How Long Does A License Suspension Stay On Your Record In Ontario?
How long does a license suspension stay on your record in Ontario? I think we must first answer a question. What do we mean by record? So let’s answer all the possible records. So the first record that we would be concerned with would be our abstract. For most Ontarians, we have an abstract and it’s three years.
You would go down to Service Ontario and you could order your abstract and it would be a three year snapshot into what’s been happening with your driving record. So, the first answer to the question is, if you had a suspension there, you would indeed see that for the life of three years.
Now, a police officer pulling you over has a different set of tools. It also includes your driving abstract, but it looks into your complete background. So, a police officer can look back a number of years and see what incidents there have been. You will hear the acronym CPIC. So they could do a CPIC check on any particular person driving a vehicle and they could find out if there are other convictions way outside of the three year window that I just spoke of.
By way of analogy, If there was a charge, and you were going to court. And you were dealing with anything that would require them to look at your driving record, what you would see is you would see a complete driving record. So it would be the historical driving abstract, or record, of your driving since you’ve started.
For most of us, it’s from the time you were 15, 16, going forward, and they could see anything that happened. Now. So the answer that we’re ultimately giving you is that there is generally a very short window, about three years, that it would show up on your abstract, which is also called your record, but the reality is if something like that were a conviction, there are mechanisms in place for the police and the prosecution to look back and find it through the rest of your driving history. Meaning, into the past and years into the future, they could absolutely go back and look and see if you’ve got that type of conviction there.
