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​The Attorney General of British Columbia, David Eby, was recently interviewed by the Vancouver Sun. One of the issues covered in the interview was the question of Legal Aidfunding. During his campaign, Attorney General Eby promised to restore funding to Legal Aid, which is a critical issue in the access to justice sphere.

That has not happened yet.

Unfortunately, Attorney General Eby’s response was less than comforting, particularly for those who cannot get legal aid funding for their criminal matters.

​This week, the Provincial Government announced changes to the distracted driving laws in British Columbia. Again. They are raising the fines and penalties again. If you don’t recall, I wrote about this last year when the fine amounts and penalty points were increased.

Now, the BC Government has decided to increase the penalty again, because drivers aren’t getting the message. This policy, however, actually amounts to a substitution of penalties and will not lead to a decrease in distracted driving overall.

Here’s why.

This last week, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Beverley McLachlin waded into the #IBelieveSurvivors debate. She made some startling but important and refreshing comments about the rights of an accused person in a sexual assault trial, and the rights of complainants in sexual assault cases.

Her comments that have been most quoted are these: “no one has the right to a particular verdict.” And she is absolutely right.

However, the Government has proposed a piece of legislation that seems to codify the opposite. With Bill C-51, the Federal Government is trying to make it so that sexual assault complainants are, in essence, guaranteed a verdict unless the defence shows that a sexual assault did not occur.

Not a day goes by when we do not read stories about the carnage that fentanyl is wreaking on our communities. The BC Court of Appeal has issued a stern warning for those who traffic in fentanyl: the starting point for sentencing is a jail sentence in the range of eighteen months. And given the evidence and attention about fentanyl deaths, it’s hard to cry foul at these guidelines.

As a result of the severe consequences of fentanyl trafficking, the BC Government has been repeatedly asked about what they are doing to address the situation. Some have suggested a pro-social approach, enhancing opportunities for rehabilitation for drug users. Others have pointed to studies that have shown that decriminalizing hard drugs actually leads to a decrease in deaths associated to those drugs. Others still think the answer is to arrest all the traffickers, round them up, and throw them in jail.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the Alco-Sensor FST manual was changed to support a certain unscientific and inaccurate belief about mouth temperature. My concern with any of this is, of course, the fairness of the Immediate Roadside Prohibition review process and whether drivers are given a reasonable opportunity to challenge the apparent results of their breath tests.

Sadly, today I learned of yet another change the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles has made to make the review process less effective and fair to drivers. I have to say, sometimes participating in this review process is like attempting to play a chess match with Death, except Death can change the rules of the game at any point.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about mouth temperature and how it can impact the reliability of a breath test. I wanted to show the impact that even a small change in mouth temperature, from a few seconds of swishing hot water to a few seconds of sucking an ice cube, could have on an blood alcohol reading.

You can see how the results of my blood alcohol test go up and down based on what I put in my mouth in this video. These factors would only have impacted the temperature of my mouth by a few degrees, and the effect was not prolonged. In real-world circumstances, a prolonged impact from increased or decreased mouth temperature may have a more significant impact on the results of the test.

In any event, the proof is in the science. And you can see it here.

Many of the Twitter trolls that harass me every time I succeed in anImmediate Roadside Prohibition or impaired driving case appear to believe that innocent people do not receive DUI charges. This could not be farther from the truth. I have personally seen how a person can provide a falsely elevated result just from a few drops of alcohol consumed in recent proximity to the test.

This phenomenon is known as residual mouth alcohol. And it can affect the reliability of an approved screening device (or, roadside breathalyser) test. But it can also affect the reliability of a breathalyser at the police station, even where the instrument has a mechanism designed to eliminate it.

The video above shows how mouth alcohol falsely skews the results. I do not want to spend much time on the process, but more on what I have seen and where mouth alcohol can come from in affecting a breath test.