Recently it was revealed that thousands of Quebecers will no longer be required to present themselves in court to contest a traffic ticket they were issued in the past and haven’t received a court date for. It was revealed that the Director of Criminal and Penal Investigations ordered the cancellation of 8,578 traffic tickets due to an unreasonable delay in the time the courts took to process these cases.

This all began when Ticket911.ca filed 100 Jordan motions which subsequently got almost 8,600 tickets cancelled by the Prosecutor's office.

So, what exactly is a Jordan motion. In 2016 R v Jordan was a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada which rejected the framework traditionally used to determine whether an accused was tried within a reasonable time under section 11(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and replaced it with a presumptive ceiling of 18 months between the charges and the trial in a provincial court without preliminary inquiry, or 30 months in other cases. This effectively limits the amount of time the courts have to process these cases.

Through our hard work and due diligence Ticket911.ca was able to discover a pattern coming out of the St. Jerome’s court house when our client started getting court dates two, three and four years after their ticket were issued.

We then proceeded to go through all of our files to discover close to 100 files with the St. Jerome court house with unreasonable time delays. That is when we decided to act and file the Jordan motions.

Ticket911.ca’s own Bernard Levy filled the motions and once the 100 motions were granted by the Prosecutor's office, they decided to withdraw the outstanding tickets seeing that they would eventually get all the other thousands of them dismissed as well.

Just to put things in perspective the average fine issued for a ticket was $400. Therefore, by cancelling all these traffic tickets the province of Quebec lost out on about 3.5 million dollars in revenue.

The spokesperson for the police Me Jean-Pascal Boucher was quoted as saying “Due to all these tickets being cancelled we can now focus on our current active files which are still open and are close to reaching the 18 months deadline”.

All persons affected by the cancelling of all these open files were sent letters to notify them their file has been closed and will no longer need to deal with these old infractions and their corresponding fines.

This is a great accomplishment for Ticket911.ca. We couldn’t be any prouder of our entire team and all their work.

The information provided in this blog post is strictly meant for educational purposes only. This information should never be confused with getting proper legal advice. There is no substitute for legal consultation with an experienced and professional traffic ticket lawyer who understands the law and how it affects you. If you find yourself in a situation like this, please do not hesitate to call us for more information or to book your consultation with us.