In The News

British Columbia’s minister of housing says he’s shocked and frustrated by an attempt to recruit people to take part in what he calls a fraud to get around new rules about short-term rentals.

Ravi Kahlon shared a screenshot on social media showing a Vancouver-based rental management company offering $500 to people willing to change the address on their driver’s licence to match an address it selects, then apply for an Airbnb approval.

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Kyla on Global News: B.C. housing minister tells people not to help ‘desperate scammers’ with Airbnb fraudRead More »

On today’s show Brent has Vancouver criminal lawyer Kyla Lee to talk about disability and driving under the influence. PWD + DUI: Failure to accommodate.

“Under the criminal code of Canada, the criminal code says you cannot drive or operate a vehicle if your ability to do so is impaired by a drug. And so for people who take a medication for a disability, for a medical condition, their ability to operate the vehicle isn’t impaired by the drug… But the law doesn’t have a mechanism to sort out those cases.”

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Kyla on PWD Allies podcast: Disability and driving under the influenceRead More »

On The Coast’s Soapbox Social panel, Kyla Lee and Mo Amir, react to Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi stepping down as the B.C. Greens’ deputy leader after liking a post that compared Dr. Bonnie Henry to Josef Mengele, Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke’s first year, and the quickly sold-out Stanley Park train tickets.

“When it’s healthcare practitioners saying ‘people are going to die, we feel a moral responsibility to challenge this law because of our profession’, I think that gets a lot more people listening.”

“They’re not challenging entirely any prohibition on public consumption. They are agreeing with the fact that there should be a prohibition of consumption in skateparks and children’s parks and school yards. So they’re limiting the nature of their challenge in such a way that it actually protects people from saying ‘well children are going to be exposed to drug use by a successful challenge of this law”…

Kyla Lee, a Vancouver criminal lawyer for Acumen Law Corporation, and Mo Amir, host of the podcast This is VANCOLOUR, react to Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi stepping down as the B.C. Greens’ deputy leader after liking a post that compared Dr. Bonnie Henry to Josef Mengele, Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke’s first year, and the quickly sold-out Stanley Park train tickets.

“Now that we know that everything you do as a politician, every second of every day is going to be scrutinized, and because we have a 24 hour cycle of politicians attacking other politicians, you cannot like, you cannot follow, you cannot retweet, you cannot comment until you’re fully sure that you’ve read everything any maybe if you’re not sure what you’re about to say, run it by your comms people…”

Listen here.

“My suspicion is that as far as criminal charges are concerned, they’re likely not to be laid. Because again, the government doesn’t want to have to get into this big constitutional challenge. They don’t want to take this person up on their dare to be charged and to challenge the law. So in all likelihood, they’re just going to seize all of the drugs, let the business get back up and running and then we’re going to go through this again and it’s going to be a repeat cycle…”

“They’re sending the message that building social housing is obviously not the priority. The priority is building housing and it’s building market housing and it’s moving developments along and it’s appeasing developers… We’ve seen the provincial government step in on a number of occasions now when it comes to housing… My hope is that we’ll see the provincial government stepping in and creating some sort of regulations that say if you’re financing these big projects, you can’t refuse to provide financing simply because there’s a condition that social housing has to be done first.”

Listen here.

“I’m concerned as a criminal lawyer about the prevalence of AI and the speed at which people are using it… With AI you can now use it to mimic somebody’s voice, to make a video to look like somebody, and that could be used potentially to defraud innocent people and put people at risk.”

“I’m not that concerned that AI is going to eliminate the role of lawyers. There are a lot of ways that AI can be used to make the job of lawyers for efficient or more effective, but at the same time the law is ever-changing…”

“That’s one thing that could lead to police involvement – if you’re using your fireworks unsafely, or if you’re using them when you’re not permitted to do so… If you’re violating those rules that could really get you into trouble because those are considered explosives and they are considered dangerous and there are a number of injuries that people can suffer…”

Mo Amir, host of the podcast This is VANCOLOUR, and Kyla Lee, a Vancouver criminal lawyer for Acumen Law Corporation, weigh in on B.C. politicians trying to make their nicknames for opponents stick, a Vancouver councillor’s attempt to make intersections safer with speed and red-light cameras — and how they handle handing out candy on Halloween.

“In some jurisdictions they’re using intersection cameras to issue distracted driving tickets by using really high-powered lenses to look through the windows of motor vehicles – we probably won’t ever see that in British Columbia because of the privacy concerns.”

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“Intersection cameras can’t identify who was driving the vehicle and the result of that is that the government has made this compromise where if we’re going to be policed by robot, we’re not going to get the tickets added to our driving record and we’re not going to get penalty points which is what most people are concerned about.”

Listen here.