A comedy of infractions

>> Squeegee kids and panhandlers regularly accumulate thousands of dollars in fines. Who on earth expects they will actually pay up?

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

>>> See also » Tales Of Woe And Owe: Street dwellers' accounts of their sad, ticketed lives

"'What's the matter, you got an attitude?' a blonde with iridescent green streaks and a nose ring sneered the other day. Well yes, as a matter of fact, we do. We're bourgeois and proud of it. No more listening indulgently, as we did last year, while an able-bodied squeegee explained his choice of a summer job: 'It's fun. You're not sitting in an office with a tie on doing telemarketing.' We're mad as hell about panhandlers working the sidewalks, people peeing in bank-machine lobbies and most of all kids stealing squeegees from gasoline stations so they can swipe imaginary grime off our pristine windshields. And what's more, we aren't the only ones who aren't going to take it anymore."

--Editorial, the Globe and Mail, June 19, 1998.

Angry white boomers have spoken. The squeegee punk, symbol for all that's wrong with employment and education vistas for the young in the '90s, has become the new social irritant extraordinaire. Leering, sneering, homeless wannabes (as the Globe and Mail editorial went on to call them), harbingers of Third World street corner conditions (as Montreal city mediator Robert Côté described them), or even incipient rapists who spray old ladies with their work tools (as one recent Winnipeg-based Canadian Press story implied), these ragged, self-employed and maddeningly un-passive youth are garnering objections everywhere.

In Montreal and other Canadian cities, the discontent has translated into a rain of fines on squeegee punks. The Mirror asked 16 Montreal squeegeeers, panhandlers and public urinators to tell us how much they owed now or had owed in fines for their various offences.

The 16 (many of whom would not give their real names) claimed to owe collectively over $60,000. Most of that money has not been paid; some fines have been paid with either cash, community service or time in jail. Individually, people claimed they owed anywhere from $135 to $28,000 (!).

Most weren't sure exactly how much they owed. Some of them seemed to regard their outstanding fines as amounts too vast to even have a real meaning, like the rest of us view the public debt or Bill Gates's fortune. Some of the panhandlers were in old clothes and could barely speak, and one man had a mass of needle marks on his forearm. Almost all said they had no intention whatsoever of paying their fines. One said she tore up the tickets as soon as she got them.

The amounts add up quickly because tickets for second infractions and third infractions cost roughly triple and quadruple the initial $135 fine, says Yves Manseau of Citizens Against Police Brutality (COBP). Administrative fees are added for late payment and court costs, much like any parking ticket. "There's nothing extraordinary about people owing $5,000 or $6,000 in fines," says Manseau who, incidentally, was the man who three years ago uncovered the fact that the Quebec Corrections Department had shackled a pregnant woman to her hospital bed while she was serving a sentence for unpaid parking tickets.

There is something strange about having panhandlers and squeegee punks owing staggering amounts of cash they have no hope of paying off. What happens to people who don't pay their fines? We faxed a list of questions on the matter to Jacques Provost, collection agent at Montreal's municipal court.

"Each case is treated individually," was the terse faxed reply. And as for the prickly question of what happens to people who don't pay their fines, all that was said was, "See attached table," referring to an unusually impenetrable departmental organigram on the second page.

Manseau was more definite. Montreal is one of the few cities in Canada where people still go to prison for unpaid fines, he said. "You can't put people in prison for debt anymore, except in this case. It criminalizes young people. A squeegee will go to Bordeaux and come in contact with real criminals."

According to Statistics Canada, 55 per cent of sentenced admissions in Quebec prisons in 1996­97 included sentences for fine defaults, up from 48 per cent in 1995­96. In Alberta, the next-highest-ranking province, 35 per cent of sentenced admissions included fine defaults, while in Ontario, only eight per cent of sentenced admissions included fine defaults.

Linda Veillette of Quebec Correctional Services conceded that the Quebec figures are "enormous," and said other provinces in Canada have more up-to-date ways of dealing with fine defaulters, due in part to more generous budgeting. She says the Public Security Ministry is now looking at ways of easing punishment for fine defaulters, including seizure of goods and bank account funds, and refusal to renew their driver's licenses.

She noted that defaulters with no cars, no goods to seize, nor bank accounts to raid--the kind of people who get ticketed for squeegeeing and panhandling--are a small percentage of the people receiving fines. Veillette says the normal fining and procedures clearly don't work in these cases: "There's another sort of question that has to be asked here, namely, is this a social problem rather than a judicial one?"

André Chauvette, who works at the Bunker, a refuge for teenage street kids, says that two years ago police were ticketing kids to the tune of $135 for actions like spitting, walking on the grass, taking up more than one space on a park bench or crossing at a red light. More than half of the tickets Chauvette saw had been improperly filled out by the police.

Chauvette says many kids never thought to contest these tickets because they felt the system would be rigged against them from the start. The two or three who actually brought their case to the police ethics commission said they were laughed at by the employees there and told they'd have to wait two years before their cases were heard.

But Chauvette has noticed an improvement in police­punk relations this summer. They're still ticketing squeegeeers and panhandlers--so far this year they've issued more than 250 tickets for squeegeeing alone, according to the city--but have laid off the spitters and park-bench slouchers. The police this year are easier to reach, more willing to listen and generally more respectful, he says.

Pierre Verge of MUC police media relations concurs: "We've taken an informative approach rather than a repressive one."

Certainly it would seem to make sense to lay off ticketing people who simply cannot afford to pay: the cost of keeping a person in prison in Quebec now is $100.33 a day.