Punishment rarely fits the crime for vehicular deaths.
Justice was administered to Audrey Thomas t his month at Old City Hall courthouse in Toronto, and a brief, rote spasm of outrage ensued. On June 14 last year, Thomas accidentally rammed her Mercedes SUV into the booth that sisters Algie and Allane Parucha were manning at the City Place Urban Market. Algie Parucha died instantly.
Thomas’s punishment for “careless driving” under the Highway Traffic Act: a $1,000 fine and a six- month driving ban — with exceptions for “work, medical appointments and emergencies.” Because that’s just when you want someone who can’t find the brake on the road: in an emergency.
Indeed, some of the judgments against “careless drivers” seem almost bespoketailored to offend the public.
A $ 2,000 fine and a twoyear driving prohibition — the maximum non-custodial penalty — for killing a six- yearold properly using a Toronto crosswalk. The JP wrote of his “heavy heart,” on account of the “devastating impact” on the driver’s life. To wit: “He is too anxious to drive.”
Twenty days in jail, to be served intermittently, plus a two-year driving ban, for killing an 89- year- old woman crossing a Halton road on a green light. The driver was on her cellphone, and had a previous conviction for that. On appeal, the judge deemed jail time unduly harsh because the driver had post-traumatic stress — from killing the woman — and because she was a single mother of two boys, one of whom has Asperger’s.
Much harsher penalties attend people convicted under the Criminal Code of dangerous driving ( though many argue they’re still too lenient). And this is thoroughly defensible: generally speaking, we shouldn’t be throwing people in jail for making careless mistakes, as opposed to for gross negligence or genuine intent to cause harm.
We should, however, be trying to impress upon people how grave the consequences can be for a moment’s inattention behind the wheel as opposed to, say, while walking the dog or knitting. And we should want bad drivers off the road. As such, I have never understood why the driving ban provisions specifically are so lenient, and so leniently applied. Whatever happened to “driving is a privilege, not a right?”
The consequences of Highway Traffic Act offences are rarely taken into account at sentencing. But in Ontario, the Burlington MPP and cabinet minister Eleanor McMahon tabled a private member’s bill last year that would create a new offence: “careless driving causing death or bodily harm.”
McMahon’s late husband, OPP officer Greg Stobbart, died in 2006 after a driver struck him while he was cycling. The driver, Michael Duggan, had five convictions for driving with a suspended licence, four for driving uninsured, and a criminal record to boot. He had only just gotten his licence back — and only lost it again for a year.
“People rarely feel gratified by someone who kills their loved one and walks away with a $500 fine,” says McMahon. “I want to recognize and honour that feeling of egregious resentment that people feel, that the law really … isn’t reflecting their sentiments.”
She hopes the bill will resurface in the province’s legislature during this session, and pass before the summer break. But I’m not sure it will really salve much resentment. The minimum fine would be $ 2,000, the maximum $ 50,000. The maximum j ail s entence would be two years, up from six months. The maximum licence suspension would go from two years to five. That’s something — but still not much, surely, measured against a human life.
And on driving bans, I still find myself asking: Why not 10 years? Why not forever — certainly on a second or third offence? And I keep hearing variations on the same answer: well, some people simply need to drive — certainly rural people; certainly people in certain professions. McMahon seems to prefer the ideas of a “short, sharp ( jail) sentence.” But I’m not sure why two years in jail — a lifealtering event — is widely considered appropriate but, say, having to move or get a new job isn’t. As consequences go for killing someone, those don’t strike me as cruel and unusual.
We might not even have to codify it. A Highway Traffic Act offence like careless driving can send your insurance premiums through the roof, says Pete Parageorgos, director of consumer and industry relations at the Insurance Board of Canada. Multiple convictions, and just one under the Criminal Code, will likely get you dropped altogether. This seems nothing other than fair and just.
Under Ontario’s “take all comers” rule, however, insurers have to offer coverage to anyone qualified to drive. They pool the risk for high- risk drivers, and if the claims paid out exceed the premiums, they take the hit. The effect, says Mary Kelly, chair in insurance at Wilfred Laurier University’s Lazaridis School of Business, is that the safest drivers subsidize the most dangerous.
This is a standard arrangement in mandatory-insurance jurisdictions, Kelly notes, but it’s not altogether clear to me why it should be. There’s no right to affordable insurance: lots of people get priced out of car ownership because they can’t afford the rates — not least low- income high- risk drivers. (Parageorgos says he’s heard of $10,000 premiums.) What concern is it of the government’s if careless, dangerous, drunk and otherwise unfit drivers find themselves branded unsafe at any price?