Toward the end of last week, while we were busy trying to lift the interlock requirement for as many people as possible, the Vancouver Sun published an article with particularly interesting IRP news. Ian Mulgrew managed to interview the former B.C. Solicitor General John van Dongen, and elicit his opinions on the IRP scheme. He was a member of the BC Liberal cabinet when the Immediate Roadside Prohibition legislation was introduced.
Van Dongen is an interesting guy. But really interesting to us is the enlightened observations he made about the IRP scheme when it was first discussed in cabinet. This is all discussed in the article. Here are some interesting excerpts:
He said the measures were motivated by Liberal hopes of capitalizing on sympathy for the victims of impaired drivers rather than proper public policy and legal standards.
“I warned (current Justice Minister Shirley) Bond, (Supt. Of Motor Vehicles) Steve Martin and other staff that courts would never support this legislation, which was right over the top,” van Dongen said.
“It went too far in terms of balancing ease of enforcement versus individual rights under the law ….de Jong as a lawyer should have known better.”
“But we knew, we knew … people like me knew, I couldn’t believe they were going through with this. They destroyed lives with this bloody thing …. You don’t get to hammer the hell out of somebody when you suspend their individual rights.”
A $1,000 fine would work, van Dongen said, rather than penalties and costs that amount to thousands of dollars and are “beyond what would happen in some criminal cases.
“We don’t have to and we shouldn’t want to hit a guy with $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 worth of costs, basically brutalize the guy, have him lose his job,” van Dongen said.
“And I’m not sure we should be entitled to do that under an administrative system where the guy isn’t entitled to go to court.”
“This was nuts …. They shouldn’t have a right to do this stuff … They take politics to such an extreme that they will build public policy around politics and that is in part, and I stress in part, what I believe happened here.”
Van Dongen insisted he agreed in theory with the new approach.
“I have been arguing for administrative penalties across the board in government since I became an MLA,” he said. “I believe in them.”
“I don’t know how much this is going to cost the government but it is going to be a lot,” van Dongen predicted.
“They destroyed a lot of lives. Now they probably stopped some drinking and driving as well, but there is a law: There is a law even for government. This was that we-can-do-anything-we-want syndrome.”
IRP news hits the editorial pages
Picking up on Ian Mulgrew’s article, the National Post published a sharp editorial lambasting the BC Government for their assault on our civil liberties.
They were harsh on van Dongen for not speaking out earlier. This seems unfair to us. We know that parties vote for party legislation. So why single out one person for not speaking up when the entire cabinet is guilty of short-sighted narrow-minded zealotry? Van Dongen deserves a gold star for exposing what was going on in cabinet.
Then came the Times Colonist editorial: Licence review process unfair.
Because we are lawyers we can’t speak much about our personal perceptions of fairness when it comes to tribunals. There are certain rules that muzzle us. Freedom of speech always has limits, and one of the limits for lawyers is that we should avoid criticizing a tribunal.
We understand the reasons for this rule governing lawyers, but we don’t always agree with it. The danger is that lawyers, who are on the front line dealing with tribunals, can’t publicly decry bad behaviour by a tribunal for the purpose of exposing a faulty process.
So we don’t tell you our opinions about the OSMV tribunal. But if you were innocent and disputed an IRP and lost, chances are that we share your opinion.
The Times Colonist editorial politely identifies the danger of giving too much power to one Government organization with an in-house tribunal:
Between suspensions issued by a police officer, and those ordered by the Superintendent after review, 70,000 licenses are yanked each year and fines that can reach several thousand dollars are levied. Those are not small numbers. Penalties like these can match the sentences handed down in criminal courts. Yet there are few of the checks and balances we expect in a court of law.
And although an appeal process exists, its value is questionable. Under the new drunk-driving laws, vehicles can be impounded immediately if motorists fail a breathalyzer test. Driver’s licences can also be suspended at the roadside.
Yes, those decisions are reviewable. But even if the motorist wins, the damage is already done.
The impound fee may be returned, but there is no recompense for the loss of the vehicle or licence. There is an important point of principle here: Instant justice is often impossible to remedy when it errs.
We’re glad to see that the IRP news is now translating in a better understanding of what is really an unfair process from beginning to end.
We can tell you now that we’ve got a lot more IRP news waiting to be released at the appropriate time. Keep visiting our blog. We usually foreshadow the IRP news here long before it makes it to the TV or the newspapers.