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The province's Court of Appeal has thrown out the conviction of a motorist who was ticketed after using a GPS device in Halifax.

Mehardeep Singh Anand was spotted by a Halifax Regional Police officer using a hand-held device on Connaught Avenue during rush hour, which the officer thought was a cellphone. Anand testified that it was a GPS device and he was looking for a way to get out of traffic.

The officer wrote Anand a ticket for using a cellular telephone or text messaging on a communication device.

The adjudicator dealing with the original ticket accepted Anand's testimony but said that using a GPS was still like using a communication device.

“The whole purpose, if you will, behind the legislation is . . . is to avoid drivers being distracted and concentrating on other things and . . . texting instead of watching where they’re going on the road. And you were doing precisely that on that day,” the court decision quoted the adjudicator as saying.

The decision was released Friday.

After the adjudicator's decision, Anand appealed to the Summary Conviction Appeal Court in 2018 but lost. The judge there said the entry of co-ordinates into a GPS device was basically text messaging and, because it provided information to the user, it was a communication device “in conjunction with the Legislature’s purpose in enacting” the provision of the Motor Vehicle Act.

Anand then went to the Court of Appeal, which heard the case in November.

Writing for the three-person panel, Justice Duncan Beveridge said in the decision that while there may be similarities between inputting co-ordinates in a GPS device and text messaging, the Motor Vehicle Act is specific in talking about texting, which is defined as sending a short text message electronically, especially from one cellphone to another.

“I know of no other definition. The Legislature’s meaning could not, at least in this respect, have been clearer,” Beveridge wrote.

“A driver is prohibited from using a hand-held cellular phone or engaging in text messaging on any communications device while the vehicle is being operated."

The justice also wrote that “words in an enactment should be interpreted in the context of which they are found. When that is done, the answer becomes even clearer. The prohibition is against text messaging on a communications device. A hand-held or built-in GPS device is a navigation device.. . . . It does not, by any grammatical and ordinary meaning, send or receive text messages.”

The Motor Vehicle Act was in effect at the time Anand was ticketed. The province's new Traffic Safety Act also prohibits the use of hand-held GPS devices, but the legislation is not yet in effect.

“Use of hand-held or built-in GPS may well be just as distracting as using a cellphone to make a call or engage in text messaging. But the Legislature did not prohibit the use of a GPS device,” Beveridge wrote.

"It is decidedly not the role of the courts to fill in the blanks and convict members of the public based on our views of whether the impugned conduct is just as bad as what the Legislature in fact had banned.”

He said that if the intention was to ban using hand-held GPS systems in cars, it would have been simple to do so when the cellphone texting ban was put in place.

Beside tossing the conviction, the Appeal Court also entered an acquittal in the case.