You can dispute it if you’ve received a notice of intent to prohibit. The first thing you need to know about that is that you only have 21 days from the date on the letter to make your submissions.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t make submissions outside of the 21 days, but you run the risk that you receive a notice of prohibition in the meantime. This can either be mailed to you or it can be handed to you by a police officer after you’ve been pulled over.
For this reason, it’s important to try and get your submissions in within the deadline. As long as your submissions are received by ICBC within 21 days, they will not take any action to prohibit you until they consider your submissions and determine the result of the dispute.
To dispute a Notice of Intent to Prohibit, you must persuade ICBC that your need to drive outweighs the public interest in prohibiting you on the basis of your driving record. this means that you must provide compelling reasons as to why you need to keep your license.
These are more than just personal convenience, such as needing it to run errands and get to school, you are less likely to get a significant reduction or revocation of the Notice of Intent to Prohibit than if you need your license to keep your job.
That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get anything, as a result of your circumstances, but the likelihood of getting a reduction of the driving prohibition is directly connected to the reasons why you need your license.
In addition, you should also provide support for the claims you make as to why you need to keep your license. For example, if your children are in a lot of activities, and you need your car to take them to and from those activities, providing schedules can help. If your
job requires that you have a car, providing a copy of your contract from work, to demonstrate that you need a vehicle is a good idea.
If you live a significant distance from any public transit, consider providing information with transit maps to show how far you are from the closest public transit stops.
Financial hardship alone is not often enough to have the prohibition revoked or reduced. If your financial circumstances are difficult, as many peoples are, providing information to demonstrate this, including banking records, mortgage statements, debt consolidation statements, pay stubs and other financial documentation, can help to demonstrate you can’t afford the consequences of a driving prohibition.
In addition to demonstrating how your need to drive outweighs the public interest in prohibiting you, you should also provide information to demonstrate to ICBC that you no longer pose a risk to the public.
This can include rehabilitative actions taken by you, and confirmation that you have completed, for example, some driving lessons.
Alternatively, you can provide online course certificates related to safe driving, such as the BC safe driving course, or you could write an essay on the dangers of certain types of conduct that appear on your driver’s abstract.
Taking these steps can help to show that you have learned from your mistakes, and are not likely to repeat this behaviour in the future.
The last factor that ICBC considers is your driving record itself. This is of course why they believe it is necessary to prohibit you in the first place.
Providing evidence about the circumstances that led to you getting tickets can in some situations, be helpful. But this does not mean that you should avoid or minimize your responsibility for these offences, after all, now that they are on your driving record you are
deemed to be guilty of them, whether you plead guilty, paid the tickets or didn’t dispute them in time.
ICBC considers you guilty of these offences, and while you can provide information that may mitigate your responsibility, in the sense of providing an excuse for why you violated the law, you should not attempt to say that you did not violate the law, because your driving record is evidence of your guilt of those offences.
A good example of this is a distracted driving ticket, where you picked up your phone to change the song. While this is not permissible, you may not have understood that that type of conduct is the same as texting or talking while driving in the eyes of the law.
Similarly addressing what steps you’ve taken and strategies you’ve used to not engage in the driving behaviour that led to you getting tickets can be helpful. These things can show that you understand the behaviour that led to your Notice of Intent to Prohibit in the first place, and that you’re not likely to engage in it in the future.
Ultimately, disputing a Notice of Intent to Prohibit can be difficult and the standard that ICBC imposes on you is high. We deal with a lot of these disputes and we are always happy to help by providing information about how to dispute a notice of intent to prohibit. Feel free to give us a call.