Another police force expands impaired testing

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/05/2024 (696 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A little over a month ago, this space had an editorial about projects going on next door in Saskatchewan: both the RCMP and the Regina Police Service (RPS) were telling drivers to expect that, if they were pulled over for any sort of traffic offence, drivers would be getting a breath test to see if they were impaired.

For the RCMP in Saskatchewan, the project was an open-ended one. It’s just what the police will do now. For the RPS, it was a one-month trial, which ended up catching 15 drivers with varying levels of impairment after 637 stops by their traffic unit.

That works out roughly to catching one impaired driver for every 42 traffic stops.

Which is … alarming.

Well, the testing pool is now getting bigger, with another police force saying they’re now going to take the same action.

Wednesday, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) announced that they, too, will now require drivers to be tested for impairment any time they are stopped for a traffic offence on roads patrolled by the OPP in the greater Toronto area.

The OPP say they’ve seen a dramatic increase in impaired drivers in the GTA, with a 30 per cent increase in charges in the last five years (rising from 8,000 in 2019 to 11,000 in 2023).

And anyone who thinks they’ll just refuse to take part in mandatory alcohol screening will certainly want to think twice: those who refuse end up facing charges for refusing the breathalyzer, which carry penalties comparable to impaired driving charges.

You might say that none of that really affects Manitoba drivers, unless they’re travelling through Saskatchewan and parts of Ontario, and you’d be right — to a point.

It’s a near-certainty that the RCMP is watching its Saskatchewan experiment very closely, to see what kind of results it gets.

You can easily understand why: here are the numbers of impaired driving suspensions and charges tallied up in that province during the month of March. In all, 454 drivers were suspended for impaired driving offences: 312 drivers were issued licence suspensions for exceeding provincial limits for alcohol and/or drugs, and 142 were charged with a Criminal Code impaired driving offence.

If the Saskatchewan RCMP ends up charging a significant number of drivers that would otherwise have gone undetected, or if their rate of catching drunk drivers during traffic stops matches the Regina experience, the chances are that what’s now a provincial experiment could become a national approach.

And other municipal and provincial police forces, who are also watching, could also follow suit.

There are suggestions that there could be challenges to the test-everyone approach — which is based on a change in Canadian law dating back to 2018 — because the request for a test unreasonably intrudes on people’s rights when they aren’t even suspected of violating a law.

Tell that to someone who has had a family member injured or killed in a drunk-driving accident — they’ll tell you that almost anything that keeps even one drunk driver off the roads is worth doing.

Is there a drinking and driving problem on our roads? Absolutely.

The numbers just don’t lie.

But one element of this approach that may be more effective than anything else is the sheer deterrence factor.

It’s not hard to think that people who realize that they will have to deal with a breathalyzer if they accidentally commit the smallest of traffic violations, might decide they’re better off to make alternate plans if they’ve had anything at all to drink.

And that could make all of us safer on the roads.