Provincial Offences Act - Intro to Part II

In order to fight your parking ticket, you must review Part II of the Provincial Offences Act which covers parking infractions. Fortunately it is not very long and some of it has already been covered under why you should ignore your parking ticket.

The key sections you should be aware of are section 17 and section 18.1. These two sections are the most important for your defence. Study them well as they will be referred to a lot.

What you need to know is that if you use the parking ticket left on your windshield to request a trial, section 17 applies. If you ignore the parking ticket, receive a Notice of Impending Conviction in the mail and use that to request a trial, then section 18.1 applies. They are basically identical sections but they are not written the same way.

To make things confusing, section 18.1 doesn't have the same sub-clauses that section 17 does. Rather than writing them a second time, section 18.1.1(2.1) simply refers back to parts of section 17 and says use those bits for section 18.1 as well.

And to make things even more confusing, both sections have separate parts depending whether you can mail your request for trial or whether you have to go in person to the court to get a trial (sections 17.1 and 18.1.1).

These distinctions are important as the Act has different requirements. This means you will use a different trial strategy depending which section applies to you. To figure that out, you have to know what process you used to request a trial.

There are two things you must consider: what document you used to request a trial (the parking ticket or the notice of impending conviction) and how you requested the trial (by mail or in person).

The following chart will help you understand which section applies to you.

Finally, there are two regulations you should be aware of: Parking Infractions, Regulation 949 and Electronic Documents, Regulation 497. The latter applies if your parking ticket was electronic (usually printed on yellow thermal paper) instead of handwritten.