcement (ASE) program. These mayors claim they’re protecting road safety. But the facts tell a very different story – one of lost local money, misplaced priorities, and an overreliance on revenue machines that have done little to make streets safer.

In Guelph alone, residents have already paid about $2.3 million in speed-camera fines since the program began. Much of that money never stayed in the city. Instead, it flowed to private vendors and out-of-country contractors who operate the program, leaving Guelph taxpayers footing the bill while their own neighbourhoods see no direct benefit.

A local Guelph community reader poll echoed that frustration, with more than 90 percent of respondents voting to remove the cameras entirely – a clear rejection from the very community footing the bill.

Meanwhile, real, proven traffic-calming solutions – physical barriers such as speed humps, curb extensions, raised crosswalks, and narrowed lanes – continue to be under-funded or delayed. These are the very measures traffic engineers agree actually slow vehicles and save lives. Cameras, on the other hand, punish after the fact. Drivers slow briefly for the camera zone and resume speeding a block later. Nothing about that pattern represents lasting behavioural change.

The letter from OBCM, signed by 29 of Ontario’s largest-city mayors, including Guelph’s Cam Guthrie, frames the cameras as “a necessary tool to keep our communities safe.” Yet buried within the same letter is an admission that removing them would cause “significant operational and financial challenges” for municipalities – a clear indicator that many of these cities have come to depend on this fine revenue to seemingly balance budgets, not to fund meaningful safety infrastructure.

When safety policy is guided by fiscal dependency, the goal stops being safer streets – it becomes sustaining cash flow. A revenue generator. A revenue machine.

The majority of Ontarians don’t buy it. A provincial survey found that two-thirds of respondents favour banning the cameras entirely, while only a small minority want to keep them unchanged. Even among those who accept them, most view them as a last resort, not a first choice. The public’s message is simple: end the gouging and focus on design-led solutions that actually protect pedestrians, cyclists, and children.

In Guelph’s case, the logic collapses entirely. The city’s own reports show limited measurable reductions in collision severity near ASE sites, and the fines collected have largely vanished into administrative costs and vendor contracts. The claim that the program “pays for itself” rings hollow when much of the profit leaves the community.

OBCM’s letter tries to position speed cameras as an indispensable safety measure in school zones, but that argument ignores the core principle of traffic safety: engineering over enforcement. Narrower lanes, raised intersections, better crosswalk lighting, and physical impediments have long been shown to produce sustainable speed reductions. Cameras do not.

Even the mayors’ proposed “fixes” – issuing warnings for first offences, adding larger signs, adjusting thresholds – are cosmetic. None address the fundamental flaw that cameras react to violations rather than prevent them. The only true prevention is physical change in the road environment.

At a time when residents face rising taxes, higher living costs, and infrastructure backlogs, it’s astonishing that municipal leaders would band together to defend a system that drains millions of local dollars every year. Instead of lobbying for more cameras, these 29 mayors should be demanding funding for speed humps, sidewalk expansions, pedestrian islands, and curb-bump-outs that make drivers slow down naturally.

In effect, OBCM is asking Premier Ford to keep in place a system that transfers community wealth out of Ontario while giving the illusion of safety. That illusion is expensive: millions leaving local economies, countless working-class residents penalized, and no measurable reduction in collisions that justifies the cost.

The province’s other 415 municipalities – those not part of OBCM – should take note. This is what happens when large-city mayors mistake cash flow for safety policy.

Citizens deserve leaders who understand that enforcement is not engineering. Real safety is built, not billed. If even a fraction of Guelph’s $2.3 million in camera revenue had gone toward permanent traffic-calming infrastructure, every school zone in the city could have been retrofitted with raised crosswalks, narrowed lanes, or flexible bollards that physically protect children. Instead, the city is left with warning flashes, fines, and an invoice from an American vendor.

The truth is simple: speed cameras don’t save lives – safer streets do. Ontario’s big-city mayors can keep defending their revenue machines, but the public can see through the rhetoric. Every dollar sent out of Guelph through this scheme is a dollar not spent making our own streets safer.

If the Ontario government truly wants to protect children, seniors, and pedestrians, it should invest in infrastructure that forces slower speeds, not cameras that profit from higher ones.

Because the difference between a safe street and a profitable one should never be a matter of municipal preference.

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