Originally Posted by yyzvoyageur

It's not solely about drink driving. Canada's immigration laws make inadmissible anyone convicted of an offence outside Canada that, if committed in Canada, would constitute a serious offence. There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the basic idea here. Because Canada considers drink driving to be a serious offence, it normally (there are a lot of factors to consider) results in inadmissibility, but so too would many assaults and other offences.

And, no, it's nothing new. It's just that it's brought up on this forum so often that a casual observer would believe that something new is afoot.