A real Case of drunk backyarding
What some people, including the folks at Justice Canada, say can’t occur actually did happen to Lee Anne Lowrie.
She was visiting her sister in Maple Ridge, B.C., this past April. They were having drinks in the backyard when she got a call from the RCMP. They wanted to talk to her.
“I thought something had happened to someone in my family,” Lowrie told the Times-Colonist earlier this year.
There was nothing wrong with her family, the Mounties were there in her sister’s driveway because someone had called in anonymously to say that Lowrie had consumed many drinks at a local bar before getting in her truck and driving away.
It wasn’t true and Lowrie would eventually be acquitted of all claims against her but not before the RCMP used new powers under the Criminal Code to ask her for a breath sample long after she had stopped driving.
The Justice Department is declaring it a myth that police can show up and demand that you provide a breath sample long after you stopped driving. In Lowrie’s case, she had parked her car just after 3:30 p.m. and was being asked to blow into a breathalyzer at 6 p.m. after a few drinks at a family gathering.
“I would say that it is absolutely not a myth, it is something that happened in this case,” defence lawyer Jennifer Teryn told me over the phone from Victoria.
She and her colleague, Jerry Steele, have been working on cases related to drunk driving, including the Trudeau government’s changes that came into effect last December. Teryn says the changes in the law go too far.