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​The Vancouver Police Department has sparked controversy online by posting about a driver who had his iPad and iPhone mounted to his steering wheel using string. A clever trick to get around the distracted driving laws, but one that the police officer who pulled him over frowned upon. Since they posted the tweet and photographed that revealed the funny details of this traffic stop, a huge debate has erupted online over what penalty this driver should have faced.

The police let him go with an $81 ticket for not producing a license, and a warning about the cell phone mounting system.

Here are my thoughts on whether this is actually an offence.

​This week, Alberta unveiled its proposal for fixing their administrative license suspension law. The Alberta law was declared unconstitutional earlier this year, and the province was given one year to write a new version. Yesterday, they introduced the new version.

Bill 29 creates a new regime to deal with the problem of alcohol and drug-impaired driving but, in my view, does not cure the constitutional defects inherent in the legislation.
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​​In 2008, the small country town of Merritt, British Columbia was rocked when news broke that Allan Schoenborn had stabbed his estranged wife and killed their two children while they slept. He had suffered a psychotic break, and believed that that his children were being sexually assaulted. He killed them, in the horrific, mistaken belief that doing so would somehow save them from the humiliation of the ordeal.

​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.