Your ticket

An Ontario ticket prints an item number from the set fine schedule alongside the provision you are charged under. The amount beside it is a SET FINE — the figure that settles the matter out of court — and it comes from the Office of the Chief Justice consolidation, not from the Highway Traffic Act. Anyone quoting it as what “the law says” is quoting the wrong document.

A Québec constat prints the article of the Code de la sécurité routière and an amount claimed under it. For speeding that amount is the art. 516 formula; for most other offences it is a figure inside a range the article states. The constat also claims frais and a contribution on top, each from its own instrument.

Both documents carry a deadline and a set of choices. Neither is a bill with only one thing you can do about it.

• Ontario: pay the set fine, ask for an early resolution meeting with the prosecutor, or request a trial.
• Québec: plead guilty and pay the claimed total, or plead not guilty and return the constat to the court office named on it.

Paying is handled by the government, and only by the government. In Ontario that is the provincial service and the court office named on the notice itself; in Québec it is the court named on the constat, very often a municipal one. Both provinces run their own online payment services, and the document tells you which office holds your file.

This site cannot take a payment, process one or pass one along, and it will never ask you for a card, a licence number or a ticket number. What it can do is tell you what the amount is made of before you pay it.

One thing worth knowing first: in both provinces, paying is a guilty plea. It closes the matter as a conviction and puts any points that attach onto your record. If you were thinking about contesting, paying is not a step towards that — it is the end of it.

Ontario runs its own ticket lookup and it is the authoritative one — it reads the actual court file. Québec's provincial and municipal courts do the same for the constats they hold. Those services need identifiers this site deliberately does not collect: a notice number, a licence number, a date of birth.

So this page hands off rather than imitating. There is no lookup field anywhere on this site, no account, and nothing you type into a calculator here is stored or sent anywhere. A site offering to “check your ticket” that then asks for a driver's licence number is either the government or something worth a second look.

In Québec, a large share of constats are issued and collected by MUNICIPAL courts — Montréal, Québec, Laval, Longueuil, Saguenay and many more each run their own. That is a structural fact about how the province prosecutes provincial offences, not a quirk of any one city, and it is why a Québec driver's next step depends on the name printed on the constat rather than on one provincial address.

The law does not change city by city. The amende comes from the same Code de la sécurité routière, the frais from the same Tarif, the contribution from the same Code de procédure pénale. What changes is the office holding your file, the payment channel, and where a contestation is filed — which is why this site publishes no page per city and says once, here, that the office is the variable.

A lost constat or offence notice cancels nothing, and the deadline printed on it keeps running whether or not you can read it. The file exists at the court office either way.

The route back is that office, reachable through the province's or the municipality's own service — the same ones described above. This site holds no copy of your notice and has no way to retrieve one; nothing here is connected to any court system.

The surcharge is a closed table of 13 bands keyed on the fine amount ALONE, starting at $10.00 for the smallest fines. Its last band, from $1,001.00, is 25% of the fine rather than a flat figure — so on a large fine the surcharge stops being a rounding item.

The service cost is $5.00, flat on every conviction, and does not scale with the fine. Worked through on 20 km/h over the limit: $75.00 plus $15.00 plus $5.00 is $95.00.

The frais come from the Tarif in 9 bands, all keyed on the amende alone, from $7.00 at the bottom. The second-highest band is 25% of the amende. The top band is worth reading slowly: $2,500.00 plus 1% of the PART of the amende that exceeds $10,000.00 — strictly the part above the threshold, never the whole amount. Applying that percentage to the whole amende overstates the frais, and the error grows with the fine.

The contribution is separate again, under CPP art. 8.1, in 4 bands: $28.00, $52.00 and $75.00 at the flat rungs, then 25% of the amende at the top.

Worked through: $70.00 plus $33.00 plus $28.00 is $131.00.