This week is the big IRP shakeout. Early Friday morning the Supreme Court of Canada will issue the decisions in Sivia (Goodwin) v. the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles and Wilson v. the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles. Both cases arise from the major challenges to the Immediate Roadside Prohibition law which first came into effect on September 20, 2010.
The Supreme Court of Canada usually only permits appeals to be heard if they have a plan on rendering a decision that has some significant legal impact.
Timing of the appeals
We argued Wilson on May 19, 2015 right before the arguments in the Sivia case. Wilson has been mainly Kyla’s effort. As far as she was concerned, if there is a constitutionally deficient law, and the wording of the legislation is ambiguous, it should be interpreted in a manner that brings it closer to being constitutionally valid. Working against us is that the BC Court of Appeal said that it wasn’t ambiguous.
The Sivia case goes back to the decision from the BC Supreme Court of November 30, 2011 in which the first version of the IRP law was found to offend section 8 of the Charter of Rights. The law was struck down, re-written and re-introduced June 15, 2012.
A mystery to us has been why the two matters were heard at once, and really why Wilson got leave to appeal particularly when Sivia had not been resolved.
And why bother considering Sivia in the first place? The law was replaced. And why consider Wilson when it deals with a different version of the law than in Sivia and the BC Court of Appeal was decisive in its ruling in the Wilson case?
We really don’t know the answers. What we do know is that the Supreme Court of Canada usually only permits appeals to be heard if they have a plan on rendering a decision that has some significant legal impact.
Timing of the big IRP shakeout
The timing of the big IRP shakeout is exactly what we predicted in our office, give or take a couple of weeks. That it’s coming so close to the federal election simply means that it may not get as much media attention as might otherwise be the case.
The BC Government with their finger on the trigger
The BC Government passed legislation fundamentally changing the IRP scheme but to this date it has not brought the main provisions into effect. Their intention as we understand it is to put these changes into the Motor Vehicle Act within hours of the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in the hopes that the media doesn’t notice.
We’ve noted from Freedom of Information disclosure that the BC Government spends tons of time and taxpayer money trying to figure out what their talking points should be when the media learns of some of the bad stuff going on in the backrooms.
They’re media savvy. All of the journalists we talk to complain about the BC Government’s efforts to thwart their attempts to get information. It’s disgraceful.
Friday’s decisions
We’re not making predictions. We’ll post links to the decisions here on the blog Friday morning and we’ll provide commentary as appropriate when we read them and have an opportunity to consider what they mean.
Come back on the morning of Friday October 16, 2015 for news of the big IRP shakeout.