As most of our readers know, the first version of the 90-day IRP scheme for blowing Fail on an ASD was found unconstitutional by the BC Supreme Court. Despite that, the Court gave no remedy to all of the people who received these unconstitutional driving prohibitions.
There were lots of issues, and neither the Government nor the Petitioners were satisfied with the BC Supreme Court ruling. So both sides appealed the ruling, and now it’s going to the BC Court of Appeal.
The expectation was that the IRP appeal would be heard in February. Now it is scheduled to proceed in March 2013 – so just over 3 months from now.
As we have noted, the Government and the police are trying to influence the Court by releasing misleading stats, i.e. lies, to pressure the Court of Appeal before the IRP appeal hearing. It will be interesting if the Government spin succeeds over what is actually right and consistent with legal principles.
As for the revised IRP scheme, the Government claimed it was responding to the Sivia decision in drafting and applying the new law.
Because we defend IRPs literally every single day, we know that this too is a big lie. Innocence will still not cause your 90-day IRP to be lifted. Many many innocent people still end up stuck with a 90-day IRP.
We succeed on technicalities. We have identified bizarre and obscure technicalities no one else would ever think of because we are so deeply aware of the procedures and the processes. We regularly succeed for innocent people, not because they are innocent but because of some technical or procedural mistake that we pick out. We estimate that we succeed about 30% above the overall success rate based mainly on the information we collect in FOIs from the Government.
We decided, therefore, to challenge the lawfulness of the modified IRP scheme – what the Government calls IRP 2.0. As far as we’re concerned, there are new legal issues that cause this scheme to be as deficient and unlawful as the old scheme. In some respects, the arguments against this scheme are more persuasive than those advanced at the first Supreme Court hearing.
The Petition challenging the new scheme has been scheduled for hearing in BC Supreme Court in September 2013.
What does all of this mean?
We’ll try to explain some of the issues here on our blog in January.
On another note, on December 24 at about 3:00 p.m. our time, someone hacked our site and uploaded a couple of files. They then sent out a bulk email to thousands of people inviting them to click a link to obtain a FedEx receipt.
The link was to the files they had uploaded. There was a zip file that would then unpack some malicious software to your computer.
We were lucky that a thoughtful and compassionate person with skill to recognize the bogus email decided to call us. We then deleted the files.
We think that we have fixed the problem that allowed these hackers to get access to our site. Nevertheless, we have been taking steps to ensure that we seal things off as best we can. To that end, our site has been locked down for the last few days while we go through the code to check everything out.
When things are back to normal, we will get back to posting more regular updates to our blog.
Thanks again for following our blog and happy new year.