The Comedian The Clown and The Fool

By Ray Rivers

September 25^th, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

OPINION

We laugh with a comedian and laugh at a clown but there is nothing funny about a fool.

Ontario’s premier Ford has flip-flopped on speed cameras.  Perhaps one of his family or friends got a ticket?  In all fairness there have been rumours of abuse – people claiming they were billed $100 for going 3 kms over the limit.  But rather than fix that abuse, he’s decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater and just ban municipal speed cameras all together.

Speed Cameras: They are resource efficient, indisputably accurate, corruption-proof, and non-invasive, –

People who know speed will tell you that cameras work.  They are resource efficient, indisputably accurate, corruption-proof, and non-invasive, –  only the license plate appears on the ticket.  Your ticket doesn’t affect your driving record, only your pocket book.

To defend the ban Ford is claiming speed cameras don’t work – in the face of ample evidence that they do, slowing traffic by almost 50% in one study.  His solution is to pepper our city streets with even more of those dreaded speed bumps.  You know the ones that can blow out your shocks, scrape your car’s undercarriage and exhaust system and so on.  So you’ll pay for speeding one way or another it seems – a speeding ticket or a car repair.

And what about life saving fire-engines and ambulances which will now have to slow down as they bounce over miles of these new Ford bumps.  Of course Hamilton with the worst roads in Ontario is well ahead of Mr. Ford’s new policy because pot holes the size of giant Halloween pumpkins work just as well.   Speed bumps may be called traffic calming. They are anything but calming – I  bounce over these obstructions in getting to where I want to be.

And since speed bumps slow traffic on city streets, don’t be surprised if the genius running this province decides to place them on highways as well.  After all, that is where most fatalities actually happen.  Ironically, Mr. Ford normally seems to want us to drive faster.  He’s been taking out bike lanes, building new highways, increasing speed limits – so one has to wonder what is driving Ford.

How pouring prime Canadian whiskey on the ground protects Ontario is hard to understand.

Colbert and Kimmel are comedians and Doug Ford’s brother Rob was an unfortunate clown.  But Doug Ford, still the most popular Ontario political leader, is just a fool when it comes to speed cameras.  So what does that make the rest of us?

Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington.  He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject.   Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa.  Tweet @rayzrivers

Background links:

Ford Popular    Speed Cameras     Camera’s Work     45% Reduction     How They Work    Speed Bump Damage