Last month, Precedent Magazine published an opinion piece that I wrote regarding the need for technology improvement in the Ontario justice system. The piece identified two high-profile Ontario government IT project failures: the Integrated Justice Project and eHealth, which together wasted about a billion and a half dollars of taxpayer money.
On June 13, 2010, a Toronto Star article revealed yet another failed information technology infrastructure project. According to the Star, since 2004 a team of about 15 Ontario civil servants has been working on a project alongside dozens of officials from the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) to provide police with on-the-road electronic access to a database of insured drivers. Under Ontario’s current system, car owners must provide an insurance policy number to the transportation ministry when renewing their licence plate. But the ministry currently has no way to verify the insurance. Without an electronic system to verify a driver’s insurance coverage, uninsured drivers can continue driving with little risk of discovery.
While the government claims that its new system will enable Ministry staff to verify insurance coverage at the time of renewal, the most important feature – a mechanism to allow police to verify coverage at the time of contact with a driver – will not be available.
The IBC (funded in part by insured drivers in Ontario) refuses to disclose how much has been spent on the failed initiative, saying only that they have spent “substantial” funds on the technology project. This lack of disclosure is also cause for serious concern.
According to Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne, the provincial government has essentially thrown in the towel on the project, claiming that the government simply can’t afford a working system. “We don’t have a plan for that at this point. It’s not that that’s not possible, it’s just that there’s a cost attached to that technology and we just don’t have the resources at this point to do that,” Wynne says.
But Wynne’s statements don’t make sense. In fact, based on the costs that uninsured drivers impose each year on the Ontario insurance system, the government’s claims that a working system is unaffordable are laughable. Simply put, the people of Ontario cannot afford for the government NOT to fix the problem.
Sadly, the government’s failure forces insured drivers to subsidize the uninsured and enables the government to continue to look the other way with respect to the problem. The Star reports that uninsured motorists cost the province’s 9 million drivers roughly $27 million a year in licensing fees and a further $100 million in insurance premiums. Costs of developing a “real time” verification system available to police vary between jurisdictions, but Texas was able to implement its TexasSure system for only $7 million.
No less than thirty U.S. states have been able to implement real time insurance verification systems – many of which are built on self-financing business models and novel partnerships with private sector suppliers – while Ontario is apparently comfortable with simply throwing up its hands in futility.
That the province is unable to deliver the technology services Ontarians deserve – and require – is in itself cause for serious concern. But even more disturbing is the fact that the government no longer even seems embarrassed by this.
~Gregory Azeff
Saw the story about the lawsuit in the Globe. Best of luck to you. The technology situation in this province is truly pathetic, but what do you expect? It is ‘managed’ (I use the term VERY loosely!) by the most incompetent and apathetic bureaucrats on the planet, who neither understand technology nor have the skills to use it properly. As for the politicians the only thing that they care about is getting re-elected. Actually fixing something that is so obviously broken? Not so much.