The Ontario government will allow footage from school bus cameras to stand alone in court and give cities more powers to fine speeders, in an effort to curb the thousands of drivers who go by buses every day.
According to Transportation Minister Jeff Yurek, there are 17,000 'blowbys' on a daily basis in Ontario, meaning cars speeding past buses with their stop sign on.
"That's an awful lot of people that are getting away with not only endangering our children's lives but driving recklessly," he said Thursday.
Yurek says the government will amend the law to allow footage from school bus cameras to stand alone in court, as opposed to requiring a witness, usually the driver, to testify.
"We no longer have to have the driver going to court, taking a day off work, to go and testify that so and so blew by the bus," he said.
The other change is allowing more powers to municipalities to fine speeders.
"Utilize their own proceedings, they're own tribunals that they have put forward...without having to go to the court system," he said.
He then said cities can use the revenue from the fines to pay to put more cameras on buses.
The government says there are currently six jurisdictions that are conducting school bus camera pilots, where bus operators front the cash, with the fine revenue paying off the initial investment.
NEWSTALK1010 Legal Analyst Ed Prutschi said while the idea to allow footage to stand alone isn't a new one, the fine changes are.
"We'll hand municipaities the reigns and some powers, that way the expense and the management of it doesn't fall to the province," he said. "Which is very interested in keeping its cost low and its hands clean."
"The big question mark is whether the quality of the video will be sufficient to identify drivers," he said. "The closest analogy is what we have with red-light cameras."