Uninsured Drivers Get Free Ride

Provincial crackdown won't give cops tools to run roadside checks

Brett Popplewell Staff Reporter

A provincial crackdown on uninsured drivers will still leave police unable to check for valid auto insurance — eight years after it was promised.
Jean Chrétien was still Prime Minister, Pierce Brosnan was James Bond and UN weapons inspectors were in Iraq when Ontario's Uninsured Vehicle Project was announced. Seven years overdue, it is scheduled to launch at the end of this year.
But the Star has found the new system still won't allow police to see if your insurance is valid. Instead, the new system will only allow verification of insurance annually when a licence plate is renewed.
Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne says the government can't afford the system police have asked for.
“We don't have a plan for that at this point. It's not that that's not possible, it's just that there's a cost attached to that technology and we just don't have the resources at this point to do that,” Wynne says.
A team of about 15 civil servants has been working on the project since 2004, alongside dozens of officials from the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC). The IBC, which is partly funded by insured drivers in Ontario, will only say they have spent “substantial” funds on the technology project.
Despite their investments, the ministry and the IBC still can't do what Texas and 30 other states have already done — give police on-the-road electronic access to a database of insured drivers.
“This problem has been allowed to go on,” says Brian Patterson, president of the Ontario Safety League. “We're already paying the ministry to fix this problem (in licensing fees and in insurance premiums). They're not working hard enough to address it.”
Without an electronic system to verify a driver's insurance slips, uninsured drivers are able to take to our streets with relative impunity while fraud artists are able to continue selling fake car insurance policies that cannot easily be spotted by police.
Const. Hugh Smith of the Toronto Police Service's traffic division says money shouldn't be an issue when it comes to giving police the tools they need. “I should have access to check immediately that your insurance is valid when you're stopped or when you're involved in a collision,” Smith says.
Const. Dave Woodford of the Ontario Provincial Police's highway safety division says, “We've been asking for a long time for a system where we can check.”
Roughly 2,100 uninsured vehicles are involved in collisions on Ontario roads every year. Some of those collisions are fatal. All are costly.
But it's not the uninsured drivers who pick up the more than $125 million in annual damages caused by those accidents. It's Ontario's 9 million licensed drivers who pay through licensing fees and increased insurance premiums.
Driving without insurance is illegal; a minimum $5,000 fine on conviction is the penalty.
Under Ontario's current system, car owners must provide an insurance policy number to the transportation ministry when renewing their licence plate. But the ministry — in person, online or at a provincial kiosk — currently has no way to verify the insurance.
“If you were to write in that application form that the name of the insurance company is Bozo the Clown Insurance and the policy number is 1234, you would have your licence plate issued because nothing is done with that information,” says Frank Klees, a former transportation minister and the Conservative transport critic.
The ministry's new system will fix that problem, giving the ministry the ability to verify your insurance. But only on the day the sticker is issued.
The police will still be left dealing with those pink insurance slips you carry around in your wallet or glove box that are less official than a Blockbuster video card. They aren't machine readable, can be easily falsified, and are often invalid well before the stated expiration date.
“There's no reason why (the new system) can't be made available to police,” says Klees.
One of the most vocal advocates for police having access to an electronic insurance database is Debbie Virgoe, whose husband died in an accident involving a man driving with falsified insurance slips.
On June 18, 2007, Nauman Nusrat and two other men were street racing on Highway 400. Nusrat, 19, and driving a dark blue Pontiac Grand Am at 180 km/h, cut off the transport truck David Virgoe was driving. Virgoe's truck hit a guard rail, flipped over and landed on its roof in a nearby ditch. The 48-year-old truck driver died instantly.
“The driver that hit my husband was uninsured and the police didn't know that he was uninsured at the scene because he provided forged documents,” says Virgoe's widow.
“If you can't follow the simple rules and we can't check them, why are the rules there? You and I might as well drive without insurance.”
Nusrat pleaded guilty to criminal negligence causing death, driving without insurance and having forged insurance documents. He was sentenced to two years of house arrest — on top of the 11 months he had already spent in jail — along with a lifetime driving prohibition.
In 2008, the Star's sister paper, The Record of Waterloo Region, raised the issue of the delayed provincial insurance project. At the time, Paul Harbottle, director of the Uninsured Vehicle Project, said his team's progress was being slowed by numerous erroneously transcribed vehicle registration numbers which had been incorrectly transcribed into the province's current system. As a result, a number of drivers would have had their validation stickers denied had Harbottle's team launched the new program too soon.
“We have come a long with this,” Harbottle now says. “A lot of people don't realize the time or risk or complexity that it takes to do these kind of things. We want to ensure people aren't wrongfully denied insurance.”
In 2002, the ministry estimated that up to 6 per cent of the more than 7.48 million motor vehicles on Ontario's roads were uninsured.
They won't give an estimate anymore, but they will say this: there are nearly 14 million roadworthy private passenger vehicles (cars, pickup trucks, vans, SUVs, dune buggies and motor homes) registered in the ministry's database. Roughly 6.5 million of them have insurance. The rest do not and it is unclear how many of the cars without insurance are on the road.
An analysis of the most recent provincial collision data available (2002-2006) reveals uninsured drivers were involved in 10,671 accidents in the first five years after the province vowed its crackdown.
Some 108 people were killed in those collisions. A further 3,717 people were injured.
Uninsured motorists cost the province's 9 million drivers roughly $27 million a year in licensing fees and a further $100 million in insurance premiums.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada says the average insured car owner pays $15.48 a year to cover the potential damages caused by uninsured drivers. That rate has increased by 26 per cent from $11.38 in 2002.
But Ontario drivers don't just pay for the uninsured in their premiums. Whenever a driver renews his licence in the province, $15 of the $75 licensing fee goes into the Motor Vehicle Accident Claims (MVAC) Fund, which acts as the “payer of last resort” to people who are injured in car accidents but have no access to insurance.
Thanks to that fund, pedestrians and cyclists hit by an uninsured or unidentified driver are eligible for up to $200,000 and up to $2 million for medical and attendant-care benefits if they suffer catastrophic injuries. But so too are the uninsured drivers, even if they were at fault in the collision. And uninsured drivers don't always have to pay for damages they inflict.
That's what happened in a Toronto accident in June 2005.
Petal Seetal walked out the door of her Driftwood Ave. home en route to her high school to check out her final grades for the school year.
She had already taken a few steps into the intersection of Jane St. and Driftwood Ave. when Oswald Quiroz Jr., a teenaged driver in his father's uninsured Honda Civic, ran a red light and took Seetal's legs out from under her.
Seetal was left clinging to the hood of Quiroz's car as he barrelled out of control through the intersection, smashing into a parked taxicab and throwing the teenaged girl to the ground. Quiroz was subsequently convicted of dangerous driving causing bodily harm.
Seetal, who had no insurance of her own, was left with a fractured pelvis and a head injury that resulted in anxiety, depression, chronic headaches and rehabilitation bills that included an occupational and speech-language therapist.
Though he was at fault in the accident, Quiroz did not have to pay for any of the $200,000 needed for Seetal's rehabilitation. In the end, it was the insurer of the idle taxicab that paid up.
According to data obtained and analyzed by the Star, the MVAC Fund processed 22,808 successful claims for a total of $53,861,542.62 between Jan. 1, 2005, and Dec. 31, 2009.
Of the millions spent, $16,716,226.40 went directly tothe uninsured drivers themselves, covering lost income and rehabilitation and medical expenses.
The rest went tocovering the recovery of pedestrians injured by uninsured motorists or to passengers injured in the uninsured motorists' car.
Eleanor McMahon has been advocating for tougher laws on uninsured drivers since June 6, 2006. That was the day her husband, Greg Stobbart, an off-duty OPP officer riding his bike on a country road in Milton, was struck and killed by Michael Dougan.
Though Dougan had insurance at the time of that accident, he had five previous convictions for driving while suspended and four for driving without insurance.
“The penalties are not applied enough to be a deterrent,” says McMahon.
McMahon has been instrumental in pushing for Greg's Law — named for her late husband — which would impose a seven-day vehicle seizure if someone is caught driving while under suspension.
She says the same penalties should be applied to anyone found to be driving without insurance.
“When you have a loved one whose life is lost at the hands of someone who has had the selfishness and lack of discretion (not) to comply with what's required in a civil society it really causes you to sit down and think, ‘Well what can we do about that?'”

http://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/article/822961--uninsured-drivers-get-free-ride?bn=1

BP shares plunge as U.S. threatens new penalties

Ayesha Rascoe REUTERS NEWS AGENCY

WASHINGTON—British energy giant BP Plc’s stock price plunged to a 14-year low in U.S. trading Wednesday as the Obama administration threatened to impose new penalties on it over the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
BP depositary shares trading in New York fell nearly 16 per cent to close at $29.20, their lowest level since August 1996, on growing worries about the costs the energy giant will have to assume.
U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a Senate hearing he would ask the British oil giant to repay the salaries of any workers laid off because of the six-month moratorium on deepwater exploratory drilling imposed by the U.S. government after the spill.
BP’s total bill so far, including cleanup costs, has reached $1.25 billion and the U.S. government has already said it will have to pay billions more in penalties.
The White House echoed Salazar’s comments.
“The moratorium is as a result of the accident that BP caused. It is an economic loss for those workers, and ... those are claims that BP should pay,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told a briefing.
“We believe it’s an economic damage caused by this, not unlike losing business at your bait and tackle shop.”
Earlier, the company’s stock closed down 4 per cent in London on concerns the company might have to suspend its dividend payment. U.S. politicians have been calling for this, saying the company should put its cash into paying for legal claims and environmental damage in the Gulf.
Meanwhile, BP plans to bring in an oil-burning device and a tanker from the North Sea as it tries to contain the crude spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, a disaster creating headaches for people who make their money off the sea and those processing their claims of financial loss.
The current oil containment system is catching 2.4 million litres daily, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said at a news briefing in Washington. Officials had previously cited that figure as the system’s general capacity, but Allen said officials now believe it can handle 2.86 million litres gallons daily.
Even so, there’s still more oil eluding capture. BP is bringing in a second vessel that will increase capacity, as well as the North Sea shuttle tanker, which will assist in the transport of the oil, and a device that will burn off some of it. The company previously said it plans to switch out the current containment cap with a slightly larger one that will seal better and trap more oil.
The government is also keeping an eye on how BP is reimbursing people for their losses in the Gulf. Allen has written to BP CEO Tony Hayward demanding “more detail and openness” about how the company is handling mounting damage claims, reminding the beleaguered executive that his company “is accountable to the American public for the economic loss caused by the oil spill.”
Allen has noted that “working claims is not something that’s part of BP’s organizational competence.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/821417--bp-shares-plunge-as-u-s-threatens-new-penalties

Liberals admit HST will cost families up to $480 a year

Rebate cheques being mailed this week

Robert Benzie Queen's Park Bureau Chief

HST rebate cheques are being mailed out this week, but Ontarians may want to bank some of the money as the new tax will eventually cost households up to $480 a year.
In fact, 51 per cent of Ontario families will pay more in taxes by 2012, according to the Liberal government’s own study on the impact of the business-friendly 13 per cent harmonized sales tax. The tax takes effect July 1.
Speaking to an Ottawa radio station, Premier Dalton McGuinty emphasized that the transition payments of up to $1,000 per household should offset higher levies on gasoline, electricity, and other goods and services.
“We’ve worked really, really hard to minimize the impact of the HST,” McGuinty told CFRA Radio.
“That’s money we’re passing directly to our families through the federal government to help them cope with the HST,” he added, referring to the three installment cheques totalling up to $1,000 being sent out starting Thursday.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government gave McGuinty’s Liberals $4.3 billion as an incentive to blend the 8 per cent provincial sales tax with the 5 per cent federal GST, hiking tax rates on about one in six services and products.
That money will in turn be distributed to Ontario families with household incomes of less than $160,000 in the form of what Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak derided as “bribe cheques.”
Single Ontarians earning $80,000 or less will receive $300. Three payments – in the form of government cheques or direct deposits into taxpayers’ bank accounts – will come this month, in December, and next June.
But any taxpayer jubilation over the rebates may be tempered by a sobering new 38-page report released Tuesday by the provincial finance ministry, entitled Ontario’s Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth.
Officials found by the third year the HST is in place – 2012 – families with a household income greater than $60,000 will pay more in taxes even though income-tax rates were trimmed as of last Jan. 1.
Revenue Minister John Wilkinson argued the tax system will be “more progressive” because lower-income Ontarians will pay less.
“The people with the most will pay more as a percentage than the people with the least,” Wilkinson said in an interview.
For example, by 2012, a family with a combined annual income of between $20,000 and $30,000 will save $235 a year. Overall, 49 per cent of families will be ahead after the tax is in place and 51 per cent will pay more.
Once the $60,000 income threshold is breached, however, the tax burden escalates steeply:
• Between $60,000 and $70,000, it’s a $45 hit for the 7 per cent of Ontario households in this bracket.
• Between $70,000 and $80,000, it’s $95, affecting 6 per cent of households.
• Between $80,000 and $90,000, it’s $135, also affecting 6 per cent of families.
• Between $90,000 and $100,000, it’s $195, affecting 5 per cent of households.
• Between $100,000 and $125,000, it’s $240, affecting 10 per cent of households.
• Between $125,000 and $150,000, it’s $295, affecting 7 per cent of households.
• Between $150,000 and $300,000, the highest bracket for which figures are available, it’s $480, which affects 10 per cent of earners.
While the government claimed its assumptions are “very conservative,” its calculations are based on businesses passing along to consumers 90 per cent of all savings realized through the streamlined tax by 2012.
(In comparison, the TD Bank, which has refused to say what, if any, service fees it would be cutting as a result of the new measure, estimates 95 per cent of savings would flow through to Ontarians by the third year of the HST.)
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said the report was “ludicrous.”
“No one believes that businesses will pass on their savings to consumers. If the government’s own business—the LCBO—isn’t going to pass on the savings, why should those in the private sector?” said Horwath.
That’s a reference to revelations in the Star last month that the province’s Liquor Control Board of Ontario quietly increased its mark-up by 7.5 per cent in order to claw back any revenue shortfall from the HST.
“The shifting of taxes off the corporate sector onto the backs of individuals and families is the wrong thing to do,” she said.
Hudak, meanwhile, dismissed the HST as “a greedy tax grab.”
While both he and Horwath rail against it, neither has pledged to repeal it if they become premier after the October 2011 election.

http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/hst/article/820554--liberals-admit-hst-will-cost-families-up-to-480-a-year?bn=1

Ottawa set to criminalize bogus immigration consultants

Ghost advisers will face criminal charges, hefty fine and jail time

Nicholas Keung Immigration Reporter

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is set to introduce a new law that will make it a criminal offence for anyone to offer immigration services without being a registered consultant.
The Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, to be unveiled in Parliament Tuesday, will allow law enforcement authorities to lay criminal charges against the so-called “ghost consultants,” who prey on vulnerable to-be migrants but are off the officials’ radar, the Star has learned.
Such individuals could face a $50,000 fine and a two-year jail term upon conviction.
The changes come two years after a Star investigative series that exposed the problem of unscrupulous immigration consultants who have continued to take advantage of the law’s loopholes despite a new regulatory body Ottawa established in 2004 to weed out these operations.
“The new legislation will crack down crooked consultants who are exploiting tens of thousands of people who dream of coming to this country,” one source told the Star. “This has created an entire industry of underground ghost consultants who offer people fraudulent advice and counterfeit documents and never fulfill their promises — this has obviously been a long-standing problem.”
Examples of consultants taking advantage of the system include charging applicants for refugee claims when they’re not real refugees or taking applicants’ money without completing the necessary paperwork.
Currently, RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency officers can only go after those unauthorized individuals whose names appear in immigration or refugee applications as the legal representatives — but ghost consultants never identify themselves in any official document.
Often, immigrant and refugee applicants have to bear the consequences of such frauds and misrepresentation, seeing their cases unnecessarily rejected and their dreams shattered.
The criminalization of unauthorized consultants was one of the key recommendations put forward by the all-party parliamentary citizenship and immigration standing committee, which conducted a nation-wide consultation in 2008 to revamp the consultants’ regulatory system after the Star investigation.
The Star series found that the consultants’ regulator, the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, only has the authority to regulate its 1,500 members but was itself engulfed in and consumed with internal management issues — pushing some frustrated consultants to practise underground. It’s not yet known if the government will seek an overhaul of the regulatory body.
Another source told the Star that the proposed legislation will allow improved information-sharing among enforcement authorities and the regulator “on individuals providing unethical or unprofessional representation or advice.”
These changes will complement the immigration department’s public awareness campaign in the past year to warn immigration and refugee applicants of the use of unauthorized consultants and its improved web-based application tools that make it easier for applicants to file applications on their own.
One of the two sources also said, as part of the overall crackdown strategy, the Canadian government plans to sign bilateral and multinational agreements with other countries to crack down on fraudulent activities of overseas immigration consultants, who are out of Canada’s reach.
Unpaid third parties, such as family members, friends and not-for-profit community groups, who provide immigration services, would not be affected by the new law.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/819805--ottawa-set-to-criminalize-bogus-immigration-consultants

What’s wrong with making love and war?

Daniel Dale

Staff Reporter

Their bodies could have provoked desire, which could have produced sex, and so, before members of Britain’s Women’s Royal Naval Service were permitted to attend social events on Royal Navy ships during World War II, they were forced to don garments known as “blackouts,” “rigid black knickers with stout elastic at waist and knee.”

On land, continues historian Paul Fussell in his book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, male and female dwellings were separated by high steel-mesh fences topped with barbed wire. Written British policy, meanwhile, prohibited not only any “caress” involving a soldier in uniform but also gestures as innocent as holding hands — even if the hands-holders were husband and wife.

No, wait. That is written Canadian policy. In 2010.

The case of Brig.-Gen. Daniel Ménard, sacked as Canada’s top Afghanistan commander May 29 over an “alleged inappropriate personal relationship,” was less about sex than about a superior (allegedly) sleeping with a subordinate. But it nonetheless brought attention to a truth that may surprise many in this proudly permissive nation: officially, at least, our military is prudish.

It is prudish even compared to the bastion of conservatism that is the United States military. Where sexual orientation is concerned, Canada is progressive: we began allowing homosexuals to serve openly in 1992; the U.S., for now at least, continues to enforce the discriminatory policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

We’re ahead of the game, too, where sex as in gender is concerned: Canada permitted women to serve in ground combat units in the late 1980s; the U.S. still bans them. And the Americans, as usual, are far more concerned than us with so-called sexual deviance: the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice still makes adultery and sodomy punishable infractions.

Yet when it comes to plain old sex itself, it is Canada that has the more restrictive policy. American soldiers in Afghanistan are told that sex is “heavily discouraged.” Canadian troops are told that it is prohibited — as is, according to Defence Administrative Order and Directive 5019-1, other “conduct that may be considered unprofessional in a military context,” such as kissing and hand-holding.

In theory, the policy applies only to a soldier “in uniform in public.” Military spokesperson Cdr. Hubert Genest, however, says that, in his view, “in public” covers basically anywhere soldiers happen to be.

“Well,” says Genest, “ ‘in public,’ it means what can be seen by anyone. . . I’d like to remove the possibility of you thinking that, behind closed doors on a military base, because the public can’t see, we are acting differently. No. ‘In public’ means, certainly, outside a base, but inside a base I would argue that the regulations are even tougher. Because we’re seen by our chain of command, our peers, and we have to lead by example. So: it’s everywhere. That’s how I see it.”

A rule, then, that as written forbids sex “in public” also bans sex behind closed doors?

“Behind closed doors?” Genest chortles indignantly at the suggestion. “Those who do that do that at their own risk. I hope it doesn’t happen.”

Genest takes pains to note that the no-sex policy is administrative, designed as a preventative measure, rather than disciplinary; violations are not tried in military courts. But he also defends the policy as essential. The military cares so much about soldiers’ conjugal relations, he says, because it must maintain the effectiveness and mission-readiness of its units.

Asked to explain how an in-between-missions romp by, say, one of the military’s 3,000 married couples would jeopardize effectiveness or mission-readiness, Genest struggles. He then refers his questioner back to the policy, which does not help.

Military historian Jack Granatstein, who does not believe soldiers should be permitted to have sex with other soldiers while in combat theatres, does better. He says even hookups between soldiers of the same rank can “create jealousies and difficulties.

“Anything that impedes the development of good relations in the unit or anything that might impede its combat efficiency, simply must be controlled and regulated.”

There is no evidence, though, that the U.S. military’s fighting fearsomeness has been diminished by its comparative sexual permissiveness. A liberalization of our policy would quite possibly be a non-event, neither positively nor negatively affecting performance, says retired Col. Michel Drapeau — especially because, as Granatstein acknowledges, our soldiers are already finding ways to fulfill their needs. From the half-jokes soldiers at Kandahar Airfield make to journalists about after-hours liaisons in light armoured vehicles to the condoms available on base that are, wink wink, for troops going on leave, there is ample if circumstantial evidence that, like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the no-sex policy is merely forcing soldiers to hide and lie.

Paul Robinson, a University of Ottawa public and international affairs professor who served in intelligence in the British army and later in Canada’s reserves, says “maybe by prohibiting things you might reduce some of it, even if you don’t stop it.” On the other hand, he continues, “Having rules which are clearly unrealistic does tend to bring the rules into disrepute. There’s a danger in having rules which everyone knows are being broken. Because then it simply becomes arbitrary who happens to be caught.”

Drapeau, who served in the Canadian Forces for 34 years and now practises law and teaches at the University of Ottawa, contends the military should go “back to square one” on the policy. At the very least, he says, the wording of the rules should be loosened to acknowledge the differences between the various types of romantic interactions and the differing circumstances in which they take place.

“That policy is black and white; there’s no shade of gray,” Drapeau says. “A kiss on the cheek with your own spouse is prohibited. Okay, maybe when you’re standing in the receiving line and the Queen is coming down the tarmac, it’s not the time to kiss your wife — but maybe it is. Whatever.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/819426--what-s-wrong-with-making-love-and-war

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