A notice of intent to prohibit is a letter generated by ICBC or RoadSafety BC to inform you that it is their intention to suspend your license.
Receiving a Notice of Intent to Prohibit does not guarantee that your license is going to be suspended, but it most likely will be. A notice of intent to prohibit is different than a notice of prohibition, because it gives you the opportunity to make submissions and explain to ICBC why you should not lose your license before the prohibition comes into affect.
A notice of prohibition takes affect the moment you receive it. ICBC does not start counting the time in a driving prohibition until the prohibition is acknowledged, so if you decide to either start serving the prohibition pursuant to the notice of intent to prohibit or as a result of getting a notice of prohibition, you must acknowledge the prohibition by signing the letter and dating it for the day you stopped driving.
A Notice of Intent to Prohibit is one of a series of sanctions that ICBC can issue as a result of having too many points on your driving record.
The first thing that ICBC can do is put you on probation, which is effectively a form of warning that if you get any other tickets, you will lose your license. The second thing ICBC can do is the Notice of Intent to Prohibit. The third step they can take is the notice of prohibition.
That does not mean that you have to be put on probation before you get a Notice of Intent to Prohibit. Similarly, you don’t need to get a Notice of Intent
to Prohibit before you receive a notice of prohibition. ICBC can skip any step in the process based on your driving record and your circumstances.
If you get a notice of intent to prohibit, you should act quickly, because while you can dispute it, the process must be done within 21 days of the day on the letter. Because these letters come by regular mail, you often receive the letter about a week or longer, after the date on the Notice of Intent to Prohibit. Many people don’t check their mail everyday, so many people don’t actually realize that they have an intent to prohibit until after it’s been sitting in their mailbox for a week.
A notice of intent to prohibit is triggered as a result of your driving record. Generally speaking, you receive a Notice of Intent to Prohibit because you
have a pattern of unsatisfactory driving behaviour.
This could be an accumulation of too many driver penalty points, too many of the same type of ticket, or a combination of these factors. You can also receive one on the basis of a single ticket, particularly if you have a class 7 license or if the ticket was for a high risk offence or unusual circumstances.
They can also follow court-imposed driving prohibitions and because anything added to a driving record can trigger a further prohibition from ICBC, a Notice of Intent to Prohibit can be sent to you even when you are already on prohibition from the court.
If you receive a Notice of Intent to Prohibit and you have tickets you need to dispute, or tickets that you recently received and haven’t disputed yet, you
need to be very careful about what happens to these tickets.
This is because you can get further notices of intent to prohibit, on the basis of these additional tickets, which means you could end up adding stacking
driving prohibitions as a result. There are also cases in which individuals respond to a Notice of Intent to Prohibit, then have another entry added to their driving record and ICBC exercises their ‘discretion’ by not taking further action against you in the form of another ticket, but doesn’t reduce or revoke the driving prohibition.
If you receive a Notice of Intent to Prohibit the key is to act fast and to act properly. Give us a call and we’d be happy to help.