Written By Sean Hunt
In May 2024, the Morrisburg Leader ran an editorial that stuck with me: Ontario legalized stop-arm cameras on school buses back in 2020, and two years after that piece ran, most of the province still doesn’t have them, buried under a pile of overlapping jurisdictions—upper-tier municipalities, school boards, transportation consortia—that all have to agree before a single camera goes up. Reading it, I found myself asking the obvious follow-up: where does that leave us, here in Middlesex?
The honest answer is: not where we should be. But it’s also a more specific answer than “nothing’s happened,” and as a former school board trustee who spent four years on capital and financial oversight committees, I think the specifics matter.
Ontario’s enabling regulation, O. Reg. 424/20, has been law since 2020. When the province first announced the pilot in 2019, it named six municipalities—Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Sudbury, Brantford, North Bay, and Peel Region. The announcement itself was made right here, in London, by then-Transportation Minister Jeff Yurek, the MPP for Elgin-Middlesex-London. Six years later, the riding where this policy was launched still doesn’t have a working program.
Part of what’s holding us up is structural, and it’s our own local version of the problem the Morrisburg Leader wrote about. School bus service across Middlesex County and the City of London runs through one consortium, Southwestern Ontario Student Transportation Services, coordinating for the Thames Valley District School Board and the London District Catholic School Board (the French-language boards have their own separate arrangement). That’s actually simpler than the four-board tangle described in the original editorial. But our complication is geography, not institutions: those buses cross constantly between the County—an upper-tier government with eight lower-tier municipalities under it—and London, a single-tier city entirely outside the County’s authority. A stop-arm bylaw passed by Middlesex County stops at the London city limit. One passed by London stops at the County line. The buses don’t recognize either boundary. Our enforcement would have to.
There are signs the appetite for school-zone safety is there. In 2025, County Council approved a Community Safety Zone Policy, and this past winter moved to designate new zones with increased fines on County Road 49 near Northdale Central Public School and St. David Catholic School, and on County Road 6 near Kerwood Ball Park. That’s real, concrete action—just not the action the 2020 legislation was actually written for. The County’s own school bus safety page mentions that violators “caught by camera technology” can be fined—language lifted straight from the province’s rules, not evidence we are actually running a camera program. As far as I can find in the public record, we are not.
The politics have shifted since 2024 too, and not obviously in stop-arm cameras’ favour. In November 2025, the province banned automated speed-enforcement cameras outright, calling them a “cash grab,” and made municipalities pull them down. It would be easy to read that as the end of any provincial appetite for camera enforcement of any kind. But stop-arm cameras sit under separate legislation and a different premise entirely—they don’t ticket speed, they document a driver blowing past a stopped bus with kids getting on or off. That distinction seems to be holding up. As recently as this July, Caledon in Peel Region approved a framework to pursue its own program, directing staff to work with school boards, bus operators and vendors and report back to council. If Caledon can move on this in today’s political climate, the problem in Middlesex isn’t Queen’s Park. It’s that nobody at our own council table has put the item on the agenda.
The original editorial closed by asking how long we’d wait before a preventable tragedy forced the issue. That question hasn’t gone stale here. Our County Council has shown, with the new safety zones, that it can act on student road safety when it decides to. Stop-arm cameras are a heavier lift—they mean sitting down with London, with our school boards, and with our transportation consortium to sort out who owns a program that has to work across a boundary the buses ignore every school morning. But “heavier lift” isn’t “impossible,” and Caledon just proved it.
What’s missing in Middlesex isn’t provincial legislation. It’s someone at the council table willing to put the item on the agenda and see the cross-boundary conversation through—which is exactly the kind of file we must now call on our mayor and deputy mayor recently acclaimed and to be appointed to step up and bring forward at county council. If safety of our children, bus drivers and motorists matters to you, I encourage you to contact your newly elected and long-time members of your council, particularly Mayor Brennan [brennan.dairy@gmail.com], and deputy mayor acclaimed Sue Cates [ suecates@yahoo.ca ] to express your concerns about getting this done at the county ASAP.
Keeping children safe on our roads requires more than policy debates; it demands cross-boundary collaboration and the political will to act. I encourage readers to keep this conversation going in our communities.
About the Author: Sean Hunt is a former Thames
Valley District School Board trustee for Middlesex County (2018–2022) with a professional background in fleet safety technology, vehicle telemetry, and digital infrastructure through work with Ztr.com, Trackunit.com, and Carfax.ca. He is also the founder of Ecoworks Web Architecture, advising small-to-medium businesses and institutions on automation and technology. He can be reached at 519-488-1414 or sean@ecoworks.ca.
