fter a stressful day at work, the woman had a drink before going to her doctor for swelling in her legs.
There was no suggestion at the appointment about her having a drinking problem — no discussion about alcohol at all.
The next day, the doctor reported her to the Ministry of Transportation (MTO), alleging she was dependent on alcohol and could pose a risk to road safety.
Despite a spotless, 25-year driving record, she lost her licence for nearly two years — even though a tribunal later found she did not have a drinking problem and accepted that she had never been impaired behind the wheel.
The woman, unnamed in the tribunal’s decision, is one of the Ontarians whose licence suspensions for alleged alcohol abuse lasted longer than the suspensions of many people actually convicted of driving drunk.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Alan Pearse, a lawyer in Toronto whose practice is devoted exclusively to representing clients charged with offences related to impaired driving. “They’re serving more time than a drunk driver.”
These drivers are among dozens of Ontarians whose licences were suspended by the province for alcohol-related medical conditions that a provincial appeal body later found did not threaten road safety, a Toronto Star/Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) investigation has found.
Drunk driving is a scourge to the public, and suspending the licences of drivers whose drinking is likely to impair their driving can save lives. This story is about drivers who pose little to no threat being caught up in an Ontario program that some doctors, traffic safety experts and lawyers have criticized as indiscriminate and draconian.
Unfounded suspensions can upend lives, jeopardize employment, leave people stranded in remote areas and make them wary of seeking further medical help.
“We don’t want to punish people who … are trying to get care,” says Dr. David Gratzer, co-chief of general adult psychiatry at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). But “some people are being punished for doing everything right.”
The MTO did not respond to requests for comment on the findings in this story. The ministry has previously stated that it “applies consistent medical standards that are designed to balance road safety and mobility for Ontarians.”
Physicians reported more than 9,000 Ontario drivers to the MTO from April 2011 to December 2020, citing alcoholism, alcohol withdrawal, or alcohol-related psychoses, according to Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) data. The data was obtained by the Star and IJB, based at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, as part of an ongoing investigation into medical condition reports, or MCRs.
Doctors and other health professionals are required to alert the MTO to patients with potentially dangerous medical conditions by filing an MCR.
When drivers suspended for conditions involving alleged drinking problems challenge their suspensions before the Licence Appeal Tribunal (LAT), many are shown to be unjustified.
A review of five years’ worth of these appeals shows that more than 40 per cent — 37 out of 85 cases — were overturned.
In 80 per cent of successful appeals, there was no evidence that the person whose licence was suspended had ever driven under the influence.
The woman whose licence was suspended for almost two years after she saw her doctor for her swollen legs had an “impeccable” driver record, the tribunal determined.
It took the woman three months and a formal freedom of information request to learn why she had been suspended to begin with. She eventually went to a psychiatrist, who wrote a six-page report finding that she didn’t have a drinking problem.
The ministry’s only evidence was a check-mark in the original report from her family doctor indicating she suffered from alcohol dependency.
The length of time she was without a licence is substantially longer than many licence suspensions for convicted drunk drivers.
Getting caught drunk driving comes with significant penalties, including an immediate 90-day roadside suspension. If convicted, first-time offenders will also face fines and a default licence suspension of at least a year.
But drivers can get that suspension reduced to three or six months by enrolling in a program that involves installing an ignition interlock device — a breath-screening tool that prevents the engine from starting if the driver has been drinking. Even some drivers convicted for the second time can get a three-year licence suspension reduced to nine months through the program.
By comparison, people whose licences are suspended because an MCR indicated an alleged alcohol use disorder face the prospect of a longer road.
At worst, the suspension could continue indefinitely until proof of yearlong abstinence is provided to the ministry. Drivers who complete a treatment program and have a health-care provider who is supportive of their reinstatement can get their licences back after six months of confirmed abstinence.
Addiction specialists raise concerns about the province’s approach to suspending licences.
The length of time the ministry requires drivers to be abstinent is out of step with the medical community’s approach, says Dr. Raju Hajela, an Alberta-based addiction physician and contributor to a Canadian Medical Association guide on assessing fitness to drive.
“A person can be considered fit to drive if they’re under proper care and have demonstrated three months of maintaining abstinence and [are] engaging in treatment and recovery,” he says.
Requiring abstinence in the first place is an approach to treating addiction that may not work for everyone, says Dr. Dominique Morisano, a clinical psychologist in Toronto who specializes in treating people with addiction.
“It sounds like blatant discrimination,” she says. “It’s pretty straightforward — if they’re not operating a motor vehicle under the influence of a substance, then their licence should not be part of the consideration … It should not be taken away just because they have a particular condition.”
She says treatment should seek to reduce harms — for some, that may mean cutting back, and for others it could be abstinence.
In one case, an Ontario man saw a doctor in 2015 after hearing about how medication could help him reduce his alcohol cravings. His licence was suspended for 18 months after the doctor reported him to the ministry. In her report, the doctor did not include any information about why she thought the man’s condition might make him unsafe on the road. The man’s driving record had no alcohol-related infractions, and a subsequent doctor’s report only characterized the man’s alcohol dependence as “mild.”
In its decision, the tribunal stated that “each driver must be assessed individually” when it comes to evaluating the risk they pose to road safety. “Proof of an alcohol addiction alone is not sufficient.”
There is also no ignition interlock program available for drivers suspended for alleged drinking problems that would allow them to get back on the road sooner — though this is an option for convicted drunk drivers.
The ministry’s approach is “not rehabilitative,” says former CAMH lawyer Kendra Naidoo. “It does feel punitive.”
An interlock program could strike a better balance between public safety and patient mobility, say several traffic safety experts and advocates.
Interlock devices allow drivers to “maintain their employment and other things that are dependent on having a driver’s licence, and it helps maintain public safety at the same time,” said Dr. Ian Gillespie, a psychiatrist who has contributed to the Canadian Medical Association’s fitness-to-drive guidelines.
An interlock option for medical suspensions “seems like common sense,” says Eric Dumschat, the legal director of MADD Canada, an advocacy group that supports victims of impaired driving and promotes vigorous enforcement and sanctions for the offence.
“By having the interlock, it reduces the chance of them driving while suspended, it reduces the burden on them … and it helps protect the public.”
Kristoffer Reid wanted to address health problems when he opened up during a doctor’s appointment about increased drinking that started several years before.
Instead, the 41-year-old from Guelph says his doctor told him he would be filing a report to the ministry that would suspend Reid’s driver’s licence. Within hours of the appointment in January 2021, Reid’s licence was suspended indefinitely, until he could prove up to a year of sobriety.
“I sought help because I wasn’t hiding my problems and this was the outcome,” Reid said.
Reid calls the sudden, unexpected loss of his licence “catastrophic.” Unable to drive, the real estate agent was forced to refer his clients to colleagues, leaving him effectively unemployed.
“I got screwed by the person I asked for help,” he says.
While Reid has never been charged with a driving-related crime, his driver record shows, he did blow within the warn range in two roadside alcohol readings, once in June 2018 and again in December 2020. This means his blood-alcohol level was high but not enough for him to be committing a crime. They resulted in roadside licence suspensions, fines, and Reid had to complete an alcohol-education program.
When reporting Reid to the ministry, Reid’s doctor wrote, “I believe he will be compliant with therapy under my care, and he is highly motivated.”
This raises the question of whether Reid even met the criteria to be reported in the first place, Naidoo says. Under Ontario’s current reporting system, doctors are only required to report patients with “uncontrolled substance use disorders” who are “non-compliant with treatment recommendations.”
Following the suspension, Reid says he stopped drinking entirely and attended an alcohol treatment program. His doctor completed an MTO assessment form in March 2021, and no longer diagnosed Reid with an alcohol use disorder.
But the ministry refused to reinstate his licence, saying that not enough time had passed since the initial diagnosis in January.
“It’s really not clear … on what basis the registrar was seeking to uphold the suspension,” says Naidoo. “It appears to be an arbitrary system lacking any individualized assessment.”
Reid appealed to the LAT, which found that Reid’s situation was “exceptional” enough to justify departing from the period of abstinence that the ministry usually requires.
Reid “has attended alcohol programs, has normalizing blood work and has good insight into his past difficulty with alcohol,” the adjudicator wrote.
While Reid was relieved that his licence was reinstated two and a half months after his suspension, he remains resentful.
“This whole innocent until proven guilty thing kind of gets thrown out the window,” Reid said.
The ministry sometimes reinstates licences before drivers appeal, but for those who must seek recourse at the LAT, many face serious challenges.
“It’s a real uphill battle,” says Calvin Barry, a lawyer who spent over 16 years as a senior crown attorney and now defends clients charged with driving offences, among others. The suspension “can go on in perpetuity.”
Reid is among a small minority of drivers who hire a paralegal or lawyer to represent them. In 90 per cent of appeals of licence suspensions related to alcohol use, appellants represented themselves.
And those who manage to bring an appeal “would be a sliver of the people who’ve had their licence taken away,” says Gratzer, the CAMH psychiatrist.
The appeal process also “strikes a reverse onus,” Naidoo says, “because when the medical report is made … the licence suspension is automatic, and so the burden then shifts to the individual to have to prove that they are safe to drive.”
The challenges can be even more acute for those suffering from addiction and mental illness, says Jami Sanftleben, a paralegal in Peterborough with extensive experience representing people fighting their licence suspensions at the LAT.
“It further marginalizes people with mental health issues, with substance [use] issues, that are below certain lines in terms of their income,” he says. “I believe it just serves to make that gap even wider.”
Gratzer says “it would be very reasonable for the ministry to look at a round of consultation” given the legislation’s troubling unintended consequences and the “deep frustration on the part of patients.”
“Sometimes,” he says, “with the best of intentions, government officials might overreach.”
With files from Danielle Orr / Investigative Journalism Bureau
Abeer Khan, Heidi Lee and Kayla Zhu / Toronto Metropolitan University
This article was also published in the Toronto Star.
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