A study shows, that in less than 5 years, 30,551 tickets were handed out to homeless people in Montreal, Canada, for municipal bylaw and Société de transport de Montréal violations. The tickets were handed out to 4,370 people —3,852 men and 518 women. The majority were handed out for public drunkenness or intoxication, travelling without paying for a ticket, and sleeping on a bench, seat or floor of a metro car.
The Gazette reports that one 51-year-old homeless man is supposed to pay more than $88,000 for the 374 infractions for which he has been fined between January 2006 and December 2010. Of them, 132 are for sleeping or lying in a metro car.
The money spent on this pointless venture would be better spent on social programs to solve the problems that cause the infractions in the first place, said a representative of the homeless to the newspaper. The authors of the report agree that handing out tickets does not help anything.
“Issuing one ticket after another and spending the time and energy and re- sources to deal with these unpaid tickets is no good,” Marie-Eve Sylvestre, one of the authors, told The Gazette. “The situation of the homeless is just worsening and they keep increasing the number of tickets year after year.”
Montreal Mayor Gerald Trembley agrees that ticketing people who can- not pay is not an answer. He also said that there cannot be two sets of rules for the metro, one for the homeless and one for others.
