Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/05/montreal-cop-invents-new-law-o.html
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You will respect my authoritah!
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I am neither Canadian nor a lawyer, so this is a genuine question:
Since when does signing the ticket mean anything? As in, anything at all?
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It’s an acknowledgement but not an admission of guilt, I think.
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Oh Cananda!
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I dunno. I think the cop is on to something. When you consider the point of car pool lanes her misinterpretation makes perfect sense.
I mean if we’re going to allow children to qualify as members of a car pool what’s to stop people from driving to work with a box turtle?
Although I understand a lot of people are married to box turtles these days so maybe that’s not a good example.
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So, Poe’s law alert and all, but children are human beings, not pets, objects or accessories.
I disagree with your “point of car pool lanes” thinking. The point of car pool lanes is to encourage people to get more than one person in their car rather than driving solo. That car had more than one person in it. If they had taken public transit instead of the car they would have taken two seats on public transit.
Also, whatever the cop was thinking, citing a specific, non-existent rule is totally inappropriate.
Yeah, what’s with making up a law to avoid embarrassment? Why not just shoot the person who talked back to you?
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A tragic miscarriage of justice, for sure. Why are we not marching in the streets? This woman will have to spend half a day in traffic court getting this thrown out! Let us shake our fists in righteous anger at this blatant fascism!
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It’s “Respectez mon autorité”
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This is an issue. A week or two ago there was a letter in the Montreal Gazette questioning why a taxi with one passenger can use such lanes. Almost thirty years go I wrote my provincial representative on the matter, got no answer.
A taxi isn’t reducing traffic unless there are two passengers, the driver us just there to drive. A parent with one kid along, it’s not reducing traffic, so why get the speedier lane?
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Oui, mais tu n’as pas ecrit l’accent impliqué par “authoritah.” peut-etre un tutoyage… “respecte mon autorité”. Hm.
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They should rewrite those laws to be much, much more complicated! There, solved. You’re welcome.
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Weird, I recognise the parking lot the photo is taken in, it’s the Mackay School on Décarie in NDG, which almost certainly means this mom has a special needs child. Maybe the idiot cop (who should be fined himself for this) didn’t think a disabled child counted.
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Got a big hefty parking ticket in Montreal once. The street I parked on was well marked what areas were free parking and what areas were for residents only. I parked just beyond the residents only zone and in a free area, but they issued me a ticket anyways. Something like 150 Looney Canukz or whatever their currency is. Well, naturally I didn’t pay it. I drove back to New England, didn’t think anything of it.
THEY TRACKED ME DOWN. They somehow tapped into the US system, got my name and mailing address and sent me an increased fine with late penalty about two months later.
Naturally, I ignored that one, too. I was about to sell the car anyways.
Addendum: the next time I visited Canada, I thought, hrm, I wonder if the border agent is going to mention my old unpaid parking ticket when they look me up on their computer? Nope. Not a mention.
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In the united states it’s acknowledging you’ll pay the fine or go to court to fight it. If you won’t agree to that you go to jail and be processed + bail assessed etc. This procedure is meant to avoid all that for small issues.
If you won’t sign then they have to arrest you.
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I see the argument for taxis, it is a vehicle that has the goal of transporting a single human being from one place to another. But as I did above, I object to this idea that children aren’t people. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if it was an adult child driving their elderly parent to a hospital appointment.
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I don’t think he’s saying that it’s about children not being people, but that if the point of the carpool lane is to encourage a decrease in the total number of cars on the road, then in circumstances where the people in one car couldn’t instead be in multiple cars, they shouldn’t be in the carpool lane.
So, in the case of a parent driving a child, there’s no way that you could have the parent in one car and the child in another; that journey could only ever be in a single car, so it’s not decreasing traffic, therefore it shouldn’t be in the carpool lane.
…is the logic I think is being used here.
Then you open the question of how it works if the other adults in a carpool don’t have driving licenses, of course.
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I wonder what this reply was.
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That happened to me in Toronto couple years back. Almost exact same scenario - resident permit zones, etc… I took a picture of the signs and where my car was parked and contested the ticket (all done online - very efficient). They sent me a letter back apologizing (naturally - they’re Canadian after all) and nullifying the ticket. No way an outcome like that would have happened in the US.
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