The Immediate Roadside Prohibition scheme has been a series of failures right from the start. One of the dumbest things that the BC Government did with the IRP scheme was to make everyone who was issued a 90-day driving prohibition get an interlock in their car for a year. It was shortsighted and they knew it, but they needed to rely on a desperate move to get support for their law.
After a very reasonable period of time, we took them to court. We brought an action to force them to do their job.
Intentional deception
The IRP law never said that everyone who got a 90-day IRP was required to get an Interlock before they could get their license back. Rather it said that it was the Superintendent’s discretion as to whether a driver would be required to participate in the remedial programs (the RDP course and the Interlock). This was important because when the law was challenged the lawyers for the Government stood in court and said it was discretionary and indicated that only drivers with a history of drunk driving would be required to go through the program.
Two of us were actually in the court when this took place. Our jaws dropped. We assume that this is what their client told them. The court accepted this statement which made the IRP law seem balanced and fair.
Interestingly no one pointed out that people with a history of drunk driving were not supposed to be issued an IRP. The policy was that anyone with a history of drunk driving would be charged with criminal impaired driving. This policy was expressed to the court so as to enhance the argument that the IRP scheme wasn’t an unlawful intrusion on the Criminal Law jurisdiction of the Federal Government.
You can see the inconsistency inherent in the two assertions. Nobody pointed it out in court, however. We felt that the lawyers for the Government were misinformed by their client. Still, despite what the court was told it was clear in all of the material at the time that the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles had a blanket policy to refer everyone to the Interlock program. And that’s what they did.
But then we took them to court.
We made things better
We had a limited behind-the-scenes role in the first major challenge to the IRP scheme. One thing that always irked us was that the law said that the Interlock was discretionary, and the lawyers for the Government told the court that it was applied as discretionary, but in fact it was a blanket policy and all of their publications at the time (which we still have) demonstrated this.
When we got our chance, we took them to court.
What we did was we created our own review program. We wrote to the Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles and told them that their policy was unlawful and we explained the reason why our client should be exempt from the Interlock and Responsible Driver Program.
We heard nothing from them. We didn’t expect to hear anything. After a very reasonable period of time, we took them to court. We brought an action to force them to do their job, which was to apply some reasoned discretion to our client’s matter and revoke the remedial program requirement.
A bad press conference
That was probably a difficult day for the then Deputy Superintendent of Motor Vehicles. She had to face the cameras and explain that because they had been faced with strong legal arguments (that we made) they were revoking the remedial requirements for 1200 BC drivers. Then a few weeks later they quietly expanded it to approximately 12,000 more people (with no corresponding press release).
Interlocks were coming out like crazy and suddenly the Government had to get a whole bunch of staff to assess applications for cancellation of the referral to the remedial programs.
We knew there was logical criteria but there were no guidelines in place, so we’d get good decisions most of the time and silly ones from time to time. The nice thing, however, was that the structure we created was thrust upon the Government and it stood for a long time (3 years!). And we were responsible for having the Interlock removed from thousands of vehicles.
Foolish and they knew it
One of the things about the automatic interlock requirement was that anyone with any good sense would see that it would polarize people. They wanted to say that it was the toughest drunk driving law in Canada. Although they were decriminalizing drunk driving, they got MADD on board by telling them that the interlock was compulsory. They got the BC Supreme Court partially on board (the first version of the law was found unconstitutional) by telling the Court it was discretionary.
They knew the two lies couldn’t stand and when we brought our action in court they fessed up. It was a mistake and they knew it. There was a big shakeup in the OSMV, but the damage was done. People across BC lost confidence in the IRP law because this deception had a harmful impact on good people with clean records and no history of doing anything wrong.
Thousands of drivers got IRPs and were jerked around by the BC Government not applying their own law. They told their friends, and so on.
The fix is in
Yesterday the Government issued a press release that said they’d made a big change to their policy as of last week! Although they still haven’t changed the online version of the legislation and regulations at the time of publishing this post, they announced that there was a new matrix (gonna get everyone confused with that snazzy word) which would determine whether a driver must have an interlock installed if he or she ever wants to drive again after serving the punishment in a drunk driving case.
If you want to step into the Matrix, follow this link: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-and-cycling/roadsafetybc/high-risk-driver/criteria-matrix
The OSMV (right now also known as RoadSafetyBC) calls this the Mandatory Criteria Matrix.
Make fun of the name all you want — this is the new non-discretionary version of the remedial programs. Got an IRP? Better enter the Matrix.
Is it really fixed?
Other lawyers often ask us if everything is fixed at RoadSafetyBC. It’s all very complex.
In some respects this is a big step forward. If you get one 90-day IRP and you have no history of drunk driving, it’s clear sailing in that you won’t have to get an Interlock. That makes an IRP barely a blip. Hardly the harshest drunk driving law in Canada — actually perhaps the softest, but hey. Whatever.
Of course, we’ve seen the police target people who have been issued an IRP (even if it was revoked) and if the police target you in the future and you end up with a second IRP, then you’re on the way to Interlock alley. So there’s that.
Where was the big press conference?
We were called by reporters who seemed to be well aware that the previous version of this Interlock scheme was controversial and they knew it. We were told by the reporters that when they called yesterday to ask for a statement from the Government on the Government’s own new press release that no one was available to comment.
The release had a contact number, but still “no comment.”
We got a laugh out of that.