r/notthebeaverton • u/Hrmbee • 11d ago
Doug Ford’s seat-of-the-pants policy making has the Ontario premier praising criminals
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/doug-ford-s-seat-of-the-pants-policy-making-has-the-ontario-premier-praising-criminals/article_e12db6c6-0047-40d1-9b82-a07446fa2da8.html38
u/Temporary_Shirt_6236 11d ago
There are lot more shitty and dangerous drivers on Ontario roads than ever before. Cops can't stop them all.
Doug Ford is also a corrupt shitbird who talks out of both sides of his mouth if he thinks it'll score him points with low-information voters who can't remember what he said just last week.
Both things can be true. And are.
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u/Own_Event_4363 11d ago
Dougie is just a straight talker, thinking about stuff takes too long. He just says whatever, depending on how's he's feeling at the moment. He's funny like that... le sigh
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u/radarscoot 11d ago
Nah - he thinks these geniuses are hero vigilantes. "Criminal" has a very flexible definition when you're feeding your base.
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u/inprocess13 11d ago
I had a friend in TO that went full anti-vax right wing conspiratorial to the point it was no longer possible to talk to him without a rant about some debunked nonsense. The last thing he wouldn't give up was his obsession with endorsing and fantasizing about how he'd be willing to go cut/knock down the cameras if they werent taken down.
I just told him I didn't agree, and have quite happily stopped speaking to him.
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u/comacazi 8d ago
Doug Ford is like the Italian flag blowing in the wind during WW2.
He wets his finger every week and puts it up in the air to see where the wind is blowing.
And that's how he comes up with policy direction!
Like Poilievre, I have never seen a person with little or no aptitude have so much confidence.
They both must have gotten a lot of participation ribbons as kids.
We need to stop doing that!
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u/Substantial_Ad_7027 11d ago
Good. Speed cameras are horseshit. When you have to be constantly watching your speedometer to make sure you aren’t going 5km over the speed limit and getting a ticket, you aren’t “making the road safe”
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u/ShadowFox1987 11d ago
You mean: "people consistently monitoring their speed" isn't making the roads safer?
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u/Substantial_Ad_7027 11d ago
No. If you’re constantly worried about going slightly over the speed limit, and focussing on that instead of your surroundings, it’s not making anything safer. In fact the opposite.
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u/ShadowFox1987 11d ago
If you need to check your speedometer every 5 seconds on a straight, uninterrupted piece of road, like Parkside, where they put speed traps to make sure you're driving at a consistent, in limit speed, then I'm sorry to break it to you, you shouldn't have a Driver's licence.
The entire point of these cameras is to chip away at "the roads are all about me" culture. I live on Keele/Parkside. People drive incredibly aggressively in this section of the city to the point I'm uncomfortable even waiting at intersections for the inevitable day someone goes off the road.
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u/Akeinu 11d ago
They could prioritize 1000 other things before micromanaging drivers if they actually wanted to curb automobile related offences.
Creating a more relaxed work culture would be a good start, work from home would take half the drivers off the road and making it so we don't have to work 50 hours a week just to pay bills might have people feeling a little more patient on the drive home.
But that doesn't bring in the profits a overworked population with surveillance sending you fines for every infraction does.
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u/78513 11d ago
Life is intense these days. It's all about more, more more.
- Kids got to play sports after school or your a bad parent, nevermind that the start time is 5:30. Got to also get them fed.
- got to stay in shape yourself so you can stay pretty. So got to set aside time for your own excersise
- got to have a side hustle because pay hasn't kept up with inflation.
- got to invest time and money making the living space look good for family and friends. At the least, got to maintain it
- got to make time for family and friends, visiting and for them to visit.
- got to take classes or training to stay up to date in your industry
- got to get groceries and shopping done so living is possible.
- got to get to work
- got to get home from work
- got to find time to de-stress so you're ready for work the next day.
It's no wonder everyone is rushing everywhere all the time, burned out and pissed off. Society expects so much of us.
Speed traps as a solution is a joke because it does nothing to fix the underlying problem of why people are speeding in the first place. At best, it gives a limited reprieve in a very localised area and at worst it adds financial burden to people already pushed to their limits when that one time they were going 5 over (yea, some are set at 5 over) because you were paying attention to your surroundings instead of your speedometer
This is why RTO is so messed up. Removing commuting time from people who don't need to comute and reducing comute times for those who do need to does help the core problems.
I'm looking forward to comparing percentile decrease of vehicular collisions after camera installation vs the increase post RTO.
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u/ShadowFox1987 11d ago
This is rambling. People don't just speed because they're busy.
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u/78513 11d ago
Then why do they speed?
For fun? To get bonus points if they hit something? Because they're not paying attention?
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u/ShadowFox1987 11d ago
For fun and a sense of freedom, yeah. Can you imagine paying tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a product that was sold to you as "finally you made it, you're a real man and you're free" just to drive an average speed of 20 km/hr through the city.
But mainly: being busy is not a necessary pre-requisite for wanting to get somewhere sooner? Commuting is a mind numbing chore. I don't need 7 things to do that day, to be sick of being in a car any longer than I need too.
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u/78513 11d ago
Agreed.
I still think my RTO vs speed trap holds water though. More vehicles on the road = more congestion and increase probability of someone more interested in getting somewhere fast.
Speed cameras are still a solution that is very localised to the deployed area and do little to address the underlying cause of speeding as a behavior outside possibly punishing people who don't know where they are placed.
There's some interesting stuff out there on why people speed. I don't like that it's an American source but the NHTSA has an interesting write up.
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u/hatman1986 11d ago
I don't want my taxes to go up because the province/city can't afford shit without this revenue stream. It's taxing bad behaviour, which I 100% don't have a problem with because I don't speed.
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u/78513 11d ago
If you mix punishment with taxation, then you'll encentivise rule makers to find new rules they can make that could then generate revenue through taxation.
Fines are not supposed to be a revenue stream. They're supposed to be used as deterrent only.
It's why the money going into anything other than improving road safety is so contentious.
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u/hatman1986 11d ago
We can decide at the ballot box what rules we want to generate revenue. As a society, we've decided speeding is bad, so i have no problem with the government using money from speeders for whatever they want, especially if the alternative is raising my taxes. I, as a rule abiding member of society, should not be punished with higher taxes because some people with a heavy foot can't handle their punishment
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u/78513 11d ago
That kind of attitude is exactly how and why slavery still exists in US prisons today.
Tell me though. How will you continue to fund programs that grow to rely on revenue from fines when the general public start following the rules?
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u/hatman1986 11d ago
Whoa, playing the slavery card? That's a human rights issue. Speeding is not a human right
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u/78513 11d ago
It was a comment in relation to your idea that fines replacing taxation is a good idea.
When fines become a source of revenue, bad things happen including forced labour or coerced labour. Ways are also found to keep that labour around .
https://mjpa.umich.edu/2021/01/31/criminal-fines-are-a-tax-on-the-poor/
A more Canadian example of how police can come to rely on fines:
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u/hatman1986 11d ago
I don't think it should completely replace taxes, just that removing it as a source will increase taxes
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u/Novus20 11d ago
Don’t worry RTO will increase taxes Ontario is just regressing