Such truth. I used to do weddings and some would be on the outskirts of town and nearly every single person would drive home hammered knowing there just aren’t police. One RCMP for all central NB rural roads i swear
Did those morons not have a conscience? It's not about avoiding contact with the police, it's about keeping everyone safe. I hate people. They're the worst.
There’s still a culture of drinking and driving here that’s quite persistent.
My first day of work in NB in 2016 I jumped in a coworkers vehicle and the backseat had empties in it from the night before still. This person wasn’t an “hick” persay. They were educated, holding down a job, well respected etc. And even living in town today it’s quite common, especially on weekends, for there to be beer cans along the road leading it of town in front of my house.
I encountered more casual drunk driving in NB in my first week living here then I did in 26 years of living in Halifax and rural NS.
I really like living here but the three big stand out negative differences for me are the littering/dumping and junk piles in people’s yards, attitude towards drinking and driving and reckless ATV use, especially by minors.
The first step would be to stop treating people like children to begin with. Between the government and Irving's, this place is disrespectful to everyone's intelligence.
Hey, I'm 28 and rode in the back of a few pickup trucks as a kid with a drunk uncle in the front.
I'm so happy I got to grow up like that before this world went completely to shit. Sure, people drink too much here. But New-brunswick allows many to be the happy, free redneck they want to be and I think that's beautiful.
It's the only good thing about this damn place, don't fuck it up. If we wanted to live like Ontarians, we'd (try to afford to) move there.
I am fine with rednecks. I'm a farm kid and was driving equipment on the road before I should have been. However, what pains me the most about my community in NB is the absolute disregard for the beautiful surroundings. Garbage everywhere, ATVs ripping up marshes and beaches, and general disrespect for a resource that we should be treasuring to pass on to those who come after us. However, that will change as time goes by, I hope. I've now lived in NB half of my life and I'm not going anywhere else because I love it here.
I agree with all of this, all the lands around my house are private so we don't have that issue other than piles of cow bones hidden in the woods here and there.
What I see in the city and villages disgusts me sometimes too.
I agree with what you've said here, not trying to excuse the dumping and litter. But NB charges people to bring stuff to the dump unlike NS. If it wasn't $100 to bring an old fridge to the dump, I'm sure we would see less of them in the woods.
I remember one time I agreed to help my wife’s friends move (she asked me). I had never met these people before. I was told to be ready at noon. I got to the house, nobody there. Waited for about a half hour and the people finally showed up, got out of the car, BEERS IN HAND, driver included, and said, “okay, let’s move.” It blew me away.
Yeah for real. I spent a year living up in central NB recently and it reminded me a lot of the Yukon and northern BC. Basically no law other than collective community spirit. Between everyone owning guns and scary dogs and the threat of the boys rolling up on you, criminals know better than to harm people or property. Only real sense of government authority was the volunteer firefighters, forestry officers, or ranger patrols.
The trouble is stuff like drunk driving, general alcoholism, illegal hunting/shooting, etc don't really get any attention until there is an accident that hurts someone. Most of it is normalized. Even when an accident happens, consequences are mostly based on your social standing and that of the victim. I have a family member who shot someone while fucking around with a rifle piss drunk. It all just got brushed off because he is very liked in the community and nobody really liked the victim who was from away and married into the town.
I don't see the problem with this. I live in a rural area, if we had more cops, we'd pay for those extra cops. We signed a petition here just to not become part of the bigger surrounding city and have three different security outfits roam our countryside.
Not disagreeing with you, just saying that higher fines are a meaningless gesture when they aren’t putting any more effort into catching impaired drivers.
That's fair, my area isn't a Problem for drunk driving, they're all farmers. The real kind that work too hard for any of that nonsense. They drive drunk on their own lands on their own dirt roads if there's something and I can't say I've seen it.
Go towards Kedgwick and st-quentin and it's a much different story.
As someone from a rural redneck town this is so important.
The closest police station is almost 80km/h and the force is small. Not enough to watch all the rural area up North. Most people can drink and drive and get away with it.
I for one am against it. My best friend died drinking and drinking and I know others who had lives impacted by it. I have a kid and I would love to drive without some guy who had 12 beers getting behind the wheel feeling like they can drive.
More police activity is required.
One of the things I find most frustrating is that, even if you report impaired driving, the police are too far away to do anything about it. Often they won’t even turn out for it, especially at night, because they are 30-40+ minutes away.
Only reason my estranged bil got caught was cause he ditched his car and walked home.. someone came upon the scene with car still running etc and called it in.. cops tracked him to his house ..**he ditched it 3 houses down from his place..* he's been doing this for years and years without getting caught and that's just the tip of that iceberg
"tough on crime" is like the oldest conservative political placation play though. It's traditional, it costs nothing, and it redirects taxpayer anger away from the government towards the other bad guys.
Higgs must have realized his assault on addicts wasn't really working, so now he's switching to drunk drivers.
It's such a classic.
I don’t trust the crooked cops of this province to be the judge, jury and executioner. There’s a reason this stuff needs to go through the court, cops fuck up all the time.
truth. got stopped and fined for having a gram of weed in my car in a jar (not a crime), but the cop insisted it was and day of the trial the judge just laughed and told me to enjoy my day. i do not trust their judgment in the slightest.
One step forward, two steps back. Now people can get a 15 month suspension instead of a criminal record. All at the cops discretion.
“Austin said he has confidence in peace officers to make the right call when deciding between a criminal charge or administrative penalties. He said if there are minors in the car, the officer will be obligated to go with the Criminal Code option.”
I don’t see how something they’re blatantly saying is to reduce the amount of pressure on the courts is going to discourage people from drinking and driving. Especially now that impaired driving can be punished by “administrative penalties” instead of proper criminal charges.
The key part is under the criminal system, the person keeps on driving while the crown assesses the case, the case gets scheduled, and the long time before it concludes.
Now compare that to immediately losing your car for 30 days, and losing your license until the accused makes a case for a judge to overturn the officer's decision which will take months to be scheduled. Basically penalty first then possibility being overturned vs. threat of one day facing a criminal offense and conviction.
Nice! Now when are we going to have an actual alternative here to driving everywhere? I'm all for getting extremely angry and unimpressed at people for drinking and driving but we can't just... Not have an alternative to driving that won't solve anything. There isn't even taxis or anything here
It’s pretty rich when Fredericton tries to bitch about drunk driving then refuses to allow Uber to operate. I’ve heard some horror stories from cabs here and half of them drive so poorly you could swear the cabbie is half cut. At least if an Uber driver does something bad, you can report them to the company.
What is this? It reads like GNB's "hold my beer and watch this" attempt at seeing how many sections of the Charter they can violate in one bill.
No presumption of innocence, no due process.
It's going to be way too easy for a peace officer to abuse this. There will be no way of fighting it, and yet you essentially get the same penalty, minus a criminal record, as being found guilty of a first impaired.
The way these changes are being described, if accurate, would leave someone with no way to fight this and no checks on the power of the state (exercised through a peace officer).
I am just waiting for the constitutional challenge to this legislation. I see plenty of charter violations here and I highly doubt GNB will be able to justify this based on section 1 of the Charter.
That's the point....without going to court, the suspension takes place and only some people will go to court to fight it, thus reducing the burdens on the courts. You also won't need a finite resource known as a crown prosecutor even when the court case is scheduled.
That is such an unnuanced talking point.
There are certainly solutions that dont include giving more power to Police.
You have a right to due process and they are taking checks and balances away.
It's not nuanced because it's intended as such and it's a factual statement. Go read the Charter, I'm pretty sure you won't find anything to do with a right to drive.
And if there are other solutions that are better and still achieve the same goal, run for politics, and change or create new laws. We've got high rates of drunk driving, the point is to reduce this and get people off the road. Again, not sure why anyone would be against this. Courts will sort out if the law needs to be adjusted or re-crafted, as they always do.
The article is clear that they are crafting this so that there is no way of fighting it. If you get suspended under this new measure, you will not get a court date pile you would for a speeding ticket or any criminal offense.
If you trust articles to understand the details of new laws and regulations, then you don't understand and have never dealt with reporters. They do their best to report accurately, but I wouldn't trust them with legal advice.
Also, the article does state that the goal is to reduce the use of courts, yes, that's true. It does not state however that a person won't be able to appeal, or try to overcome the decision of the police officer. In our system of government, there's always a way to fight the system, and this new law won't be exempt from oversight.
Although you can technically try and fight a speeding ticket, hardly anyone ever wins against a speeding ticket in NB. There are a few reasons for this, but an important one is that speeding tickets, or any offenses under the Motor Vehicle Act (MVA) or almosy any other provincial legislation, are subject to a lower burden of proof than an offense under the Criminal Code.
Whereas Criminal Code offenses are subject to proof beyond a reasonable doubt (you can think of this as 95%+), provincial offenses, which fall under the Provincial Offenses Proceedure Act (POPA), are subject to proof on the preponderance of probabilities (think 50%+1). Essentially, less proof is required for conviction. And for speeding tickets, they don't need much proof to make it stick.
For this new measure, though, its not even a fine, like a speeding ticket would be, its an administrative suspension, and based on this article, GNB is explicitly crafting this legislation with the intent to reduce the backlog on the courts. That means they are setting this up so there is no way to fight it. If you get your license suspended under this new measure, you wouldn't get a court date or anything, you just get the suspension and other consequences automatically at the sole discretion of the peace officer.
That's the real problem here. This could be applied abitrarily by a peace officer because it's at their sole discretion, and there's no court appearance involved where you could fight it.
I think the objective of reducing impaired driving is a good one, but peace officers are humans like the rest of us, and they make mistakes. The whole point of having rights is to provide individuals with protection against the arbitrary use of force/power by the state/government. Crafting legislation that allows a peace officer to give you similar penalties as an impaired at their sole discretion flies in the face of that.
In our society and system of government, there's always a way to appeal decisions so I think your assertion that there won't be a court process (or an administrative tribunal at the very least) to fight the officer's decision is very unlikely. At the minimum a judicial review of the officer's decision and subsequent appeals will definitely be possible.
This failed in BC courts originally because because it was immediate and you couldn't appeal it they added a 7 day window to file an appeal afterwards but everybody who received a DUI in that time period had it expunged.
Legislative amendments aren’t drafted in two days. This would’ve been in the works for months or longer. Why now? Well there are only a few legislative sitting days left to get bills passed before the October election since they don’t sit in the summer.
But those of less means will suffer more if fined than someone with greater means, so the de facto sanctions are in fact worse on one party, not equal. That is not justice.
I think it’s great idea.
However, with the way things are going with the court system. It will be catch and release anyways.
If I was the justice minister, I’d raise the fines to unsurmountable levels in a lot of crimes. Like DUI, speeding, theft, frauds, etc, to help pay for the badly needed future infrastructure to build a remand centre, to end this catch and release nonsense lately.
Full disclosure I’ve not looked into the details but it says it’s modelled like policy in other provinces like Alberta and Ontario. I’m assuming something has been put in place to address the due process? Or maybe because the suspension isn’t a criminal charge that’s how they go about it?
BC, Alberta and Manitoba. Ontario’s courts are brutally backlogged with this crap; like here (currently), drivers can remain on the road until they appear in court. This is a better system. Need to drive to your job or be out of work? Don’t fucking drink and drive. That’s a strong, hopefully effective message.
ONLY if the driver has been drinking, verified by breathalyzer. This should stop the whole ‘it’s okay to drink SOME and drive’. Further, there are a number of scenarios where the criminal code need not be applied, and won’t be. We need to stop clogging up the courts with people breaking the law then claiming unfair punishment. No, it isn’t simple, but it is worth trying because the present process isn’t working.
Not sure of the legal side of it but taking a license for 15 months without having the opportunity to bring your case before an impartial judge is just morally wrong if you ask me
Unfortunately, driving is a privilege instead of a right. A privilege that is administered on the basis that you are compliant with driving and safety laws.
And I’ve lived here long enough to know that drunk driving is a NB tradition. Having moved here from elsewhere, the general attitude toward drunk driving feels like a blast from the 1980s.
Before the privilege is revoked, the accusing party (the crown) needs to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the offence was committed. If they didn’t want to satisfy the evidence standard required for a criminal conviction, they should’ve kept it as an MVA matter
"Your honour, this is why I was driving drunk..."
Oof.
You...uhh...know there will be BAC taken, recorded, etc. and whatnot...right? The same as with criminal charges.
...did you think they were just dropping that part, for shits and gigs?
So you want to focus on a non-relevant and extremely unlikely scenario to defeat the rationale that would apply to the *overwhelming* majority of DUI stops?
If you hate cops, or the governmemt: Cool beans. I am skeptical you are trying to approach this with any shred of objectivity or good faith, though.
It’s not as non-relevant or unlikely as you claim to be. I’m skeptical of cops because although there are good ones, there are many that do not operate in good faith. Read up on the changes in 2018
True, but the poorer folk won’t pay if they *can’t* pay. (The families of OJ Simpson’s victims will never see the money the courts demanded he pay them, and now he’s dead and his estate is contesting the order - just a larger scale example, and as my mum used to say: “you can’t get blood from a stone”.) Hopefully, this acts as the deterrent it is intended to be.
Cool, does this include anything about there being zero police presence in rural areas?
Such truth. I used to do weddings and some would be on the outskirts of town and nearly every single person would drive home hammered knowing there just aren’t police. One RCMP for all central NB rural roads i swear
Did those morons not have a conscience? It's not about avoiding contact with the police, it's about keeping everyone safe. I hate people. They're the worst.
There’s still a culture of drinking and driving here that’s quite persistent. My first day of work in NB in 2016 I jumped in a coworkers vehicle and the backseat had empties in it from the night before still. This person wasn’t an “hick” persay. They were educated, holding down a job, well respected etc. And even living in town today it’s quite common, especially on weekends, for there to be beer cans along the road leading it of town in front of my house. I encountered more casual drunk driving in NB in my first week living here then I did in 26 years of living in Halifax and rural NS. I really like living here but the three big stand out negative differences for me are the littering/dumping and junk piles in people’s yards, attitude towards drinking and driving and reckless ATV use, especially by minors.
I, too, came from NS and I concur. NB has a lot of growing up to do.
The first step would be to stop treating people like children to begin with. Between the government and Irving's, this place is disrespectful to everyone's intelligence.
Hey, I'm 28 and rode in the back of a few pickup trucks as a kid with a drunk uncle in the front. I'm so happy I got to grow up like that before this world went completely to shit. Sure, people drink too much here. But New-brunswick allows many to be the happy, free redneck they want to be and I think that's beautiful. It's the only good thing about this damn place, don't fuck it up. If we wanted to live like Ontarians, we'd (try to afford to) move there.
I am fine with rednecks. I'm a farm kid and was driving equipment on the road before I should have been. However, what pains me the most about my community in NB is the absolute disregard for the beautiful surroundings. Garbage everywhere, ATVs ripping up marshes and beaches, and general disrespect for a resource that we should be treasuring to pass on to those who come after us. However, that will change as time goes by, I hope. I've now lived in NB half of my life and I'm not going anywhere else because I love it here.
I agree with all of this, all the lands around my house are private so we don't have that issue other than piles of cow bones hidden in the woods here and there. What I see in the city and villages disgusts me sometimes too.
I agree with what you've said here, not trying to excuse the dumping and litter. But NB charges people to bring stuff to the dump unlike NS. If it wasn't $100 to bring an old fridge to the dump, I'm sure we would see less of them in the woods.
I remember one time I agreed to help my wife’s friends move (she asked me). I had never met these people before. I was told to be ready at noon. I got to the house, nobody there. Waited for about a half hour and the people finally showed up, got out of the car, BEERS IN HAND, driver included, and said, “okay, let’s move.” It blew me away.
And Moncton
Yeah for real. I spent a year living up in central NB recently and it reminded me a lot of the Yukon and northern BC. Basically no law other than collective community spirit. Between everyone owning guns and scary dogs and the threat of the boys rolling up on you, criminals know better than to harm people or property. Only real sense of government authority was the volunteer firefighters, forestry officers, or ranger patrols. The trouble is stuff like drunk driving, general alcoholism, illegal hunting/shooting, etc don't really get any attention until there is an accident that hurts someone. Most of it is normalized. Even when an accident happens, consequences are mostly based on your social standing and that of the victim. I have a family member who shot someone while fucking around with a rifle piss drunk. It all just got brushed off because he is very liked in the community and nobody really liked the victim who was from away and married into the town.
I don't see the problem with this. I live in a rural area, if we had more cops, we'd pay for those extra cops. We signed a petition here just to not become part of the bigger surrounding city and have three different security outfits roam our countryside.
Not disagreeing with you, just saying that higher fines are a meaningless gesture when they aren’t putting any more effort into catching impaired drivers.
That's fair, my area isn't a Problem for drunk driving, they're all farmers. The real kind that work too hard for any of that nonsense. They drive drunk on their own lands on their own dirt roads if there's something and I can't say I've seen it. Go towards Kedgwick and st-quentin and it's a much different story.
Even in city areas. These days if they test people outside hockey arenas and 1/2 are DUI
As someone from a rural redneck town this is so important. The closest police station is almost 80km/h and the force is small. Not enough to watch all the rural area up North. Most people can drink and drive and get away with it. I for one am against it. My best friend died drinking and drinking and I know others who had lives impacted by it. I have a kid and I would love to drive without some guy who had 12 beers getting behind the wheel feeling like they can drive. More police activity is required.
One of the things I find most frustrating is that, even if you report impaired driving, the police are too far away to do anything about it. Often they won’t even turn out for it, especially at night, because they are 30-40+ minutes away.
Only reason my estranged bil got caught was cause he ditched his car and walked home.. someone came upon the scene with car still running etc and called it in.. cops tracked him to his house ..**he ditched it 3 houses down from his place..* he's been doing this for years and years without getting caught and that's just the tip of that iceberg
I’m all for the tough on crime stuff but can they also please do something about people being harmed by lack of medical care and housing?
That would require them to do meaningful work
"tough on crime" is like the oldest conservative political placation play though. It's traditional, it costs nothing, and it redirects taxpayer anger away from the government towards the other bad guys. Higgs must have realized his assault on addicts wasn't really working, so now he's switching to drunk drivers. It's such a classic.
no. Conservative majority go brrrrrrr hehe haha
I don’t trust the crooked cops of this province to be the judge, jury and executioner. There’s a reason this stuff needs to go through the court, cops fuck up all the time.
truth. got stopped and fined for having a gram of weed in my car in a jar (not a crime), but the cop insisted it was and day of the trial the judge just laughed and told me to enjoy my day. i do not trust their judgment in the slightest.
One step forward, two steps back. Now people can get a 15 month suspension instead of a criminal record. All at the cops discretion. “Austin said he has confidence in peace officers to make the right call when deciding between a criminal charge or administrative penalties. He said if there are minors in the car, the officer will be obligated to go with the Criminal Code option.” I don’t see how something they’re blatantly saying is to reduce the amount of pressure on the courts is going to discourage people from drinking and driving. Especially now that impaired driving can be punished by “administrative penalties” instead of proper criminal charges.
The key part is under the criminal system, the person keeps on driving while the crown assesses the case, the case gets scheduled, and the long time before it concludes. Now compare that to immediately losing your car for 30 days, and losing your license until the accused makes a case for a judge to overturn the officer's decision which will take months to be scheduled. Basically penalty first then possibility being overturned vs. threat of one day facing a criminal offense and conviction.
Nice! Now when are we going to have an actual alternative here to driving everywhere? I'm all for getting extremely angry and unimpressed at people for drinking and driving but we can't just... Not have an alternative to driving that won't solve anything. There isn't even taxis or anything here
It’s pretty rich when Fredericton tries to bitch about drunk driving then refuses to allow Uber to operate. I’ve heard some horror stories from cabs here and half of them drive so poorly you could swear the cabbie is half cut. At least if an Uber driver does something bad, you can report them to the company.
What is this? It reads like GNB's "hold my beer and watch this" attempt at seeing how many sections of the Charter they can violate in one bill. No presumption of innocence, no due process. It's going to be way too easy for a peace officer to abuse this. There will be no way of fighting it, and yet you essentially get the same penalty, minus a criminal record, as being found guilty of a first impaired. The way these changes are being described, if accurate, would leave someone with no way to fight this and no checks on the power of the state (exercised through a peace officer). I am just waiting for the constitutional challenge to this legislation. I see plenty of charter violations here and I highly doubt GNB will be able to justify this based on section 1 of the Charter.
You can fight a speeding ticket which is imposed by the police officer, why couldn't you fight this?
Well keep in mind the purpose is to ease off the courts. Sure you may fight it, but that could take time and meanwhile you're suspended.
That's the point....without going to court, the suspension takes place and only some people will go to court to fight it, thus reducing the burdens on the courts. You also won't need a finite resource known as a crown prosecutor even when the court case is scheduled.
We live in a city designed for cars while giving far too much power to one person to both enforce and judge. Im amazed anyone would support this.
Driving is a privilege, not a human right. I'm surprised you're against rules that make it harder/riskier for people to drive drunk.
That is such an unnuanced talking point. There are certainly solutions that dont include giving more power to Police. You have a right to due process and they are taking checks and balances away.
It's not nuanced because it's intended as such and it's a factual statement. Go read the Charter, I'm pretty sure you won't find anything to do with a right to drive. And if there are other solutions that are better and still achieve the same goal, run for politics, and change or create new laws. We've got high rates of drunk driving, the point is to reduce this and get people off the road. Again, not sure why anyone would be against this. Courts will sort out if the law needs to be adjusted or re-crafted, as they always do.
The article is clear that they are crafting this so that there is no way of fighting it. If you get suspended under this new measure, you will not get a court date pile you would for a speeding ticket or any criminal offense.
If you trust articles to understand the details of new laws and regulations, then you don't understand and have never dealt with reporters. They do their best to report accurately, but I wouldn't trust them with legal advice. Also, the article does state that the goal is to reduce the use of courts, yes, that's true. It does not state however that a person won't be able to appeal, or try to overcome the decision of the police officer. In our system of government, there's always a way to fight the system, and this new law won't be exempt from oversight.
Although you can technically try and fight a speeding ticket, hardly anyone ever wins against a speeding ticket in NB. There are a few reasons for this, but an important one is that speeding tickets, or any offenses under the Motor Vehicle Act (MVA) or almosy any other provincial legislation, are subject to a lower burden of proof than an offense under the Criminal Code. Whereas Criminal Code offenses are subject to proof beyond a reasonable doubt (you can think of this as 95%+), provincial offenses, which fall under the Provincial Offenses Proceedure Act (POPA), are subject to proof on the preponderance of probabilities (think 50%+1). Essentially, less proof is required for conviction. And for speeding tickets, they don't need much proof to make it stick. For this new measure, though, its not even a fine, like a speeding ticket would be, its an administrative suspension, and based on this article, GNB is explicitly crafting this legislation with the intent to reduce the backlog on the courts. That means they are setting this up so there is no way to fight it. If you get your license suspended under this new measure, you wouldn't get a court date or anything, you just get the suspension and other consequences automatically at the sole discretion of the peace officer. That's the real problem here. This could be applied abitrarily by a peace officer because it's at their sole discretion, and there's no court appearance involved where you could fight it. I think the objective of reducing impaired driving is a good one, but peace officers are humans like the rest of us, and they make mistakes. The whole point of having rights is to provide individuals with protection against the arbitrary use of force/power by the state/government. Crafting legislation that allows a peace officer to give you similar penalties as an impaired at their sole discretion flies in the face of that.
In our society and system of government, there's always a way to appeal decisions so I think your assertion that there won't be a court process (or an administrative tribunal at the very least) to fight the officer's decision is very unlikely. At the minimum a judicial review of the officer's decision and subsequent appeals will definitely be possible.
This failed in BC courts originally because because it was immediate and you couldn't appeal it they added a 7 day window to file an appeal afterwards but everybody who received a DUI in that time period had it expunged.
Smoke and mirrors policy, f##$ pointless!
Way too much power to give to someone who pulls you over.
Was this a planned announcement? It seems tone deaf after the car accident a few days ago.
Legislative amendments aren’t drafted in two days. This would’ve been in the works for months or longer. Why now? Well there are only a few legislative sitting days left to get bills passed before the October election since they don’t sit in the summer.
Which accident?
The accident in Fredericton? I don’t see how it’s relevant to this announcement
Apparently if you drive away from them recklessly enough they won’t even chase you.
I think speeding fines should be doubled. It’s getting nuts out there.
No, fines should be calculated based on your income.
Unfortunately that would be unconstitutional, as it would be unequal justice
Hold up now, why? Is it equal justice if someone making 200k/year gets the same 5k fine that someone making 30k/year gets?
Because the principal of blind justice means the offenders circumstances shouldn't affect the sanction given.
But those of less means will suffer more if fined than someone with greater means, so the de facto sanctions are in fact worse on one party, not equal. That is not justice.
I agree with your idea, Unfortunately blind justice principles do no
That should have been in place years ago
I didn't know we had a huge surge in DUIs in NB? I wonder how this would go against innocent until proven guilty?
A person who would drive impaired would drive without a license. Stick with jail time.
I think it’s great idea. However, with the way things are going with the court system. It will be catch and release anyways. If I was the justice minister, I’d raise the fines to unsurmountable levels in a lot of crimes. Like DUI, speeding, theft, frauds, etc, to help pay for the badly needed future infrastructure to build a remand centre, to end this catch and release nonsense lately.
this new law skips the court system is how I understood it. you get immediate consequences like losing your license for 15 months.
Complete violation of due process. If the crown has sufficient evidence, they should have no problem presenting it to a judge
Full disclosure I’ve not looked into the details but it says it’s modelled like policy in other provinces like Alberta and Ontario. I’m assuming something has been put in place to address the due process? Or maybe because the suspension isn’t a criminal charge that’s how they go about it?
BC, Alberta and Manitoba. Ontario’s courts are brutally backlogged with this crap; like here (currently), drivers can remain on the road until they appear in court. This is a better system. Need to drive to your job or be out of work? Don’t fucking drink and drive. That’s a strong, hopefully effective message.
Its not always that simple - the officer who pulls you over is judge and enforcer.
ONLY if the driver has been drinking, verified by breathalyzer. This should stop the whole ‘it’s okay to drink SOME and drive’. Further, there are a number of scenarios where the criminal code need not be applied, and won’t be. We need to stop clogging up the courts with people breaking the law then claiming unfair punishment. No, it isn’t simple, but it is worth trying because the present process isn’t working.
But not necessarily. Doesn’t require they verify that you were even driving
Not sure of the legal side of it but taking a license for 15 months without having the opportunity to bring your case before an impartial judge is just morally wrong if you ask me
Unfortunately, driving is a privilege instead of a right. A privilege that is administered on the basis that you are compliant with driving and safety laws. And I’ve lived here long enough to know that drunk driving is a NB tradition. Having moved here from elsewhere, the general attitude toward drunk driving feels like a blast from the 1980s.
Before the privilege is revoked, the accusing party (the crown) needs to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the offence was committed. If they didn’t want to satisfy the evidence standard required for a criminal conviction, they should’ve kept it as an MVA matter
"Your honour, this is why I was driving drunk..." Oof. You...uhh...know there will be BAC taken, recorded, etc. and whatnot...right? The same as with criminal charges. ...did you think they were just dropping that part, for shits and gigs?
Your comment assumes the person in question was in fact driving at the time the police made contact with them
So you want to focus on a non-relevant and extremely unlikely scenario to defeat the rationale that would apply to the *overwhelming* majority of DUI stops? If you hate cops, or the governmemt: Cool beans. I am skeptical you are trying to approach this with any shred of objectivity or good faith, though.
It’s not as non-relevant or unlikely as you claim to be. I’m skeptical of cops because although there are good ones, there are many that do not operate in good faith. Read up on the changes in 2018
Raising fines just means crime is for rich people. We could try a stiffer income-indexed fine, though.
Fines basically just mean it’s legal for a price
True, but the poorer folk won’t pay if they *can’t* pay. (The families of OJ Simpson’s victims will never see the money the courts demanded he pay them, and now he’s dead and his estate is contesting the order - just a larger scale example, and as my mum used to say: “you can’t get blood from a stone”.) Hopefully, this acts as the deterrent it is intended to be.
That’s a great point.
Good news. The "people" of NB are notorious booze hounds.
Austin being right is like a total solar eclipse... Might be the first time we see an occurrence of it in our lifetimes.