All of Toronto's speed cameras are gone. How did we get to this point?

Toronto's speed cameras may be gone, but this time there are no mysterious vandals wielding power tools, no blurry suspect photos and no police investigation.

As of the end of November, the cameras were taken down by the vendor who put them up for the city.

The removals end Premier Doug Ford’s crusade against the cameras, which he termed a "cash grab."

Here’s how, in less than a year, the city went from doubling its number of speed cameras, to taking them all down at the premier’s behest.

On an early fall evening in 2021, Valdemar Avila, 71, and Fatima Avila, 69, were sitting in rush-hour traffic on Parkside Drive, the busy road next to High Park. The road had a speed limit of 50 km/h, but 38-year-old Artur Kotula was doing more than double that in his BMW. 

The Burlington man drove his car into the back of the couple’s small Toyota, crumpling it like spare paper. Valdemar died there. His wife, the woman he moved to Canada with in the 1970s, died at the hospital. 

After the crash, the city lowered the speed limit to 40 km/h and installed a speed camera to ticket drivers. From April 2022 to March 2023, it issued 24,556 of them. 

Kotula was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for the crash, which Superior Court Justice Suhail Akhtar called "a crime of stupidity."

But some wanted to keep driving as fast as they liked and the Parkside camera became a focus of frustration. In late December 2024, the camera was cut down, dragged through the mud and left, semi-submerged, in the High Park duck pond. 

Throughout 2025, that vandalism spread from Parkside Drive throughout the city. On an early September night, 16 speed cameras were cut down in nearly every area of the city. The day after, those against the cameras gained a very powerful ally: Ford. 

“Hopefully the cities will get rid of them,” Ford said on Sept. 9. “Or I’m going to help them get rid of them very shortly.”

Mayor Olivia Chow resisted the ban immediately, for months answering media questions about the latest developments with something that included "speed kills."

But less than three months after Ford's ultimatum, the city's speed cameras were gone.

A few months after the Parkside camera was first cut down, the city announced it was doubling its cameras from 75 to 150.