Recent Changes In Canada’s Impaired Driving Laws

So glad you could join me today. What are the recent changes to Canada’s impaired driving laws? Well, in 2018 there was a whole fundamental host of change that completely overhauled Canada’s impaired driving laws, making it more difficult to win cases, frankly. And I’ll go over some of the issues that arose. 

Well, first of all, some of the important ones. I’m not going to go over everywhere, because there’s just a whole laundry list of them, but first of all, they changed the offence to 80 or over. So previously you had to  be over 80 milligrams. So that was so important because of a person who blew 89 say before they would round down to 80 for court purposes, and there’s no offence. So that was a really big one. 

They got rid of the bolus drinking. The last drink defense was the big one. People would be at a bar and they’d have a couple shots before they leave, get in their car and blow over the legal limit, but argue that that two drinks wasn’t in their bloodstream yet, so that that’s gone completely. 

Now, back in the day, when you pulled into a ride program, they had to have an odour of alcohol on your breath or admission of drinking to give you the alcotest device. Now they don’t need anything. You can just pull in a ride program. Hey, I’m going to demand you blow in this device. You could look completely sober and there’d be no problem at all. So that’s completely changed. They’ve also made it an offence. They can charge you now you could be in your home or a bar two after your hours after you’re driving, and they could make a demand for a breath demand or alcotest demand and charge you up to two hours. Then there’s kind of a reverse onus on you to show that you were drinking after the time of driving. This covers situations for, I guess, for hit and runs, but there are legitimate situations where a person’s rights could be breached. I mean, what if you had five beers at the bar and not drinking earlier. 

They’ve increased the mandatory minimum fines. You know, in certain ways that, because now if you blow up to 120 it’s $1,000 fine between 120 to 160 is $1,500 now and then over, over 160 and over, I should say it is $2,000 but those are the minimums. They can get way worse than that, additionally, and this is a crazy one, in my mind, they’ve increased the penalty, the maximum penalty for simple impaired driving, not bodily harm or death, but still impaired driving, to 10 years. That means that a permanent resident in Canada who has one DUI conviction could be deported from the country because it’s a considered crime of, you know, serious criminality offence. So there’s been a whole host of changes. There’s also been the refusing to provide saliva or blood demands or a breath demand. That penalty has increased to mandatory $2,000. Recall a person imposing the RIDE program is sober they demand an alcotest and let’s say it’s a little lady who can’t provide a breath sample, well they’re going to get convicted of or charged with the refusing to provide a breast sample. 

There’s a whole host of these things that have come into play, and some of them are being challenged in the courts. There’s a whole (inaudible) of cases in dealing with this. Now we’re sorting it out, and there’s a whole bunch of other changes as well. One of the changes is they now have per se limits for THC in your bloodstream, and per se limits of THC in combination with alcohol, where you can get charged with offences.  So there’s a lot of tools now that police have to charge people, and it’s making it much more difficult to defend these cases and much more easy to prosecute with much more serious penalties. So that’s a quick overview of just a whole host of changes made it is too numerous to list in a short video, but those are the those are the major ones that I’ve covered today.