Guides / BC driving prohibitions

Can I fight a 90-day driving prohibition in BC?

Yes, and you have seven days to start. A 90-day immediate roadside prohibition in British Columbia is reviewable, the review is decided by a RoadSafetyBC adjudicator rather than a judge, and the window to apply closes seven days after the notice is put in your hand.

That deadline is what costs most people their licence. Seven days, counted from the day you were served, not seven business days. Section 215.48 of the Motor Vehicle Act sets it, and there is no extension for a missed one. Of the prohibitions that come across my desk too late, a good number had a live argument in them.

An immediate roadside prohibition, which everyone calls an IRP, is an administrative penalty under the Motor Vehicle Act. It carries no criminal record. Police serve one at the roadside when an approved screening device registers a fail, or when a driver refuses the breath demand, and in most of these files the officer serves the IRP instead of laying a criminal charge. That is why people drive home from the stop believing nothing much happened.

What a 90-day prohibition costs you

Ninety days off the road, starting the moment the notice is served. Your vehicle impounded for 30 days. A $500 administrative penalty, and a $250 licence reinstatement fee before you drive again. On a prohibition of this length RoadSafetyBC can also require the Responsible Driver Program or the Ignition Interlock Program, each with its own bill attached.

Add towing and storage on the impound and the real figure runs well past the penalty printed on the notice. For anyone who drives for a living, the number that matters is not on that list at all.

The seven-day clock, and what has to happen inside it

Three things, all of them before day seven runs out. Apply to RoadSafetyBC. Pay the review fee in full. Book the date for your review. A review paid for on day eight is not a late review, it is no review.

The fee is $100 for a written review and $200 for an oral one. And here is the part people find hardest to hear: filing changes nothing about the prohibition while you wait. The Act says it plainly, that the filing of an application for review does not stay the driving prohibition. Your 90 days runs while the adjudicator reads. If the prohibition is revoked your record is cleared and your fees come back, and decisions arrive by regular mail.

What an adjudicator can revoke it for

Section 215.5 of the Motor Vehicle Act sets out the grounds, and the list is closed. On a fail result, the adjudicator must revoke the prohibition if you establish any one of these: that you were not advised of your right to a second analysis; that a second analysis was not provided, or was not performed on a different approved screening device, or that the prohibition was not based on the lower of the two results; that the device did not register a fail, or did not register it on the basis of a blood alcohol concentration of 80 milligrams in 100 millilitres or more; or that the result the notice was served on was not reliable.

On a refusal, the ground is narrower. The adjudicator must revoke if you did not fail or refuse to comply with the demand, or if you had a reasonable excuse for doing so.

Now notice what is absent from that list. Whether you felt fine. Whether you were driving well. Whether the officer was rude, or whether you had one glass of wine with dinner three hours earlier. None of it is a ground, and a review built on any of it is $100 spent on a letter of complaint. The grounds are mechanical, and that is the good news, because machines and the people operating them leave a trail.

Written review or oral review?

The officer does not attend either kind. The police case arrives on paper: the sworn report to the superintendent, the device records, the notes made at the scene. Nobody gets cross-examined. That shapes the whole exercise, because your job is to find the gap between what the report claims and what the rest of the paper shows.

A written review lets you file a statement of up to 30 pages plus supporting material: affidavits, medical records, witness statements, photographs, text messages, call logs. An oral review is conducted by telephone, and it lets you or your lawyer answer the adjudicator's questions as they come rather than guessing at them in advance. On a fail file I take the oral review most times. An extra hundred dollars measured against 90 days off the road is not a close call.

Why the device is the case

The reliability ground has a history worth knowing. In Goodwin v. British Columbia (Superintendent of Motor Vehicles), 2015 SCC 46, the Supreme Court of Canada held that this scheme is valid provincial law and that an IRP is not a criminal offence, so the presumption of innocence in section 11 of the Charter does not reach it. On the older version of the scheme before the Court, though, the fail provisions breached section 8, because a driver had no way to challenge whether the fail was accurate, and the breach was not saved by section 1. The reliability ground now sitting in section 215.5 is the answer to that problem. It is there because someone fought for it.

The companion case cuts the other way, and I would rather you heard it from me. In Wilson v. British Columbia (Superintendent of Motor Vehicles), 2015 SCC 47, the Court left standing the ruling that an officer may rely on the screening device reading alone, without separate signs of impairment. So the argument that you looked sober and drove straight goes nowhere. The device is the case. Which is exactly why the device, its calibration, its operator, and the second reading you were owed are what a review has to be built on. More on the stop itself is in my guide to roadside demands and screening devices, and the charge side is on my impaired driving and over 80 page.

What this means for your file

Do this tonight, not on the weekend. Write down the times: when the vehicle was stopped, when the demand was made, what was said about a second test, whether a second device came out of the trunk, both readings, and which one went on the notice. Keep the notice itself, both pages. Then pick up the phone, because seven days is not long and three of those days are gone by the time most people decide to make the call.

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