College student loses battle over $173 transit ticket fine

A three-year battle over a $173 transit ticket has ended with a B.C. Supreme Court judge ordering a college student to pay the fine.

In November 2013, Inna Danylyuk, a full-time student at Langara College, was travelling in a bus on Imperial Street in Burnaby when a fare officer asked her for her transit pass.

She produced a U-Pass she had grabbed in a hurry that morning, a pass that belonged to her partner, a full-time student at BCIT. She had left her own pass at home.

The U-Pass she produced had the letters BIT on front, indicating it was for a BCIT student. On the back, contrary to the regulations, no one had signed the pass.

Because she had failed to produce the proper pass, she received a $173 fine. Danylyuk filed a notice of dispute challenging the ticket on the grounds she accidentally switched her U-Pass with her partner’s U-Pass.

A TransLink official said he empathized with Danylyuk, but found the ticket was issued correctly.

Danylyuk filed an appeal to an arbitrator, arguing her U-Pass and her partner’s U-Pass had a similar appearance, causing her mistake, but in March 2014, the arbitrator confirmed the ticket.

A month later, Danylyuk filed yet another appeal to the Provincial Court, arguing TransLink was partly at fault for making the two passes look the same.

At a hearing before Judicial Justice Zahid Makhdoom, a transit official pointed out the U-Pass presented to the fare officer did not contain the student’s name and the front of the pass had the letters BIT indicating BCIT, not Langara College.

But Makhdoom cancelled the ticket, finding transit officials had been unreasonable and the cost of dealing with the case amounted to an exercise in “administrative haddockry.”

Makhdoom said TransLink would have been better off saving a student, likely already in debt, from incurring further indebtedness, or worse, wasting her time dealing with appeals and further appeals.

Transit officials appealed Makhdoom’s ruling to the next level of court, the B.C. Supreme Court.

In her ruling, Justice Elaine Adair concluded Makhdoom failed to determine the appropriate standard of review, then failed to apply that standard of review to his decision. She said it was plain that the Judicial Justice saw his role as to conduct a hearing anew without regard to arbitrator’s decision.

“The substance of the evidence did not change from Ms. Danylyuk’s initial dispute through to the review by the Judicial Justice,” Adair said, adding Makhdoom failed to explain why the arbitrator’s decision that the student did not meet the test for cancellation was unreasonable.

The arbitrator accepted that Danylyuk’s error was inadvertent, but reasonably concluded that presenting another person’s pass, particularly one that did not contain the person’s name on the back, did not meet the requirements of the legislation, noted the judge.