Contraventions Act Evaluation, Final Report

1. Introduction

This document constitutes the final report of the evaluation of the Contraventions Act (also referred to as the Act). Parliament adopted the Act in 1992 to establish a ticketing system that could be used to enforce certain federal statutory offences designated as contraventions. This new system was expected to better reflect the distinction between criminal offences and regulatory offences and to alter or abolish the consequences in law of being convicted of a contravention.

1.1. Context for the evaluation

Two factors have principally motivated this evaluation. First, the Department of Justice Canada already completed two evaluations of the Contraventions Act Fund. The Department established this Fund to support provincial governments in the provision of services in both official languages when dealing with federal contraventions. While these two evaluation reports addressed a number of issues related to the performance of this Fund, they did not address the more fundamental question of whether the Act itself was reaching its stated objectives. This evaluation is expected to fill this gap.

Second, the Department conducted this evaluation in a revised policy context related to program evaluation. In April 2009, the federal government adopted its new Evaluation Policy, which has expanded the scope of activities and programs that must now be evaluated.[1] Assessing a significant legislative initiative such as the Contraventions Act directly reflects the new direction the federal government is promoting through this new Evaluation Policy.

1.2. Scope and objectives of the evaluation

This evaluation assesses the implementation of the Contraventions Act throughout Canada. It focuses on the experience of federal and provincial governments, as well as enforcement authorities, in implementing the ticketing system included in the Act. The objectives of this evaluation are:

1.3. Structure of the report

This evaluation report contains six sections, including this introduction. Section 2 describes the Contraventions Act. Section 3 specifically describes the logic of the Act, including its expected impacts. Section 4 describes the methodology used to conduct this evaluation. Section 5 describes the findings from the evaluation, and Section 6 presents the conclusions and lessons learned.

[1] See Treasury Board Secretariat. (2009). Policy on Evaluation, Section 6.1.8.