Mr. Fantino, how typical of a politician, you never did answer the question that was put forth. The question was, if traffic safety is one of the OPP’s highest priorities, and visibility of marked patrol units has been proven over and over to be the most effective deterrent, then why even have the unmarked units doing traffic patrol?

Unless their sole purpose is to generate revenue for the province and county’s they patrol?

Using marked units is found to be pro-active while using a ghost unit to nail speeders is being reactive. To any logical person walking the face of this earth, it makes more sense to be pro-active, why sit back and wait for people to break the law, when you can be proactive HST said and prevent or at least encourage them from doing it in the first place?

Here’s another little bit of logic for you to think about, did you ever consider the fact that maybe the 29% decrease may have something to do with the OPP switching back to the highly visible black and white paint scheme beginning back in 2007?

Also there is 7.9 million passenger vehicles registered in Ontario, now using your own figures, there were 321 people killed on Ontario roadways, one third, which is 107 people or .00135% being contributed to drunk driving, the remaining 214 or .00406% to other collisions.

So these facts would prove that either (A) your bean counters are way off, or (B) You and MADD are just using scare tactics against the citizens of Ontario to get more funding. My guess is (B)

And by the way, being and Safety & Compliance Director for a large fleet, and well over 1.9 million ticket and accident free miles under my own belt, am all for highway safety.

As for the mentioning of HTA Sec. 172 I find it completely unbelievable that your officer, Detective Constable Heidi Fischer, who was charged under the act, doing 165 km/h on the 403 near Brantford hasn’t been dismissed from the service seeing as it wasn’t the first time she was involved in a very high speed incident. Back on October 22, 2005 she was traveling at 168 km/h over a hillcrest and nearly killed an innocent elderly woman making left hand turn. Please tell us that she is at least banned from operating any police vehicles, she would actually scare me more than a drunk driver or big rig doing more than 105 km/h!

W.Graham Orangeville