Halifax owed over $1M in unpaid parking tickets from out-of-province visitors

Halifax is owed more than $1 million in outstanding parking tickets from out-of-province licence plates, but won’t be collecting that money because they say it’s simply not worth pursuing.

According to statistics from the municipality, there are 49,008 unpaid parking tickets that were written between 2011 and 2015 for vehicles registered outside of Nova Scotia.

The fines from those tickets add up to $1,378,770 in lost revenue for the municipality.

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“When you’re looking at out-of-province Canadian licence plates, it’s probably within six per cent of our total revenue,” said Brendan Elliott, a senior communications advisor with Halifax.

“So when you look at it from the big picture, we don’t see it as that big of an issue.”

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In contrast, unpaid tickets issued to drivers in Nova Scotia represent under one per cent of the total revenue, which is about $4 million each year.

Elliott attributes that to the fact the municipality has many tools to recover those fines from Nova Scotia drivers, including taking people to court and eventually having the province withhold licence renewal if need be.

However, there’s no similar mechanism for out-of-province tickets.

“We’re talking about potentially 10,000 tickets a year across Canada where we would have to have somebody reaching out on probably a weekly basis to various jurisdictions to get addresses, then put letters together, send them out to someone who is in that province,” Elliott said.

“And then at the end of the day, we have no ability to enforce whether they pay or not.”

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That gap in enforcement was apparently evident to three former employees of a company hired to provide parking enforcement for the municipality. In February, they were charged with breach of trust and uttering a forged document, after allegedly submitting 2,200 bogus parking tickets for fabricated out-of-province and out-of-country licence plates.

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2:26 Tourists leaving unpaid parking tickets behind when they go

Regardless, Halifax doesn’t plan to pursue out-of-province tickets and hopes visitors will simply do the right thing.

“We would like to think that people are honest across the country and if they get a ticket while they’re here for whatever reason, that they would either pay the ticket before they leave the jurisdiction or they have the ability to pay it online,” Elliott said.