In The News

VANCOUVER — Canadian police have not seen a spike in cannabis-impaired driving one month since legalization, but there needs to be more awareness of laws around storing marijuana in vehicles and passengers smoking weed, law enforcement officials say.
The Canadian Press canvassed police forces and provincial and territorial Crowns across the country and while some said it was too early to provide data, others said initial numbers and anecdotal impressions suggest stoned driving isn’t on the rise.
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Kyla Lee, a Vancouver-based lawyer who wants to file a court challenge of the Drager test once it’s used on a driver who wishes to dispute it, said she hadn’t heard of it being used anywhere yet.
“I was worried when the law changed … that this sort of panic around cannabis-impaired driving was going to lead to a number of false arrests and bad investigations. That’s not what I’ve been seeing,” she said.
To read the full article, click here.

Listen to lawyer Kyla Lee speak with Charles Adler Tonight about cannabis impaired driving and whether it is appropriate to deal with these cases on a case-by-case basis.

Vancouver criminal lawyer Kyla Lee as asked to appear on Vancouver Consumer (this was not a paid programming piece) to discuss the ins and outs of cannabis legalization and marijuana impaired driving with Sterling Faux. Please have a listen above.

Canadians who work for, or have connections to, the cannabis industry are running into problems at the U.S. border, including lifetime travel bans.
Len Saunders, an immigration lawyer based in Blaine, Wash., says he’s received many calls from businesses who tried to travel to the U.S. and were either turned away or banned. He says that’s been accompanied by a spike in applications for waivers. 

​“It used to be that almost all my waiver connections were criminal convictions. Now I would say probably 25 per cent of my waivers, where it used to be one or two per cent, are waivers where people have run into problems because of marijuana,” he said. “When I first started practicing in Blaine 15 years ago, I’d maybe get one or two cases a year, and when they legalized it in Washington state… my cases went up to one or two a month. When Trudeau started legalizing marijuana… my cases went up to one or two a week. So it’s a huge growth industry for immigration lawyers.”

On this week’s episode of Driving Law with Kyla Lee, I speak with Paul Doroshenko of Acumen Law Corporation about how high-end vehicle sales in Vancouver may be connected to money laundering. Then, we discuss the recent case of a Burnaby RCMP officer who was struck and injured following a traffic stop for using an electronic device while driving. Finally, we talk about drug-impaired driving laws and what’s in store for constitutional challenges.

You can listen here on Soundcloud or subscribe on iTunes.

All eyes were on the passing of the Cannabis Act last week, which will make it legal to buy recreational weed in Canada on October 17. But the government also passed its impaired driving bill—one that gives police sweeping new powers and could criminalize drivers who are completely sober.
Bill C-46 creates new offences for people who drive with a certain amount of THC in their system and toughens up the rules around drinking and driving. While that may sound like a good thing—no one wants dangerous drivers on the road—experts argue several parts of the bill are unconstitutional and will trample on the rights of citizens.