Oshawa’s Nuisance Bylaw Has Cost the Canadian Automotive Museum $2,750 in Three Weeks

The City of Oshawa has fined the Canadian Automotive Museum seven times since Sept. 15, for a total of $2,750, over things other people did in the museum’s parking lot.

The penalties were issued under the city’s Nuisance By-law 65-2009, Section 3.1, executive director and curator Alexandra Miller-Gerrard told INSAUGA Canada. The section is one sentence long: “No person shall cause, create or permit a nuisance in any public place in the City.” Nobody has accused the museum of causing or creating anything. It is on the hook for the third verb.

A parking lot on Simcoe Street South counts as a “public place” because of how the bylaw defines the term. Its definition covers private property exposed to public view, “whether or not the property is owned by the person contravening the by-law.” Section 4.1 lets an officer issue orders to the owner or occupier of the land where the contravention happened. Nuisance includes conduct that is “disorderly, annoying, unpleasant or obnoxious,” and loitering is “lingering in a public place without due cause.”

According to Miller-Gerrard, the city issued an order in June 2025 alleging that unhoused people were loitering, fighting, screaming, yelling and littering on museum property, she told CBC Toronto. The order said the museum could comply by “providing consistent preventative security measures.” As she described it, the order does not say what level of security would count as consistent. City staff told her the fines would continue “until the problem is resolved,” she told INSAUGA, and encouraged the museum to hire private security.

What the museum has done

The museum says it has added exterior lighting and signage, installed more and better security cameras, and put more staff hours into watching the lot, reviewing footage and going outside to ask people to leave. It says it regularly hands camera footage to Durham Regional Police for investigations on or next to the property.

What it hasn’t done is hire round-the-clock security or build a perimeter fence. Miller-Gerrard says it can’t pay for either, and can’t pay the fines.

The damage list it has compiled since 2024 includes three broken windows in two years, cameras vandalized and copper stripped from the building’s exterior, which knocked out the HVAC system for nearly a month. Miller-Gerrard told CBC there is new graffiti on the building nearly every day.

Who pays

The museum is an independent not-for-profit charity, not a city or federal institution, a point Miller-Gerrard says people get wrong. Day-to-day operations run on admissions, memberships, gift shop sales and donations. The city provides capital funding of $0.25 per capita a year. The province’s Heritage Organization Development grant contributes at most $1,545 a year toward operations.

Three weeks of nuisance penalties have already come to $2,750, about $1,200 more than that provincial grant’s annual ceiling. Under the bylaw’s posted consolidation, administrative penalties step up through three tiers ($250, $350 and $450) for repeat contraventions in a calendar year, so the meter doesn’t slow down with repetition.

The museum says it holds the largest collection of Canadian vehicles in the world, more than 100 of them, some the only surviving examples of their kind, and has been downtown for more than 60 years. Last month Miller-Gerrard took the museum’s 1915 Russell-Knight to the Cobble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Back in Oshawa, the museum’s own parking lot keeps producing $250-to-$450 tickets, and the museum pays them out of admissions and donations.

The Facebook post

On Oct. 7, Oshawa Councillor Brian Nicholson posted on Facebook that the fines were being cancelled and no longer pursued. Miller-Gerrard called city staff to check. The museum said on Facebook that staff told her the fines had not been removed, and that two more fines arrived by mail the same day.

Nicholson then told INSAUGA he never said the fines were cancelled. “In my original post, I commented on the enforcement process not being pursued; AI turned that into fines being cancelled,” he said, adding that the post disappeared after Facebook was told about the error. His statement doesn’t say which enforcement process he meant, or whether the city intends to collect the $2,750 already issued.

Museum board member Greg Johnston told INSAUGA the city is “under a lot of pressure to resolve,” and that many people, businesses and unions had written in.

Why the lot

Regional Councillor Rick Kerr, whose ward includes the downtown core, told INSAUGA he didn’t want to blame bylaw officers for doing their jobs, but that “fines are not the way to go to help these institutions.” He tied this year’s increase to the provincially mandated closure of the Ajax Hub homeless centre in June, saying most of its clients moved to downtown Oshawa and the Back Door Mission, a social service hub he thinks should relocate. He named the nearby Masonic Temple as another property caught in the same situation.

Tyler Frederick, an Ontario Tech University criminology professor who sits on the Back Door Mission’s board, told CBC that tightening security at one location “is just going to shift it to another.”

Miller-Gerrard says the museum raised the problems with the city and police in 2024, before the order and before any fine, and wrote to the city asking to address council. She told CBC she believes the museum lot isn’t anyone’s first choice, and that a conversation with staff is sometimes enough to move people along.

What happens next

The museum wants the fines reviewed and removed, plus help paying for more cameras, an anti-graffiti coating for the building and changes to make the parking lot usable for visitors. It was scheduled to meet city staff on Friday, Oct. 9. The City of Oshawa did not respond to CBC’s request for comment, and no outcome from that meeting has been made public. Oshawa votes in Ontario’s municipal elections on Oct. 26, with downtown homelessness already an issue in the mayoral race.

Should a charity pay for what trespassers do in its parking lot, or should the city that wrote ‘permit’ into the bylaw be paying for the fix?

Related: Snook’s Dream Cars is closing because its mechanic is retiring, not because business was bad.

Sources: City of Oshawa Nuisance By-law 65-2009 (consolidated); Canadian Automotive Museum statements on Facebook and Instagram; interviews and reporting by CBC Toronto (Oct. 8), INSAUGA Canada (Oct. 2 and Oct. 7) and Durham Radio News (Oct. 8).

Lead image: Evan Delshaw via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

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Shawn Henry has spent years writing about cars, and it shows—not in a resume kind of way, but in how he talks about them. He's the type who'll notice the weird trim option nobody remembers and actually know why it mattered. At Backfire News, he covers pretty much the whole spectrum: off-road trucks and trail builds, performance cars, racing, and the collector market. He's comfortable getting into the technical weeds, but he never forgets that most people read about cars because cars are fun, not because they want a spec sheet. His beat runs from classic and collector vehicles to overlanding culture, modified performance builds, new automotive tech, and the industry news that actually affects what ends up in your driveway. Mostly, though, Shawn thinks the best car stories are about people—the builds they pour money into, the road trips, the communities that form around a shared obsession. That's the stuff he likes writing about, and it's what you'll find in his work here.

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