The family of a 15-year-old boy left with a brain injury after he was struck at a north Toronto crossing is suing the province, the city and the driver for $16 million, arguing that the intersection was left without protection after Ontario ordered its speed camera taken down.
According to a statement of claim dated September 3 and filed at the Ontario Superior Court, first reported by CBC Toronto, the boy’s parents allege their son suffered a traumatic brain injury, skull fractures, an injury to a carotid artery, loss of vision in his right eye and a fractured left femur when he was hit at Humber Boulevard N. and Louvain Street on March 25. Toronto police said at the time that a 15-year-old had been taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries and that the driver, a 71-year-old man, stayed at the scene; he was charged with dangerous operation and careless driving causing bodily harm.
The claim alleges neither the city nor the province put “protective measures” such as a traffic signal or a raised crosswalk at the crossing after the speed camera there came down, and that the province “created and allowed a situation of danger to exist.” One of the family’s lawyers, Patrick Brown, told CBC the case rests in part on “operational negligence” — that after removing the cameras, the province failed to replace them with other protections in a known hazardous spot. None of the allegations has been tested in court.
Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation declined to comment because the matter is before the courts. A City of Toronto spokesperson said “our hearts are with the teen and his family,” adding that while speed cameras did reduce speeding, the city continues to use other Vision Zero tools including school safety zones, signage, pavement markings, pedestrian head-start signals and red-light cameras.
What the law actually did
The cameras did not come down by choice. Schedule 5 of Bill 56, the Building a More Competitive Economy Act, 2025, repealed Part XIV.1 of the Highway Traffic Act — the section that gave municipalities the power to run automated speed enforcement at all. The bill received royal assent as chapter 11 of the Statutes of Ontario, 2025, and that schedule came into force on November 14, 2025. The City of Toronto’s own website records the same date: as of November 14, 2025, it says, speed camera penalty orders are no longer issued “in accordance with provincial legislation.”
In place of the cameras, the same schedule gives Ontario’s transportation minister the power to order municipalities to install signs in school zones — and to send crews in to put the signs up if a city does not comply. Premier Doug Ford has described the cameras as a “cash grab.”
The legislation also closed one door on liability in advance. A new section 206.6 extinguishes causes of action against municipalities and the Crown arising from contracts with speed camera suppliers broken by the repeal, and bars proceedings based on them. That clause is written around equipment contracts; it does not, on its face, address injury claims of the kind the Adebayo family has now filed.
The evidence the city already had
Toronto’s own published evaluation of the program, carried out with researchers from SickKids and Toronto Metropolitan University using data from January 2020 to December 2022, found the cameras cut the proportion of speeding drivers by roughly 45 per cent in the zones where they operated. The intersection where the boy was hit is on a walking route to St. Oscar Romero Catholic Secondary School. The camera there ran from about April 2025 until November 2025.
Source: CBC Toronto, September 10, 2026.
