You just got an Immediate Roadside Prohibition. Maybe you were drinking. Maybe you weren’t. Either way, the clock is running, and what you do in the next few days will determine whether you keep your licence or lose it for 90 days along with everything that comes with that.
Most people make at least one of the following mistakes. Some make several. Here is what to avoid.
1. Assuming There Is No Defence Because You Were Drinking
This is the most common mistake, and it stops people from getting help before they even pick up the phone.
Yes, you had a drink. That does not mean the IRP was lawful, that the device reading was accurate, or that the officer followed the required procedures. The IRP scheme is full of technical and procedural requirements that must be met. The Approved Screening Device has to be properly calibrated and maintained. The officer has to follow a specific process. If any of those requirements were not met, the prohibition may not stand, regardless of whether you had been drinking.
Impaired driving defence is counterintuitive. The law does not always work the way people expect it to. Do not disqualify yourself before you speak to a lawyer.
2. Moving Slowly
You have seven days from the date the IRP was served to file for a review. That is not seven business days. That is seven calendar days, including weekends.
Most people who miss that window do not miss it because they forgot. They miss it because the first day or two felt manageable and then suddenly it was day five. By day five, a lawyer may not have enough time to properly prepare your review application.
The damage from moving slowly goes beyond the filing deadline. Evidence disappears quickly. CCTV video from a business or roadside location is routinely overwritten within 48 to 72 hours. Witnesses’ recollections fade. Documents that exist today may not exist next week. A lawyer who gets the call on day one has options that a lawyer who gets the call on day six does not. Building a proper case takes time, and every day you wait is a day that cannot be recovered.
If you received an IRP today, today is the day to make calls.
3. Constructing a Defence That Is Not Actually a Defence
Some people spend hours in the days after an IRP building in their mind what they believe is a strong case. They write out timelines, gather witness statements from friends who were with them, and rehearse explanations for why the reading must have been wrong.
The problem is that most of what people think will help them does not help them in the IRP review process. The grounds of review are specific and technical. “I only had two drinks” is not a ground of review. “My friend saw me and says I wasn’t impaired” is not a ground of review. Spending your limited time and energy building a case that has no legal relevance leaves you worse off, not better.
A lawyer can tell you immediately what the actual grounds are and whether any of them apply to your situation.
4. Taking Legal Advice From People Who Are Not Lawyers
After an IRP, people talk. They talk to family, friends, coworkers, and people who had an IRP once. Everyone has a theory. Most of the theories are wrong.
The IRP review process is a specialized area of administrative law. Even lawyers who do not practice in this area regularly are not well positioned to give reliable advice on it. The people most likely to give you confidently wrong information are the people who went through the process themselves, because their experience may have no bearing on yours and the law may have changed since then.
Get your advice from someone who does this work every day.
5. Failing to Preserve Evidence, or Not Knowing When Preservation Matters
Not all evidence matters in an IRP review, and not all evidence needs to be preserved immediately. But some does, and the window to preserve it can be short.
Photos of certain aspects or areas of the scene may be relevant. If there are witnesses whose recollections will fade, getting their accounts documented early matters. The difficulty is that most people do not know which evidence is worth preserving and which is not, and they either preserve nothing or spend time gathering things that will not be usable.
A lawyer can tell you within the first conversation what is worth preserving and what is not.
6. Assuming the Superintendent Will Care About Your Need to Drive
It is understandable to want to explain, in your review, how much you need your licence. Your job depends on it. You have children to drive to school. You live in an area without transit. You will lose your livelihood.
The Superintendent of Motor Vehicles does not have the authority to consider any of that. The review process is limited to specific legal grounds. Whether the prohibition was lawfully issued is the question. Your personal circumstances are not part of that analysis, and including them in your submissions does not help your case.
7. Assuming the Police Did Everything Right
The requirements an officer must meet when issuing an IRP are far more involved than most people realize, and almost none of them are visible on the face of the documents you receive.
The stop itself must be lawful. The officer must record specific information, convey specific information to you at the roadside, and operate the Approved Screening Device in a precise way. The evidence must be recorded correctly and the report to the Superintendent must contain certain required elements. Some of those elements are explicitly required by the legislation. Others are expected by the Superintendent as a matter of practice. And some things officers routinely include in their reports are actually unnecessary, which creates its own set of issues.
None of this is apparent to someone reading the paperwork for the first time. It takes someone who has reviewed hundreds of these reports, who knows what should be there and what should not, and who understands what the Superintendent expects versus what the law strictly requires, to identify where an officer fell short.
Officers make mistakes. The mistakes are not always obvious. The only way to know whether one was made in your case is to have someone examine the record who knows exactly what to look for.
8. Assuming the Law Will Not Be on Your Side
The IRP scheme has been amended repeatedly, challenged in court, and litigated extensively. The law around breath testing, device reliability, and procedural requirements is complex, and it does not always produce the outcomes people expect.
There are arguments available in IRP reviews that most people would never anticipate. A lawyer who specializes in this area has files on specific officers, specific devices, and specific patterns of error that can be directly relevant to your case. That information exists nowhere that a member of the public could access it. It only exists because lawyers like myself have been doing this work, building those files, and developing those arguments for years.
You do not know what arguments are available to you until you ask someone who does.
9. Filing a Written Review Without Legal Input, or Scheduling It Wrong
When you apply for a review, you have a choice between a written review and an oral hearing. Most people, acting on their own, choose the written review because it feels simpler. In most cases, it is the wrong choice.
Beyond the format, there is the question of scheduling. An oral hearing needs to be scheduled in a way that gives your lawyer enough time to prepare and that fits within the constraints of the process. People who schedule their own hearings without legal input often create timing problems that limit what a lawyer can do for them, even if they hire one afterward.
If you are going to apply for a review, speak to a lawyer before you file anything.
10. Telling Your Doctor
This one surprises people.
In the days after an IRP, some people speak to their doctor, thinking the doctor may be able to help them. Perhaps the doctor can write something confirming they do not have a drinking problem, or that a medical condition could have affected the reading.
What people do not realize is that a doctor who becomes aware of information relevant to their patient’s fitness to drive may be required to report that information to the Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles. That report can trigger a separate and independent process that goes well beyond the IRP itself.
Before you speak to your doctor about anything related to your IRP, speak to a lawyer.
11. Listening to a Parent Who Says to Take Your Lumps
It comes from a good place. A parent who watched you go through something stressful wants it to be over. Their instinct is that accepting the outcome is the mature, responsible thing to do.
That advice does not account for the full picture. A 90-day driving prohibition carries consequences that extend well beyond 90 days. Insurance rates, employment implications, and the effect on any future driving record can follow a person for years. Weighed against those long-term consequences, the cost of getting legal advice is not a luxury. It is a straightforward calculation.
You may have grounds for a successful review. You will not know until you ask someone who can tell you.
12. Calling the Police to Apologize
This happens more than you might think. Someone gets home after receiving an IRP, feels terrible about it, and decides the right thing to do is call the police detachment, ask to speak to the officer, and apologize. Sometimes they are hoping the officer will have a change of heart. Sometimes they genuinely just want to express remorse.
This is one of the worst things you can do. Anything you say to the officer can end up in a report. An apology can be read as an admission. A conversation intended to smooth things over can instead hand the government evidence that is difficult or impossible to undo. The officer has no authority to cancel an IRP once it has been issued. The call accomplishes nothing for you and can actively damage your case.
Do not contact the officer. Do not contact the detachment. Call a lawyer instead.
The Seven-Day Window Does Not Wait
Every mistake on this list shares a common thread: time spent on the wrong thing is time not spent on the right thing. You have seven days. Use them to speak to someone who can actually help you.
The seven-day window does not wait. Contact me today.
