We went to visit my sister and brother-in-law in BC this last weekend, and his sister who was also there was behaving pretty wildly - she was drunk (and stoned) and driving her car around in the driveway of their large lot. We had quite the discussion about what the police would do if they showed up (which was a real possibility, since she was yelling, blowing the horn and playing music loudly - yeah, she was just a ball of fun); my brother-in-law was adamant that you can’t be charged with drunk driving on private property, and I was fairly sure you could - a crime doesn’t stop being a crime because you’re not on a public roadway, although the damage you can do is limited if you stay in a driveway.
Any ideas where I can find out what the skinny is on the law on this in BC? Thanks.
Oh, just for the record, she was doing all this with her young children there. That is one classy broad. :rolleyes:
However , do to the way its written makes it sound like they really dont give a shit where they nail you. But for what its worth, I have heard the same thing in Ontario.
I think alice has the right idea, with the Criminal Code (CC). Note that the CC applies equally across the country. BC, and Ontario, and the rest of the provinces may have impaired-driving statutes that would apply on their public roads; but the CC simply makes it an offense to operate any of the stated vehicles while impaired (generally laid in situations where the officer has probable cause to believe the driver is impaired by something, but doesn’t know what) or over the limit of 0.08% bac, anywhere. Other CC offenses–theft, for example–certainly do not make the public/private property distinction, and a reading of the applicable CC section (thank you, alice) indicates that neither does s. 253.
That being said, it seems to me that, practically speaking, doing such a thing on private property would not attract the attention of police unless someone lodged a complaint and the police responded.
Well, I do have to wonder how such a distinction could be made, when someone who was shit faced could start out on a pubic road and drive onto private property without even knowing. There are an awful lot of farmer’s fields right on the highway around these parts.
Your brother in law is absolutely dead wrong and there is an assload of case law that says so. Many people have been arrested for drunk driving while in private parking lots.
The confusion likely stems from the fact that most traffic offenses are summary offenses under the province’s Highway Traffic Act,** and indeed those laws DO apply only to acts on Her Majesty’s roads.** If you build a road on your own property there is no law that says you can’t bomb around on it at 190 while yapping on your cell phone, not wearing a seat belt, and switching lines signal-free more than a douchebag in a BMW.
But the Criminal Code says you can’t be in control of a motor vehicle while drunk, ever, anywhere. The car doesn’t even have to be moving. It doesn’t even have to be switched on.
This is a good question, but in Canada there’s a technical reason for it.
Transportation and the highways are a provincial jurisdiction. If you are speeding in Ontario, you are breaking the law of the Province of Ontario; specifically, the Highway Traffic Act. As it happens the HTA limits its scope to acts on public roads, for the most part.
However, drunk driving was deliberately made a CRIMINAL offense, a federal law. Criminal law in Canada is a federal jurisdiction. This is not accidental. Provincial law is limited in its ability to mete out punishment; the absolute theoretical meximum punishment for violating provincial law is imprisonment of two years less a day. For a federal law, of course, it’s the rest of your life. Putting drunk driving in the Criminal Code allows for drunk drivers to have the book thrown at them, not that it happens often enough.
Limiting drunk driving to being defined as acts taken on provincial highway, however, would push the envelope of federal/provincial jurisdiction.
That’s one reason, anyway. The other is that drunk driving is a public menace - it will kill more Americans between now and the end of the year than have died in Iraq since 2003 - and the government simply wants police to be afforded the right to arrest drunk drivers while they’re still in parking lots; that’s pretty much what it boils down to. The scenario outlined in the OP is not the common one; the common scenario is that the cops are tipped to some drunk trying to get his Taurus out of a bar parking lot. They need to be able to arrest Drunky in the parking lot.
Probably because you’d get more assholes whipping around the woods drunk out of their gourd on ATVs, or carving up the land on farm equipment, or accidentally launching yourself onto the highway on a snowmobile etc. A lot of private properties also have public easements. For example, the Bruce Trail goes through a lot of privately owned farmland, so the asshat on the ATV can crush a hiker.
But mainly, it’s as RickJay said. It’s preferable to be able to catch you before you actually get going on the road, and being able to arrest you in your own driveway or the privately owned parking lot of a commercial establishment is more effective from a public safety point of view than catching you after you’ve already caused an accident.
When they repealed the law locally (in South Dakota) that allowed police to charge you with DUI on a bicycle we celebrated with a “Tour de Bars” with 35 cyclists over 8 hours and 10 bars.
Thanks for all the good information, peeps. I can see the logic behind the private property DUI laws - you can actually do a lot of damage in your own driveway. There were two adolescent boys running around (as well as assorted drunk adults) while she was doing this. I can see where the police would not likely get involved in most people moving their car in their own driveway after they’d had a few, but doing like she was doing, blowing the horn and making noise, could certainly get their attention.
I don’t think DUI on bikes should be repealed; my husband has a friend who totalled someone else’s car while he was driving drunk on his bike - he ran into the front of the parked car and managed to do so much damage that the car was not worth fixing. There was an old lady killed here recently by a roller-blader (who, as far as I know, wasn’t drunk - just an example of how dangerous roller-blading can be to pedestrians) - I think anything beyond drunk walking is a public danger.
Aside from the safety of others, if I want to do a lot of damage to my property, that should be my right. The state should not be able to come and arrest me because I decided that I wanted to destroy the pavilion I built in my front yard with my Lincoln town car.
I can see a little leeway on arresting someone in the parking lot of a tavern owner, but I would say you might need the tavern owner to request charges be made, as its his property you are potentially damaging. The arrest based on what “I might do” on a public roadway is overreaching by the state.
Eh - I disagree. It’s really easy to not drink and drive. Like, stupidly easy. I think that’s why Canada has a no tolerance policy on this type of thing - it’s so easy to avoid there’s really no excuse.
I agree there is a conflict here: non-harmful acts on private property where the driver has no intention of entering a public area should not come under state purview — and it is simply reaching for the state to claim ‘they might enter public space’: punishment can only encompass actualities, not possibilities.
In the other hand, if the pavilion collapses on the car ( and elsewhere ) and that causes brain damage to the driver or others, other public services such as ambulances and health care will be involved; and it seems reasonable to prevent probable bad eventualities…
I daresay a lot of bad stuff would be prevented if some people automatically had their keys confisticated the minute they sat in the driver’s seat. Not just drunks.
In Ireland, where the wording of the legislation specifically refers to “driving or attempting to drive a mechanically propelled vehicle in a public place”, it would be illegal to drive drunk in a bar parking lot. It may be private property, but it is still a public place.
However it would not be an offence under the Road Traffic Act for me to drive drunk in my driveway.
(That is my layman’s understanding - I am not a lawyer).