Ottawa Citizen is affraid of the truth - Fuck the OPP

I sent this letter to the Citizen last week fully expecting it NOT to be published. Well surprise, surprise, they didn't.

Anyway here is the story about a little man and a terrible wasteful police force. Truth is I write the same basic letter every year knowing they won't publish it.

Another long weekend and more evidence that the OPP is little more than a parasitic organization designed to find the government yet another way to take money for taxpayers. I love that the OPP try top cover up their cash grab efforts by calling it a “Traffic Blitz designed to improve traffic safety”. As if the goal of this effort was genuinely to try and make roads safer. Revenue generation was the goal of this blitz, case closed.

Their early statistics list four types of offences, however, only two of them have anything to do with actual safety. Worse still is that out of the impressive 1,300 tickets issued province wide, only 62 had to do with those offences. So speeding, the easiest to catch and least “unsafe” of the bunch made up 70% of all fines issued and no doubt the seat belt infractions were all discovered during a speed stop so up that to 90%. So 90% of all traffic stops were speed related. So are our roads any safer?

News flash; speed has nothing to do with safety. Our speed limit was designed to maximize the fuel economy of cars built in the 1960’s and 70’s, not to save lives. That is a simple fact. Crash into a wall at 100 Km’s per hour, if you survive do it again at 130 km and tell me the difference. Don’t even for a minute talk to me about “reaction time” it has so many variables that negate the effects of velocity it is not even worth mentioning. In a perfect world with all things equal, like weather, car condition, visibility, road condition, driving style etc. etc. you could make an argument for “reaction time”, but unfortunately all things are not equal. Example: the guy was drunk, his break lights do not work, it was raining and you did not signal because you were on a cell phone, all of these things factor into an accident, all are safety issues and none of them have anything to do with speeding. Oh yeah, and only 62 people got tickets for them.

Believe me when I say that the government lowered our speed limit to save on gas during the 70’s. Today the 100 KM limit is an excuse to hand out tickets. Every car built today can travel safely at 140Km per hour, every single one, and they still get better gas mileage than a 1976 Malibu.

So an organization that we pay for, as taxpayers, fined 1,200 people for doing what everyone else was doing, setting their cruise control at 125 km per hour. It is even sillier when you think about the province of Ontario, specifically the population core, then think about the service that the OPP provides to that core. Basically nothing, a river rescue here, highway accident there, but that is it. All major cities have their own police force, so we pay these guys a lot of money to give us speeding tickets between the places people actually live.

The worst part of it all is not the $120 fine, it is that the day after they take your money, under bogus circumstances, they tell you that they were providing a service. They call it “safety”. If they really wanted to improve road safety they would close the OPP units in the Ottawa area because people drive like idiots when they see a cruiser on the highway. More importantly, Ottawa cops can and do hand out speeding tickets. At least if they close the OPP units we will only be paying the up keep of one police force, not two.