Juno News - January 20, 2019


New drunk driving laws don't increase safety. They just reduce rights.

Mentioned
Andrew Lawton
Let’s stop kidding ourselves that the Karen Wang incident is anything new Christian doctors in Ontario are fighting for religious freedom

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

189.9

Word count

668

Sentence count

1


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

If you ve had a few drinks less than two hours after driving, you can be charged with a breath test. And if you refuse to comply with this test in your own home, you have to prove that you were not drunk.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 if you've had a few drinks less than two hours after driving you can be charged this is one of
00:00:09.000 the most bizarre takeaways from the new drinking and driving legislation across Canada that just
00:00:13.800 went into effect where if you were behind the wheel of a car and then you went into a bar and
00:00:18.960 had a few drinks or even if you went to your own home and got drunk police could demand a breath
00:00:24.060 test and charge you if you blow over or charge you if you refuse to comply in your own home when
00:00:30.320 you're there for the night your car is parked and you haven't been driving for an hour and a half
00:00:34.660 this is meant to take away the ability for people to claim that they got drunk after they were driving
00:00:41.220 and actually weren't driving drunk but what this legislation truly does is open the door to a whole
00:00:48.160 bunch of overzealousness that police are able to employ and what's worse is that despite the
00:00:54.240 protestations of the Ontario Criminal Lawyers Association pretty much every constitutional
00:00:59.580 lawyer imaginable civil liberties groups all of whom say that this will cause people to
00:01:04.660 have limited rights in their own homes and to have to prove their own innocence
00:01:09.380 police are still saying oh no no just trust us now don't get me wrong I'm very pro-police generally
00:01:16.400 they have a job to do unfortunately police are very fond of the freedom and power this gives them
00:01:22.300 and the latitude this gives them even if civil liberties take a hit under it so for example
00:01:27.400 when an Edmonton police spokesperson says no no they're only going to go and demand a breath test
00:01:32.460 if they have reasonable suspicion that's truly the opposite of what the legislation says police used to
00:01:39.340 require reasonable suspicion which is already a lower threshold than probable cause now that suspicion
00:01:45.620 is gone they can just on a whim decide they want to subject you to a breath test the problem with
00:01:51.240 this is that it allows police to go on a fishing expedition for people who have done nothing wrong
00:01:56.360 to basically allow police to try to find something you might have done wrong even in this case there's
00:02:03.020 nothing morally nor should there be anything legally wrong with having a few drinks at home when
00:02:08.660 you have no intention of driving again a lot of the people who have defended this legislation say
00:02:13.960 that age-old trope if you've got nothing to hide you don't need to worry or well if you're not drinking
00:02:19.660 and driving you don't need to worry the problem with laws that erode civil liberties is that they
00:02:24.640 push everyone into a position where they have to defend themselves and prove their innocence and that's
00:02:30.320 precisely what's contained in this legislation if police charge you with blowing over because you were
00:02:35.020 in your home and you drove less than two hours ago you have to prove that you were not drunk how do you
00:02:40.880 prove a negative how do you prove that you were not drunk when you were driving behind the wheel
00:02:45.140 but you got drunk or at least mildly intoxicated after the fact now don't get me wrong everyone
00:02:51.160 predicts that this legislation will be ruled unconstitutional but it'll take years countless
00:02:56.680 amounts of money government having to fight a long drawn out battle for this to get all the way up to
00:03:01.560 the supreme court before we get that definitive ruling the much better approach would be if the people
00:03:07.040 responsible for drafting this legislation wouldn't put something that has no respect for civil liberties
00:03:12.500 in front of parliament in the first place and if parliament wouldn't adopt these things but again the
00:03:19.080 government stands by it mad which is an activist group is standing by it and police are standing by it
00:03:24.520 but that's because it gives government power over you and i for true north i'm andrew lutton
00:03:30.560 you