Many people want to know what’s happening with the interlock and RDP now that the Government backed down from automatically forcing drivers through these programs. Of course, we love to keep all of our readers as up to date as possible. The problem is we would rather wait until we know the facts before we go and post some update. And sometimes it’s harder to explain than you would imagine. But our devoted blog followers deserve to know, so here it is:
What’s happening with the interlock and RDP?
As we recently explained, if you received an IRP for Fail before November 30, 2011, and you haven’t completed these programs (IIP and RDP) either because we had them put on hold or you just didn’t get around to it, you are the luckiest person in the world because the OSMV has given up using these old Fail IRPs as justification for a referral to the so-called remedial programs.
You win a prize in the IRP lottery. For reasons that we can pretty well guess, the Government is abandoning all of these old Fail IRPs with respect to the remedial programs. Their ultra-secret internal documents say that a Fail IRP from September 20, 2010 to November 30, 2011 cannot be the basis of a referral to remedial programs. Congratulations. You can thank us for our hard work, and by the way, you’re welcome!
We’d love to tell you why they folded their tent, but we can’t. Sorry. And don’t bother speculating why we’re keeping this secret. You’re wasting your time. Move along.
New IRPs and the Interlock and RDP
Since we busted down the Remedial Program Wall starting in November 2012 (the 23rd anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall), the OSMV was all aflutter trying to figure out what to do. In April they announced that they had stopped referring people to either program as of December 2012. It would have been nice had they told people this months before. This was kinda arrogant and high-handed, don’t you think? But hey, what did you expect such a Government to do?
In any event, they were working on a policy. There was a lot to consider. We figured that first and foremost they were thinking of how to cut losses in any future law suits by trying to establish a policy that would cut down the damages. They could try to do this, we thought, by making some plausibly deniable arbitrary cut-off. For example, they could make everyone do one of the two things they were empowered to do, such as make everyone do the RDP.
We figured that it was possible that they’d make everyone do the RDP because it would cause less blowback. What do people hate more, the Interlock or RDP? Yes, obviously the interlock is more hated. And MLAs have to field all sorts of angry phone calls from constituents about it. And it costs more than the RDP so it exposes the Government to more losses if we are successful in our class action. And the Government collects the money for the RDP so it makes it harder for them to claim they were innocent parties in the process.
So we figured that they would probably come up with a policy to make everyone go through the RDP. And guess what?
Through FOI requests and some small skirmishes, we got hold of their policy manual. It’s more or less what we figured. It will probably make you angry.
Update on the Class Action and the new Remedial Program Regime
So in the next few posts we’ll tell you what’s in that policy manual. Also we’ll bring you up to date on the IIP and RDP class action dealing with people who were automatically forced through these programs because of an ADP, criminal conviction or IRP dating back to at least 2009.
Last word: The photo for today is of a MIG 21 fighter jet, which was one of the fighters used by the East Germany military. When the Wall fell and Germany reunited, they had no use for these jets so they were decommissioned.