Auditor urges city hall to get tough on parking scofflaws
· Toronto Sun
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The cars are in park and Toronto City Hall isn’t moving much faster.
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City hall’s audit committee heard Friday that last year, it took Toronto more than eight months on average to screen parking penalties. Because of that sluggish pace, the city’s backlog of screening requests was more than 10 times larger last year than it was in 2022.
Red light camera tickets, which recently joined the same administrative penalty system, have also proved to be a struggle.
While the city collected $25.4 million in red light penalties, another $17.7 million – 132,000 tickets’ worth – remained outstanding as of the end of 2025, the committee heard.
Solutions needed
One solution to the city’s administrative penalty woes might be to tweak the system to better stop scofflaws.
Councillor Stephen Holyday, the chairman of the committee, ordered a report on a “ tiered penalty structure for repeat offenders ,” as suggested by Toronto’s auditor general, Tara Anderson.
In her own report , Anderson said other GTA municipalities including Brampton and Markham use “progressive penalties or fees for repeat offenders.” Her report laid the blame for many of Toronto’s unpaid parking tickets on this type of delinquent driver.
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“We found that just over 1 million repeat offenders accumulated over 6 million parking penalties worth more than $409 million between 2022 and 2025. As of January 2026, these repeat offenders had not paid about 1.6 million penalties worth over $114 million,” the report said.
One problem is that a frequent offender’s car might be towed, but otherwise they don’t face any more trouble other than fees, the report said.
About one-third of the $659.5 million of all parking penalties and fees issued between 2022 and 2025 – $215.8 million – was still outstanding as of Dec. 31.
Just as striking is the difficulty the city has had in processing those penalties.
While 2.2 million parking and red light camera penalties were processed last year, the average time to screen parking infractions has ballooned since 2022 – and so has the backlog.
On average in 2025, it took 252 days, or more than eight months, for city hall to render a decision after a motorist requested a review of a penalty. In 2022, that average wait was a mere 94 days.
That’s allowed a massive backlog to pile up, from 23,961 unresolved screening requests in 2022 to 247,514 last year.
‘No consequences’
The wait times even in 2022 were well beyond city hall’s rough target of two months for a screening. It’s expected that city council will be asked to set an official time frame for screening such disputes next year.
The committee was told that more reviews are now being screened, but while the auditor found that’s in part due to improvements in the process, it’s also because more overtime is being authorized.
More parking penalties were disputed in 2025, as fines increased and a rocky economy have left “a greater portion of Torontonians” potentially facing “difficulty paying a penalty,” the report added.
While the report said red light camera violations are “processed much faster” than parking infractions – 48 days on average in 2025 – Councillor Paula Fletcher took issue with how many of those tickets have gone unpaid.
At the committee meeting, Fletcher pressed city bureaucrats on why there was “quite such an outstanding amount” of red light camera fines. Senior city staffers told her that such tickets can be disputed for many reasons, and drivers often fight them.
“I would say the delay in the collection would be partly due to the fact that there’s currently no consequences for not paying it,” Anderson told the committee during an exchange with another councillor, Vincent Crisanti.
Red light tickets were only folded into the city’s administrative penalty system last year, and the committee was told that there is still work to be done to integrate it with the province’s structures to ensure there can be consequences for nonpayment. That should be done within about a month.
Fletcher, having pressed for more data such as the numbers of unpaid tickets and outstanding amounts, requested that heat maps of Toronto’s parking and red light violations be put together in time for city council’s meeting at the end of this month.
“We know your top 10,” Fletcher said of the red light cameras, “but we don’t really know where all the pockets (of frequent violations) might be.”