You may or may not have been “charged”. Most people in Alberta and British Columbia are not charged criminally for impaired driving, driving with a blood alcohol level over the legal limit or failing or refusing to provide a breath sample as long as there are not aggravating factors like an accident, injuries or previous related convictions or occurrences. To determine whether you were charged criminally, look at the documents you received at the time of the stop or afterwards. These will indicate whether you were charged criminally (those documents would include a court date) or not (in which case you may have only received the Notice of Administrative Penalty and Seizure Notice(s) under the SafeRoads Alberta regime).
The first step in defending yourself against the Criminal Code charges, is to phone our office and open a file. Once a file is opened in our office, we answer any questions you may have, we order disclosure (see below), once received we review the disclosure with you, and we appear in court for all of your court appearances so that you do not have to go yourself. When you call the office, please have with you all of the documents you were given by the police upon release so that we can open the file easily.
If you are under the SafeRoads regime, the first steps in contesting a Notice of Administrative Penalty are outlined below.