Up until now, unscrupulous drivers visiting the Big Smoke could use their non-Ontario license plates as a handy shield against parking laws. To the relief of many (and the chagrin of a few), that's no longer the case, as Mayor John Toryannouncedtoday the city will begin cracking down on illegally parked drivers from out of province.

Up until now, the city had a policy of towing drivers with three outstanding parking tickets, but non-Ontario plates weren't being uploaded to the central database checked for ticket records by law enforcement officers. They're finally fixing that error, with habitual offenders now subject to towing as early as the beginning of February. Tory added the city issues roughly 100,000 tickets to out-of-province drivers every year, with most of them going unpaid.

Photo by Ian Muttoo in theblogTO Flickr pool.