Ends, means and drunk drivers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/03/2024 (629 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Do the ends justify the means?

Maybe the answer is yes.

Two police forces in Saskatchewan are trying something new: for the Regina Police Service, the experiment is set to end when April arrives. For Saskatchewan’s RCMP, the program starts on April 1 and has no set end date.

What’s happening?

Well, for both police forces, if you’re pulled over for any sort of traffic offence — even for something as simple as a blown tail light or not coming to a full stop at a stop sign — you’ll be asked for a breath sample to see if you’re impaired by alcohol. If you refuse to take the quick test, you can be charged with refusing the breathalyzer.

If you fail the quick test — which the RCMP says can be done in roughly a minute and a half — you’ll be taken for a full breathalyzer test and you will likely be charged with impaired driving.

Police used to be required to have a reasonable suspicion that a driver was impaired before asking the driver to take a breathalyzer.

Any reporter who has covered a trial for impaired driving can probably quote the usual laundry list of things that would create that “reasonable suspicion”: the driver had watery eyes, fumbled while taking out his or her driver’s licence, was unsteady on their feet when they got out of their vehicle, slurred their words, there was a smell of alcohol…” — and the list goes on.

But a Criminal Code change in 2018 removed that requirement, so police no longer needed a suspicion that a driver had been drinking.

Here’s the Saskatchewan RCMP’s description of their new policy: “Drivers will not be pulled over for the sole purpose of completing a mandatory alcohol screening — (it) will only be requested once a driver is pulled over for other various traffic violations.”

It’s understandable why the test-everyone policy is being tried out in Saskatchewan.

The province has one of the highest rates of impaired driving in the country: in just one month — December, 2023 — police reported 414 impaired driving offences.

Last year, Saskatchewan RCMP alone charged more than 1,700 people with impaired driving, an average of five a day, and that’s outside the major metropolitan areas of Regina and Saskatoon, which have their own municipal police forces. More than one-third of fatal collisions that year involved alcohol.

It’s not a new thing: in the world of “things you couldn’t make up,” in 2016, the provincial cabinet minister responsible for both the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority and the provincial public automobile insurance agency, Saskatchewan Government Insurance, pleaded guilty to an impaired driving charge while driving a government vehicle through a construction zone. His blood alcohol level was two and a half times the legal limit, and it was 11:30 in the morning.

There are probably very few people who will publicly oppose the goal of getting impaired drivers off the road — and the threat of testing at any time, day or night, might well make a lot of people rethink their behaviour.

But as with the institution of any new policy, there are concerns.

First, whether the most minor of traffic violations will be a fishing mission — and whether the tests will be weaponized, with some drivers getting pulled over and delayed more often than others. There’s also the question of whether a mandatory test for all drivers essentially means you’re guilty until proven innocent — some lawyers have described the move as an erosion of the Charter rights of individual Canadians.

The end is certainly laudable — what do you think about the means?