Nine months ago, every automated speed camera in Ontario went dark. Premier Doug Ford had campaigned hard for it, calling the devices a "cash grab."(Incidentally, perhaps, Ford’s cabinet ministers had racked up thousands of dollars in speed camera fines). Nine months on, the traffic data from the cities that lost them tells a consistent story: drivers are going faster, more often, and by wider margins than before.
For the insurance industry, that raises a question with nothing to do with politics and everything to do with claims cost. Speed is one of the strongest predictors of crash severity. So what happens to claims, and eventually to premiums, once a proven deterrent to speeding disappears from the road?
Ford's government passed legislation last October forcing municipalities to remove their automated speed enforcement (ASE) cameras. Within weeks, camera housings across the province were empty.
The numbers since then are stark. In Guelph, the share of drivers caught going 11-15 km/h over the limit more than tripled at former camera sites, from 3.9% to 12%, while the share going more than 15 km/h over jumped from 2.2% to 7.2%. In Ottawa, 14% of vehicles were speeding on Katimavik Road last autumn while the camera there was active; by this past May, with the camera gone, that figure had climbed to 80%. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow called her own city's numbers "horrifying": vehicles travelling at least 11 km/h over the limit more than quadrupled. She also pointed to at least two fatal crashes near locations where cameras had recently been removed.
None of this contradicts the research. Countermeasures That Work, the road-safety guide published by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, rates speed camera enforcement at its maximum five stars for effectiveness. Closer to home, a study by Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children and Toronto Metropolitan University found the cameras had cut speeding near schools by 45%. Ford's government has not disputed that speed cameras work. Its argument has been that the enforcement model is unfair to drivers, not that speed is harmless.
Why this is an insurance story, not just a road-safety one
Speed camera tickets never touched a driver's insurance record in Ontario. Because they're issued to the vehicle's licence plate rather than to a driver, they carry no demerit points and don't appear on an abstract, a point raised when Ontario's speed camera ban first sparked road safety and insurance concerns. Scrapping the cameras doesn't directly touch any individual driver's rating.
What it touches is collective exposure. Fewer cameras means less deterrence. Less deterrence means more speeding. More speeding means more collisions across the entire book of business, and speed doesn't just raise the odds of a crash, it raises the force involved when one happens. That tends to push claims toward higher severity: more total losses, more serious injury claims, more litigation. None of it shows up on any one policyholder's file. It shows up in the loss data insurers use to set rates for everyone.
The timing is difficult for Ontario drivers, who are already navigating one of the more turbulent stretches in the province's auto insurance history. The Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario's (FSRA) accident benefits reform took effect on July 1, 2026, unbundling income replacement, caregiver and several other statutory benefits into optional add-ons. Regulators have pitched the change as a way to trim premiums by roughly 5%. Claims professionals have been more cautious. Michael McNeill of Crawford Canada, quoted in coverage of how Ontario's auto insurance overhaul could lower premiums and fuel an underinsurance crisis, said he would "lean more on the pessimistic side" of that estimate, warning of a possible underinsurance crisis as drivers opt down on coverage to chase modest savings.
Base rates are climbing regardless of the reform. Estimates of exactly how fast vary by source: one 2026 rate guide put the provincial average increase at 4.45%, while a separate analysis from Aldorman Insurance put year-over-year growth in early 2026 at roughly 11.8%. Every estimate points the same direction, driven mainly by vehicle theft, rising repair costs and broader inflation on parts and labour. (These percentage figures should be treated as approximate; readers should check the latest FSRA-approved rate filings for exact numbers, since estimates differ by source and change quickly.) The Insurance Bureau of Canada has named implementation of the Ontario and Alberta auto reforms, alongside catastrophe risk and regulatory compliance costs, as one of its top three priorities for the year, a sign that pricing pressure in this market was already significant before speeding data entered the conversation.
Add a sustained rise in speeding-related severity on top of an already-strained system, and insurers have one more variable to price for, even though no single claim can be traced back to a missing camera.
Ford has stood firm against sustained pushback. Twenty-two municipal leaders, including the mayors of Burlington and Brampton, wrote jointly to the province urging at least a carve-out for school zones. The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario both publicly backed the cameras before the ban passed. Ford's response has been to redirect provincial funding toward physical traffic-calming measures, including speed bumps, roundabouts, raised crosswalks and larger warning signs, rather than automated enforcement.
Whether that substitution works is an open question. Guelph's road safety supervisor has said the city has a backlog of roughly 300 requests for traffic-calming infrastructure but capacity to act on only about five a year. Physical measures are also often impractical on the wide arterial roads where the most severe speeding tends to occur, which are precisely the roads where camera enforcement had been most heavily used.
Global News reported that vehicles registered to Ford's own cabinet ministers were caught by speed cameras 23 times over three years, racking up more than $3,300 in fines. The government said the fines were repaid personally by whoever was driving at the time.
An individual driver's premium won't move because a camera near their commute was removed. What moves is the market-wide loss experience that eventually feeds into rate filings, and that takes time, and several renewal cycles, to surface in the numbers insurers file with FSRA.
That gives brokers a window to get ahead of client questions now. Drivers who pick up an actual moving violation from a police officer, rather than a camera, still face the usual consequences. According to reporting from The Globe and Mail on Canadian auto insurance pricing, a first minor conviction typically adds around 10% to a premium, with a second pushing rates up a further 10-15%, and either can affect pricing for up to three years. It's worth reminding clients that camera tickets don't touch their abstract, but the stepped-up police enforcement that several municipalities have signalled as their fallback very much does.
The bigger question is whether Ontario's experience becomes a template other provinces avoid, or a warning other premiers ignore. Political voices in Alberta and Manitoba have both invoked Ford's rhetoric when arguing against their own automated enforcement programs. If claims data over the next year or two tracks the injury and fatality trends that Guelph, Ottawa and Toronto's speeding figures suggest it might, Ontario could end up as the cautionary case study for the rest of the country's insurers, whether Queen's Park intended it that way or not.
