VANCOUVER—Civil-liberties and racialized-community advocates are slamming Canada’s new impaired driving laws, saying they put excessive powers in the hands of officers to target people who already face over-policing.

They argue that the new updates, which came into effect Tuesday and expand police powers to do roadside testing, will exacerbate an existing policing problem — the disproportionate “targeting” of racialized communities, such as Black and Indigenous people — and impinge on every Canadian’s rights and freedoms.

“We are scared ... We don’t often have an opportunity to assert our Charter rights because we are terrified of the consequences. We know this can escalate into the use of force,” said June Francis, director at the Institute for Diaspora research at Simon Fraser University.

She pointed to the case of a former UBC football player who was Tasered by police in B.C. earlier this year; recent reports of systemic racism in Thunder Bay’s police force; and carding data from both Toronto and Vancouver that shows some racialized people experience a disproportionate number of street checks.

The new update to Bill C-46 enables officers to do roadside testing on anyone who has been “lawfully” pulled over. Under the former regime, officers needed to have “reasonable suspicion” that a driver had alcohol in their body — such as the smell of booze or the sound of slurred speech — before administering a breathalyzer.

Now, any driver who refuses to provide a breath sample could be subject to a criminal offence. The new rules also allow police officers to test for impairment by using any device approved by the attorney general.

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Sgt. Marie Damian, spokesperson for the RCMP, said the amended bill allows police to better combat drunk driving, which she said is the leading criminal cause of death in the country.

“Mandatory alcohol screening has been internationally credited to reduce the incidence of impaired driving and can be a valuable public-safety tool,” she said in an email statement.

Damian added that the RCMP are guided by a “bias-free policing policy,” which calls for the “equitable treatment of all persons” regardless of race, religion, gender or ethnic background.

Still, even when stopped at random, minorities are treated differently and the situation tends to escalate more quickly, Francis said.

Critics link the apparent expansion of police powers to the practice of street checks, or carding. In 2010, the Toronto Star reported that the city’s police carded Black people three times as often as others, though they made up 8.4 per cent of the Toronto population.

Additionally, police data from 2008-2017 revealed earlier this year that Indigenous and Black people in Vancouver were carded at a disproportionately higher rate than the rest of the population. This prompted a formal complaint from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been fighting the impaired-driving changes for more than a year and outlined its concerns directly to the House of Commons.

Rob De Luca, the director of the organization’s Democracy and Rule of Law program, said there are better solutions that are more sensitive to every Canadian’s Charter rights and freedoms, such as publicizing roadside checkpoints.

Often, the Charter violation itself is trivialized, he added. For some, blowing into a machine may not “be a big deal,” but for others, police interactions can be disturbing or frightening. Individual experiences with police officers can vary widely — and for good reason, he added.

“It can be a very troubling experience to have one’s bodily sample forcibly taken by a police officer on the side of the road without the officer having any suspicion that they’ve done anything wrong,” he said.

This “power imbalance” is very different from requesting a licence and registration, he argued, as it’s much more intimate. The new rules will likely lead to lengthier interactions with police officers and more detentions.

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He expects the matter will play out in the courts in the following months — after the first charges roll out.

For Francis, this is not just a problem for racialized communities. It’s a problem for everyone.

“This should enrage all Canadians. It is opening the door to injustice in other areas,” she said. “They’ve heard it enough and can’t be blind to this anymore.”

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