Toronto cancels almost a million unpaid parking tickets

Good news if you decided to dispute a parking ticket - the city of Toronto announced today they decided to cancel about 880,000 unpaid parking tickets that were issued between 2002 and 2014. If you disputed a ticket or were awaiting a trial chances are you're off the hook.

The action is a result of City lawyers concluding they didn't have a reasonable chance to win the disputes since it has taken so long to bring the cases to trial. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ensures the right to a trial within a reasonable amount of time, historically 12 to 16 months for parking tickets.

Essentially, the City is avoiding the administration costs and inevitable failure in trying to pursue tickets that have exceeded this time frame and have no reasonable prospect of conviction.

The City says the withdrawn tickets represented an estimated $20 million in revenue that will now go unrealized.

Want to know if your ticket was canceled? Just go here and enter the parking infraction number, your driver's licence number or a Registrant Identification Number (RIN). If your ticket has been withdrawn you'll see "Cancelled, Withdrawn, Complete" in the status box. This means the ticket does not need to be paid.

Do you think it's a good idea for the City to cancel these parking tickets? Let us know in the comments.

Photo by Steve M in the blogTO Flickr pool.