Brampton municipal candidates fined $158,000 for election sign clean-up
Published November 17, 2022 at 9:28 am
The City of Brampton is getting ready to lay more than $150,000 in fines against candidates in October’s municipal election for not following election sign rules.
On Sept. 30, candidates were given the all-clear to put up signs in Brampton to promote themselves for the Oct. 23 election. In less than one week, the City said there had been 46 complaints.
That number has ballooned to 278 service requests for illegal signs, and Brampton bylaw say enforcement officers have seized nearly 6,400 signs from candidates.
“I can tell you that this has been the absolute worst year for campaign signs,” the City’s acting Chief Administrative Officer Paul Morrison told council on Wednesday.
Brampton bylaw said each reported sign must be inspected, photographed, and placed in the city’s storage hanger before they are disposed of. Morrison said the hangar was emptied and filled multiple times during the election and staff “couldn’t keep up” with the number of illegal signs.
But the city has a plan to deter candidates from behaving badly in the future by invoicing them $25.00 for every illegally placed sign, amounting to approximately $158,000 in fines for municipal candidates.
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Bylaw did not comment on which candidates are facing fines.
The city used to go through a court process to bill candidates for illegal signs, but Morrison said that method was “an insufficient process” and “resulted in very low fines” between $1,000 and $3,000 across all candidates.
Morrsions said the new fines “will be a sticker shock to some candidates coming back this year.”
“It should be an impact to candidates or an incentive next time not to do this type of behaviour,” he said.
JP Maurice with Brampton Bylaw Services said illegal signs aren’t just an election issue, as the City has seized 33,000 illegal signs so far this year.
“So that includes obviously junk signs and signs that you can see on the streets,” Maurice said.
“They’re still out there, some of them,” he said of municipal election signs.
“We know there’s certain signs we didn’t get photographs, so we’re not going to be invoicing those. We want clear evidence that the signs were illegally placed,” Maurice said.
The issue of election signs was raised by Coun. Rowena Santos, who questioned the impact and effectiveness of the signs.
“This election has proven, yet again, that campaign signs do not increase voter turnout, they don’t necessarily help in terms of getting name recognition out there, but they have caused a lot of pain, stress and a very exuberant cost to candidates,” Santos said.
“We have videos of people – young teenagers, actually – taking signs, ripping them off, vandalising. It was really bad this year.”
Santos referred an earlier report on election signs in Brampton to the next committee of council meeting.
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