How Often Does Fraser Health Issue Violation Tickets?

Fraser Health publishes a single PDF of food safety violation tickets. It covers the past thirteen months, updates periodically, and overwrites the previous version. If you don't download it before it refreshes, the old data is gone.

We downloaded eight versions of that PDF, including six recovered from the Wayback Machine, and compiled them into a single set of data: 112 unique violation tickets spanning October 2019 to January 2026. After deduplication across overlapping windows, this is the most complete longitudinal record of Fraser Health food safety enforcement that exists outside the authority itself.

Here's what it shows.

Fifteen to Twenty Tickets a Year, Every Year

The enforcement rate is steady. Strip out one Hope restaurant outlier (more on that below) and Fraser Health issues roughly 15 to 20 food safety violation tickets per year. That rate held before COVID, dipped during lockdowns, and returned to baseline afterward. There is no upward trend. There is no downward trend. The health authority tickets at a consistent pace.

Year	Tickets	Total fines	Notes
2019	18	$5,175	Oct-Dec only
2020	20	$6,210	COVID-19 dip visible in Q2-Q4
2021	29	$8,970	Includes 12 tickets from one Hope restaurant
2022	8	$2,415	Jan-May only, then data gap
2024	16	$4,370	From Nov 2023 snapshot
2025	20	$5,635	Full year
2026	1	$345	Jan only

Data: 112 unique tickets compiled from 8 Fraser Health violation ticket PDFs, Oct 2019 to Jan 2026.

The COVID dip is visible but modest. Q2 through Q4 of 2020 produced only 10 tickets across nine months, about half the expected rate. Inspections likely slowed during public health orders. By 2021, volume had recovered and then some, though the 2021 spike is almost entirely explained by one restaurant in Hope that refused to close.

A gap in the record runs from May 2022 to November 2023. No Wayback Machine snapshots exist for those eighteen months. Based on the rate in adjacent periods, somewhere between 20 and 30 tickets are missing from this data. The true total since 2019 is likely 130 to 150.

Two Fine Amounts Cover 94% of All Tickets

Fraser Health doesn't set fine amounts. They come from BC Reg. 89/97, the Violation Ticket Administration and Fines Regulation, and there are only two amounts that matter.

Amount	Count	Share	Typical violations
$230	45	40%	Sanitation, training, handwashing
$345	60	54%	Food contamination, unsafe temperatures, defying orders

The remaining 6% are combined charges: $460 (two offences on one ticket) and a single $690 ticket for a pub in Maple Ridge, the highest in the data, combining unsafe food temperature and inadequate refrigeration equipment on one ticket.

The two-tier structure means there's no discretion in the amount. An inspector doesn't decide how much to fine you. The offence determines the price. A handwashing failure is $230. Operating in defiance of a closure order is $345. Every time.

This is different from Ontario, where food safety fines are court-determined and can run into the thousands. BC's fixed-ticket system produces smaller individual amounts but more predictable enforcement. You know exactly what a violation will cost before an inspector walks through the door.

Surrey and Burnaby: Three-Quarters of All Tickets

City	Tickets	Share	Total fines
Surrey	48	43%	$14,185
Burnaby	36	32%	$10,115
Hope	12	11%	$4,140
Maple Ridge	11	10%	$3,545
Chilliwack	3	3%	$1,035
Langley	1	1%	$345
New Westminster	1	1%	$230

Data: 112 unique tickets, Oct 2019 to Jan 2026.

Surrey and Burnaby together account for 75% of all violation tickets¹. That tracks with population and food establishment density. These are the largest cities in the Fraser Health region, with the most restaurants, the most inspections, and accordingly the most tickets.

Hope's 11% share is entirely one business. Without that restaurant, Hope would have zero tickets in the data. Maple Ridge's 10% is more distributed across establishments and represents a genuine local enforcement pattern.

Notably absent: Abbotsford, Mission, White Rock, and the Tri-Cities (Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody) produced no violation tickets across six years of data. That doesn't mean those cities have perfect compliance. It means either their violations stayed below the ticket threshold or they fall outside the coverage captured in these PDFs.

What Gets You Ticketed

Category	Count	Share
Unsanitary premises or equipment	30	27%
Non-compliance with a health authority order	30	27%
Unsafe food temperature	15	13%
Handwashing failures	15	13%
Other (chemicals, training, pests)	22	20%

The two biggest categories tie at 27% each. Unsanitary premises covers the physical state of your kitchen: dirty equipment, contaminated surfaces, pest evidence. Non-compliance with orders means an inspector already told you to fix something and you didn't. The second category is worse. Those tickets are $345 each under Public Health Act s.99(1)(k), and they signal a business that has already been warned.

Handwashing and temperature violations split the next tier evenly. Both are $230 tickets on first occurrence but can escalate to $345 if they involve contamination risk or repeat non-compliance.

The practical takeaway: keep your premises clean, and when an inspector gives you an order, act on it. More than half the tickets in this data come down to those two things.

One Restaurant, Twelve Tickets: What Happens When You Ignore a Closure Order

Between September 17 and October 19, 2021, a restaurant in Hope received 12 violation tickets totalling $4,140. Every ticket was for the same offence: operating a food premises in defiance of a health authority closure order, at $345 each.

That's 11% of all tickets in the entire data. One restaurant, one month, one-ninth of six years of enforcement.

The daily ticketing pattern suggests inspectors visited and documented the violation repeatedly. Each day the restaurant opened was a new $345 ticket. The closure order didn't change. The fine amount didn't escalate. The tickets just accumulated. After 12 tickets in 33 days, the record shows no further tickets from the restaurant, though the data can't confirm whether the restaurant ultimately closed voluntarily, was shut down by other means, or simply rolled off the next PDF window.

The Hope restaurant case distorts the 2021 numbers and inflates Hope's geographic share, but the case is instructive. It shows the ceiling of what ticket enforcement looks like when an operator simply refuses to comply. The fines stack linearly: $345 per day, every day, with no cap visible in the data.

Other Cases Worth Knowing

A Burnaby seafood shop received three tickets on a single day, October 31, 2019, totalling $575. One was for providing false information to inspectors ($115), another for obstructing an official ($115), and the third for non-compliance ($345). It's the only case in the data involving obstruction or deception charges. Most operators who get ticketed are guilty of neglect, not active interference. This business was different.

A Burnaby grocery chain received three tickets across consecutive days in late April 2022: food contamination, unsafe temperature, and inadequate handwashing. Three separate violations across three days suggest a thorough inspection that found problems at every level, from storage to staff practice.

A Maple Ridge pub holds the single highest ticket in the data: $690 for two offences combined on one ticket (unsafe food temperature and inadequate refrigeration equipment). Most operators see $230 or $345. Seeing $690 means the inspector found two ticketable offences in the same visit and charged them together.

How We Built This Data

Fraser Health's violation ticket PDF is a rolling window. Each version shows roughly thirteen months of confirmed guilty verdicts, as reported to Fraser Health by ICBC². When the PDF refreshes, the old version vanishes. There's no archive, no quarterly reports, no historical access.

We recovered six historical versions from the Wayback Machine, spanning October 2020 to October 2021. Combined with a directly downloaded 2022 version and the two most recent PDFs (December 2024 and March 2026), that's eight snapshots covering overlapping windows from September 2019 to March 2026.

The overlap is heavy. A ticket issued in July 2020 might appear in five consecutive PDFs. Deduplication used a composite key of facility name, city, violation date, and fine amount to reduce 130 raw extracted rows to 112 unique tickets. Some fuzzy matching was required: the same offence sometimes appeared as "Fail to protect food from contamination" in one PDF and "Failure to protect food from contamination" in another.

The result is a longitudinal enforcement record that Fraser Health itself doesn't publish. They show you the last thirteen months. We can show you the last six years.

What the Ticket Record Doesn't Show

These 112 tickets represent the floor of enforcement, not the ceiling. The PDF only includes tickets with confirmed guilty statuses as reported by ICBC. Tickets that were disputed and overturned, or still pending adjudication, don't appear. Neither do warnings, re-inspections, or closure orders that didn't result in a ticket.

The eighteen-month gap (May 2022 to November 2023) means the data is incomplete. Any analysis of annual trends carries that caveat.

Fraser Health is the only BC health authority that publishes violation tickets with dollar amounts. Vancouver Coastal Health publishes restaurant closure lists. Island Health has inspection records going back to 2005. But none of them publish what Fraser Health does: the names, the amounts, and the offences, all in one document. That transparency, even in its limited rolling-window form, is what made this analysis possible.

For operators in the Fraser Health region, the message from six years of ticket data is consistent. Enforcement runs at a steady 15 to 20 tickets per year. The fines are fixed and modest ($230 or $345). The violations that trigger them are preventable: clean premises, safe temperatures, proper handwashing, and acting on inspector orders when they come.