If you have been following the IRP news on our blog or watching the news in the last week, you may have heard about the Vancouver IRP issue. There’s been a lot of talk about how we discovered that the Vancouver Police Department was improperly preparing their evidence in IRP cases.
Despite the fact that the OSMV has been aware of the issue since September, and despite the fact that 35% of IRPs challenged in November were revoked as a result of this issue, it is apparent that the Government has no plans to conduct a review of all IRPs issued by the VPD since June 15, 2012 to determine which people were impacted by this improper evidence. Actually, they don’t need to – we already know that every Vancouver IRP for Fail or Warn falls in this category.
In our view, the OSMV and the Government should be cancelling every Fail or Warn IRP issued by the VPD and refunding people’s money. But we know that isn’t going to happen. It didn’t happen in the Port Moody cases. It didn’t even happen in Port Moody the second time we exposed improper procedure. It took us filing Petitions in Supreme Court in order to see anything happen for the 1200 people who were wronged in autumn of this year by the OSMV.
So we don’t expect the Government or the OSMV to do anything differently now. And to us, that’s just plain wrong.
It is extremely important for proper procedure to be followed if the ASD is going to be relied on as evidence to harshly punish people. If proper procedures are not followed, then IRPs must be revoked. Here, none of the Warn or Fail IRPs issued on the basis of Vancouver Police ASDs can be confirmed to be reliable. They should be revoked. Similarly refusal to blow IRPs in Vancouver should be revoked if the subject made any attempt to blow.
We are prepared to take on this challenge so that these Vancouver IRPs are revoked. We happen to be a small law office that takes on the big powerful Government. We intend to write in to the OSMV for every person who comes to us with a Vancouver IRP case from this period.
If you challenged your Vancouver IRP, the OSMV should have noticed the problem and your IRP should have been revoked. They are an expert tribunal. They should have noticed the copied documents.
If you didn’t fight your IRP, don’t be discouraged. You didn’t have this information when the seven-day time limit ran out in your case. Now that this information is available and a new defence has opened up to you, you should be given an extension of your seven-day time limit. But you need to act quickly.
If you received an IRP in Vancouver between June 15, 2012 and December 1, 2012 give our office a call and ask to speak with Paul. He is leading the charge. He had a plan to help the 1200 people. Now he has a plan to deal with these Vancouver IRPs.