BONNYVILLE – MD of Bonnyville council has a better understanding of how the second phase of the Provincial Administrative Penalties Act is going to be rolled out.
As this portion of the program will include peace officers from across the province being able to hand out roadside sanctions, council wanted to know a bit more about the program.
Luis Gandolfi, director of public safety for the MD, explained the first phase officially launched Dec. 1, 2020, and it changed how impaired driving legislation was managed.
“It was essentially put in place to shorten the amount of time police officers were in place and how long it would take to process impaired driving investigations,” he detailed during council’s March 10 meeting, adding, with the old system it could take up to six hours when a police officer pulled a driver over if they suspected they were driving under the influence.
“Beyond that, you’ve got the court preparation and subpoenaing the witnesses and things of that nature. The administrative system takes the impaired driving, assuming there’s no injuries and it’s a first offence, you can remove that from the traditional court system and put it into this system. The Justice Transformative Initiative.”
The change classifies these offences as an administrative penalty, Gandolfi stated, which allows the government to hear it through a different format than the court system called Safe Roads.
Although the first phase only included differences for police officers, the second step is applied to peace officers and involves the Traffic Safety Act (TSA).
According to Gandolfi, a majority of the MD’s peace officers deal with offences that fall under this act.
“Basically, what they’ve done is they’ve removed all TSA offences come Dec. 1. They’re going to be removing all the TSA offences from the traditional court system and moving them into the Safe Roads administrative process,” he noted.
An administrative sanction call is handed out during a roadside stop under the new regulations.
“It’s not a ticket or a charge and it’s not summoning someone to court,” Gandolfi explained. “Everything is done electronically, everything from our notes to our preparation to what we would have normally called a court or disclosure package. That’s all going to be done through an online portal called the Administrative Penalty Information System (APIS).”
Everything an officer needs to do can be done roadside through the web-based platform in their vehicle along with a printer.
The system has very strict timelines from the beginning of the roadside stop to when the sanction is administered, Gandolfi said. A peace officer is given 30-minutes between the time they pull someone over to when they’ve handed out the sanction.
“The way that it would work is we would pull someone over, notify them of the offence they’ve committed under the TSA, issue an administrative sanction, and we have our information loaded into the APIS system by the end of that shift. That’s the goal.”
Through this new program, Gandolfi believes the requirements to submit evidence "is far less than it would be under the courts."
“What I mean by that is if we had video evidence right now for a TSA offence, we would have to submit the best evidence possible with our court package,” he continued. “APIS doesn’t need us to submit video or camera footage. They basically put a lot of extra weight on the evidence from the office, that’s the way I interpret it. We wouldn’t need to populate any video evidence into the system.”
The person who was pulled over then has about seven days to respond through the APIS system, which wouldn’t require a court appearance and can be done through a computer. Through there, they would be able to review all of the information submitted by the officer and can request a hearing if they choose to.
“That hearing doesn’t involve us,” stated Gandolfi. “We’re not required to be present for that hearing as peace officers. Our notes and the information we submit at the end of our shift is the end of our involvement under the administrative penalty system.”
One concern raised by Coun. Ben Fadeyiw was how someone who isn’t Internet savvy could use the system.
“A lot of our rural residents don’t have emails, they have flip phones or they don’t have a (cell) phone at all,” he stressed.
Gandolfi responded, “That’s one of the gaps... I think that the government is going to continue to have to manage that because I think that’s going to be a common theme from the communities. At the end of the day, the APIS system is a web page platform so to truly run it the way the government wants everybody to be using it, that’s the way everyone has to use it. To my understanding, there’s no paper substitute, no faxing, and no telephones. It's not the way it’s set up, at least at this point.”
Gandolfi’s understanding is the province hopes to add more programs, like the Off-Highway Vehicle Act and the Commercial Vehicle Act, to APIS in the future, however, the TSA is the only one being added this year.
“There’s probably 100 provincial acts that may or may not make it onto the list and then people would be administratively sanctioned for those as well instead of being convicted.”
As far as the MD is concerned, Gandolfi said, "We’re going to be ready for it come Dec. 1. The Public Safety department is just in the process of procuring some printers for the peace officer vehicles and some hardware has to be updated in some of their vehicles. The goal is to be ready well before the beginning of December."