If you’re charged with Impaired Driving, Care and Control is a term that you may keep hearing. It’s important for you to understand your charges and thereby also understand what Care and Control actually means.
There are two aspects to an Impaired Driving charge. You must be beyond the defined limits for alcohol or drugs, and you must be operating a motorized vehicle. Anyone that is deemed to have Care and Control of a vehicle is deemed to be operating it.
Care and Control refers to who had control of a vehicle in the context of an impaired driving case. In almost all cases this refers to someone driving a vehicle but there are some exceptions where the courts have deemed someone to be in control of a vehicle despite not driving it.
Some examples include sleeping in a car while drunk, coming into your car to turn on the heat or air conditioning and staying in the car for more than a few seconds, or basically anytime you have keys in your possession, and are under the influence and spend more than a few seconds in a vehicle.
Practically and legally speaking, Care and Control must have one of the following. Either a realistic intention to drive or a realistic risk of danger caused by the person with a motor vehicle. Basically, can the driver prove they had no realistic intention of driving the car and can they also prove there was no way for them to accidentally move the car that could cause danger to themselves, someone else, or property.
If you were not driving but were deemed to be in Care and Control of a vehicle while under the influence, it would be your lawyer’s job to show that you had no realistic intention to drive or that you did not pose a danger to accidentally or negligently causing danger with the motor vehicle.
One example of this was seen in R v Boudreault (2012). In this Supreme Court of Canada case, someone had already called Boudreault a taxi and Boudreault was waiting for the taxi in his car with the heat turned up on a cold February morning in Quebec. As the taxi was already on its way and the car’s heat was up on a cold winter morning, the Court deemed it unrealistic that Boudreault had the intention of driving.
Other ways to negate the realistic danger element can include a car being inoperable or that it was positioned in a way that would not allow the car to accidentally start rolling, like boxed in on a private driveway between other cars for example.
Absent these specific contextual factors however, it can be incredibly challenging to prove that you weren’t in Care and Control of a vehicle, even if you were trying to do the responsible thing by sleeping off your drugs or alcohol rather than driving impaired.
That is why you need to contact the talented lawyers of Collett Read LLP. Do not hesitate to contact us for a confidential consultation through our contact page or call us at (905) 541-2228.
