The case taken by 76-year-old B.C. woman Norma McLeod is a preview of the major legal issues to come
OTTAWA — The case of Norma McLeod, the 76-year-old B.C. woman who’s filed a Charter challenge against mandatory alcohol screening, shows the sweeping powers police now have to pull over any car at any time and force the driver to take a breath test.
That’s thanks to a 1990 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that allows them to make “random routine traffic checks” for a certain number of reasons: to check a driver’s licence and insurance, to check the car’s mechanical condition, and — crucially — to check sobriety. The fact that mandatory breath tests are now a part of “random routine traffic checks” means R. v. Ladouceur is likely open to new challenge.
They point to R. v. Chehil, a 2013 SCC decision about police sniffer dogs that is the most recent authority on how police can use reasonable suspicion to conduct searches. R. v. Chehil held that reasonable suspicion complies with the Charter because it “has been deemed to be minimally impairing, but only if the suspicion rises above the level of generalized suspicion.”
There are other cases of medical issues causing this problem. In fact, McLeod’s lawyers have just had a different case where a 69-year-old woman, Inger Forsyth, was deemed to have refused a breath sample after 10 failed attempts. Forsyth was on antibiotics at the time for bronchitis.
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