Photo radar devices may be back up and running at full speed by the summer, once the province pushes through proposed changes to the Highway Safety Code.
Transport Minister Andre Fortin submitted a draft regulation yesterday that aims to plug the legal holes surrounding the use of photo radar to catch speeders.
In November 2016, a judge ruled that photo radar evidence is inadmissible and illegal, because it amounts to hearsay, if there's no officer with a radar gun doing the checking.
There are still photo radar machines in operation, and theoretically, you could still get a ticket, but the number of tickets issued in 2017 for speeding offences captured on photo radar dropped dramatically from 2016.
The proposed regulation would ease the legal formalities regarding the validation and verification of the photo radar machines.
Fortin's office hopes to have it passed by the end of the spring parliamentary session, but lawyer Jamie Benezri with Legal Logik, who tried to start a class action suit over photo radars, suggests the changes won't be enough to overcome the hearsay problem.
"It clearly does not pass the procedural smell test, which is, hey, does it look like hearsay? Does it sound like hearsay? Does it feel like hearsay? Guess what, it is hearsay," Benizri says. "So I don't think it passes that test, because there's no physical person to confirm that it actually happened."
He says one fix the government could try is adding people off-site to monitor radars, and confirm that an infraction actually did occur.