Spending your days trying to figure out the Ford government is like spending your days trying to figure out why the coin you just tossed came up heads — that’s to say, it’s a study in randomness. At least with the coin, you know that, on balance, a flip has an even chance of turning up one side or the other. With the Tories, things are much less predictable.
The government is under fire for a pandemic-era rule, still in place, that aimed at reducing backlogs in the justice system. In a bid to keep court business moving, the attorney general directed prosecutors to consider, within their discretion and when the charges were not aggravated, downgrading impaired-driving charges if the accused pleaded guilty to a Highway Traffic Act violation instead. The exchange would mean no criminal record for the accused and a swifter resolution of cases in a backed-up court system.
The Tories say the policy applies only to less serious impaired-driving cases and frees up resources to deal with more serious cases. But if you’re going to have a law to protect people on the road — pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and their passengers — then you ought to be consistent with it instead of using the pandemic and backlogs as an excuse to let irresponsible drivers off the hook.
But perhaps “off the hook” is unfair. As Global News reports, criminal-defence lawyer Bruce Daly points out the email offers from the Crown included the following deal:
“We are prepared to offer a plea as follows: dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, $3,000 fine, 12 month prohibition running concurrent with a 12 month loss of license under the Highway Traffic Act.”
That’s not a free pass, and taking the deal included a suspended license, which, in theory, gets the driver off the road — at least for a year — and one hopes teaches them an important lesson about making bad decisions.
The policy may indeed be defensible if we give the government the benefit of the doubt and assume a few things. For one, let’s assume it works and doesn’t make matters worse. The Ford government, however, didn’t bother tracking its use and outcomes, so we have limited data on how it’s worked — or not. How many times was the policy used? How does it relate to the number of impaired drivers on the road? To accidents? Injuries? Deaths?
You could also argue the policy was reasonable if the government were being generally consistent on justice — that is to say, taking the same approach to other court matters. But the Ford government is anything but consistent here, since the premier has “tripled down” on appointing hanging judges and justices of the peace in the PCs’ partisan seizing of the judicial system. They’ve even introduced harsher penalties for those convicted of impaired driving. Moreover, the Tories are “getting tough” on auto theft, overstepping their constitutional boundaries in the process. The premier loves to talk about being “tough on crime,” so what’s the rule here?
If you’re a critic of the carceral state and think the criminal-justice system produces harms without concomitant goods and solutions, the impaired-driving downgrade policy may also seem fair and balanced. There’s plenty to be said about a legal system that chews people up and spits them out, leaving no one better off and many worse off: no rehabilitation, no justice, and plenty of social and economic harms to boot. You may also say the same about justice being proportionate and thus at least requiring a different punitive approach depending on the severity of the offence.
There’s a legitimate case to be made that the impaired-driving swap policy is indeed a reasonable approach to a better way of administering justice, provided it works and doesn’t contribute to a rise in impaired driving, accidents, injuries, or deaths. But that doesn’t seem to be the government’s priority: it’s evidently just trying to manage an austerity-induced resource gap in the justice system that it’s done nothing significant to fix.
Governing means trade-offs, responding to events, managing limited resources, and trying to make policy that fits in the real world. The impaired-driving charge-reduction policy could be more than reasonable — it could be justifiable and effective. But the key to good policy is making it in the right way and for the right reasons and then backing it up through verifiable data that’s shared with the public. It’s consistent with related policies and the government’s broader ideological agenda. On this score, Ford and company are zero for four — which seems about right for them.
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