More careless driving charges dropped in Ontario as courts grapple with pandemic backlogs

After Meredith Wilkinson lost her right leg six years ago — a garbage truck hit her and dragged her under its front tire — she had to go through driver retraining to get her licence back.

But the driver who turned into her in a Toronto bike lane wasn't required to do any training at all.

"I had to undergo [retraining] and that made sense to me, there was something that had changed physically to me and there's checks and balances," she said. 

"But it's just shocking that the driver who did that to me, they would not have to do that sort of driver retraining as of right now."

Wilkinson, a transportation engineer in Toronto, wants that to change. She wants to see a provincial NDP bill that would amend the Highway Traffic Act (HTA), become law. 

If enacted, the Moving Ontarians Safely Act would subject any driver convicted of an HTA offence who seriously injures or kills a pedestrian, cyclist or others outside of a motor vehicle to a probation order which would suspend their license. 

The probation order would require the convicted driver to take a driving instruction course and perform driving safety-related community service before getting their licence back. The bill has passed first reading the Ontario Legislature.

"If a driver did that to someone, you'd want them to become a better driver, right? And how do we make them a better driver? It might not be putting them in jail or charging them a lot of money," said Wilkinson. 

"Maybe more of these charges will stick because it's more reformative."

In Wilkinson's case, she says the driver was charged with careless driving at the scene, but paperwork wasn't filed correctly so the charge couldn't proceed in court. The amendments wouldn't affect someone in her exact situation. 

But thousands of other careless driving charges in Ontario have recently been dropped and, in some cases, pleaded down. The amendments would affect at least some of those cases.

CBC Toronto reviewed Ontario Court of Justice statistics which show the number of careless driving charges laid both across the province and in Toronto specifically have gone down in recent years and that the percentage of those charges withdrawn before trial has skyrocketed. 

Such charges laid in Ontario have dropped by 27 per cent, or by almost 10,000 between 2015 and 2022.

In that same period, the number of those charges withdrawn before trial across the province increased by 374 per cent, with 5,139 more charges withdrawn before trial in 2022 compared to 2015.