SEPTUAGENARIAN PERILOUSLY TESTS PARKING-TICKET LAW

While blue hornet writes up his Lexus, Murray Rubin peels off

Globe & Mail article May 29, 2010 by Jeff Gray

Retired pharmacist and businessman Murray Rubin, 79, doesn’t look like an outlaw, with his mustard shirt and wispy white hair. But looks can be deceiving. He was, after all, the subject of possibly the shortest police chase in Toronto history.

Mr. Rubin agrees to tell his tale to The Globe & Mail at a downtown Tim Hortons, flanked by his lawyer and friend of 60 years, John Weingust, an 80-year-old anti-parking-ticket crusader and black belt in tae kwon do who ran against David Miller for mayor in 2006, winning 332 votes.

Around midday on Easter Sunday last year, Mr. Rubin parked his Lexus on Yonge Street to check if a local pub was showing a tennis match featuring Canadian Aleksandra Wozniak.

When he noticed an officer writing him a ticket, he bolted to his car and pulled out before the ticket was fastened to his windshield, as he lawyer friend has told him is allowed under Ontario law. But the officer put on his siren and lights, and gave chase.

As little as 20 feet down the street, Mr. Rubin says he stopped: “I immediately stopped, I never ran away from the police in my whole life!” When asked by the officer what he thought he was doing, Mr. Rubin says he told the cop that his lawyer had told him that driving away before a ticket is issued was “fine.”

(Mr. Weingust, at this point, interrupts his client: “No, not it’s fine. It’s legal. That’s what I told him.”) This did not appease the officer, who warned Mr. Rubin that he was “going to pay for this,” Mr. Rubin said. “He was not angry. He was livid!”

Mr. Rubin said the officer then pointed to his gun and added, “I am not a parking attendant.”

Mr. Rubin insists that he was not intimidated by the gesture, which he understood was meant to illustrate that the officer was a real cop, not a gunless parking attendant. Mr. Weingust interjects, saying the officer was trying to intimidate his client.

“Aw, come on, Jack, I don’t want to get this guy in any trouble!” Mr. Rubin said. “He’s starting his career….You can tell the chief, I’m not interested in going after this guy.”

But Mr. Rubin allows that the officer had an “inflated idea” of his power. “He’s a new cop, I doubt if the guy’s over 25 years old. And he couldn’t believe this old shit is going to run away from him.”

He was kept waiting, he says, for more than half an hour while the officer wrote up a parking ticket, as well as a ticket for unsafely pulling away—Mr. Rubin says he did pull away safely, since there was no other traffic—and for allegedly not wearing a seatbelt.

The parking ticket was tossed out for being incorrectly filled out. And after hearing testimony from both Mr. Rubin and the officer—who denied all the allegations—a justice of the peace at Old City Hall tossed out the other two tickets as well.

Mr. Weingust has written three letters to the police, including one to Chief Bill Blair, complaining about the officer’s “threats.” But, the lawyers says, he has never received a response. While both them say they no longer want to lodge a formal complaint against the officer, they do want to know why their letters were never answered.

Contacted by The Globe, police spokesman George Christopoulos said the officer’s superiors looked into the matter last year, interviewing him shortly after receiving Mr. Weingust’s letter. The case was dropped, however, after police were unable to reach Mr. Rubin, despite, Mr. Christopoulos said, leaving several phone messages.
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Reached by phone, Mr. Weingust disputed this version of events, denying that he or Mr. Rubin ever heard back from police. “This just doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I just don’t understand this thing at all.”

Regardless of where the truth lies, it was not the first time Mr. Rubin had pulled away from an impending parking ticket. And it likely won’t be the last.

“I hate the parking guys,” he says, leaning across the table at Tim Hortons, gritting his teeth. “It’s a rip-off. The city is using it as a method of taxation, and it bothers me. So whenever I can, I run away. And if I get a ticket, I go down, I ask for a court date, I always show up, and they usually give it to you for 40 per cent, 50 per cent.”

Mr. Rubin is not alone. The city says runaways cost it $4.8 million in lost revenue in 2008. Other provinces allow cities to mail tickets to would-be scofflaws, but doing so here would require changes to legislation at Queen’s Park.

Until then, Mr. Rubin remains unrepentant: “It’s a game! They hide in the doorway while you’re going in, and they run over and give you a ticket. It’s a game. So I’m playing their game. If they get it on my windshield, I’m done. If I can get away, that’s what I do.”

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