Liberals’ police-state impaired law must go
Rules invited abuse, and police RSVPED
More and more victims of the federal Liberals’ insane new impaired- driving law are making themselves heard, and they’re making Justin Trudeau’s government look very, very foolish — not least because what’s happening is precisely what everyone predicted.
Last week CBC reported on the case of Jimmy Forster, a British Columbia man with severe asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ( COPD), who twice in recent months has been charged with failing to provide a breath sample.
People with lung conditions being unable to register a sample has been an issue in the past. But in
the past, police had to articulate some suspicion of impairment before compelling a breath sample. Bill C- 46, which received Royal Assent nearly a year ago, eliminated that requirement. Police don’t seem to have suspected impairment either time they nabbed Forster. He says he volunteered to give a blood test, but was rebuffed.
In each case his license was suspended and his car impounded. All told, he’s out some $ 1,800 and without transportation, which he relies upon not just for himself but for his disabled sister. Even appealing — which he did once successfully and once not — costs $200.
Another British Columbian, 76- year- old Norma Mcleod, who also suffers from COPD, was reportedly pulled over and breathalyzed for having just left a liquor store. She couldn’t make the machine go ding, and had her licence and car seized. Her appeal failed despite her doctor testifying to her condition. She’s launching a constitutional challenge against the law, and well she might.
In a statement to CBC, the RCMP claimed their officers’ hands are tied: Where they suspect impairment, the Criminal Code provides for alternative testing methods; but the new section covering “mandatory alcohol screening” does not. This may well be evidence of shoddy law- making. But the section emphatically does not compel officers to charge people in situations like Forster’s and Mcleod’s.
Then there’s Lee Lowrie, who says she was breathalyzed poolside at her sister’s house, where she had been enjoying a few beers, some two hours after turning off her car. She failed, and as a result lost her license for 90 days and automobile for 30.
“The RCMP were not willing to let me prove the amount of alcohol I had consumed ( at) home. I even invited them in to see the empties,” she told Global News.
This is another C- 46 innovation: the new offence of having a blood- alcohol content over .08 “within two hours after ceasing to operate a motor vehicle” — or if you prefer, “drinking and not driving.” Lowrie was vindicated in court, but claims to be out $ 3,500 in expenses. For drinking by the pool.
The Liberals were warned that these two provisions in particular were engraved invitations to abuse, and Canadian police forces seem to have RSVPED enthusiastically in the affirmative. For now we’re dealing with discrimination on grounds of health. Soon enough we’ll learn new stop- and- breathalyze powers are being used disproportionately against certain minority populations. And we haven’t even touched the issue of THC impairment, which C- 465 measures using scientifically unproven methods.
Clearly the Liberals felt they had to “get tough” on impaired driving to offset concerns over marijuana legalization. But more broadly speaking this is evidence of what happens when you essentially outsource an entire field of law- making to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. You wind up obsessing over people whose level of impairment is so minor that it defies detection even by trained law- enforcement officials, when the real problem is the most spectacularly impaired: Canadian statistics show nearly 60 per cent of fatally injured drivers with alcohol in their system had levels more than twice the legal limit.
A brief tour of jurisprudence demonstrates the absurdity of the situation. This is a country where you can be convicted twice for impaired driving causing bodily harm, then head out hammered with a suspended license and roll your car, resulting in a third conviction for same, and get 180 days in jail plus a 30- month driving suspension; where driving with a .175 blood- alcohol content with your young child in the car, with a suspended license and with two previous drunk- driving convictions, can get you all of 280 days in jail; where your consecutive sixth, seventh and eight convictions for impaired driving might get you a three- year driving ban; where your 10th conviction for driving while disqualified, with four on your record for impaired driving, might produce a sentence of 177 days time served; where a judge might turn down the Crown’s request to ban a driver for life on his seventh drunk- driving conviction, this one having caused death, and decide on 10 years instead.
And what are the Liberals doing? They’re going after asthmatics, seniors buying wine and people in their backyards. It is quite likely unconstitutional. It is certainly, to repeat, insane. And it needs to be fixed. Canadian politicians are not accustomed to arguing for more lenient approaches on impaired driving, but nor are Canadians accustomed to living in a police state.