The Alberta government appears determined to push ahead, rapidly, with its new anti-drinking and driving legislation despite Wednesday’s ruling by the B.C. Supreme Court that much of that province’s tough impaired driving laws are unconstitutional.
The Alberta government can argue its legislation, modelled after B.C.’s, is different, but the idea is the same – give the police sweeping powers to become roadside judges with the right to issue immediate license suspensions and seize vehicles for up to seven days.
It’s a great deal for the towing companies who get to tow the vehicle, keep it for a week and then charge citizens exorbitant fees to get it back.
Government ministers claim the new law would help keep drunk drivers off the roads and reduce the carnage caused by impaired driving. If that is the object, then why is the legislation so punitive for drivers caught with a blood alcohol content (BAC) between .05 and .08? Why not go heavily after those offenders who are actually causing most of the carnage?
In Alberta in 2010, 96 people were killed and 1,384 injured in alcohol-related crashes. No question those numbers have got to be decreased, drastically.
What the numbers don’t tell us is how many of those accidents were caused by repeat offenders and by drivers well over the .08 threshold.
A federal government report states, “the bulk of the impaired driving problem lies with those drivers who have a BAC over the current Criminal Code limit of 0.08.”
The report said of the 37.1 per cent of accidents that involved alcohol, 4.3 per cent of drivers had a BAC below .05, 2.6 were between .05 and .08, 9.4 were between .08 and .16 and 20.8 per cent had a BAC of .16 or higher.
That means 81 per cent of alcohol-related accidents are caused by people at .08 or higher and less than one per cent are between .05 and .08.
The report said high BAC drivers represent about one per cent of the cars on the road at night and on weekends, yet they account for nearly half of all drivers killed at those times.
So why focus so much on those individuals who stop after work for a drink or those couples out for dinner and a couple of glasses of wine?
The education aspect of Bill 26 is good. First-time offenders may learn from a one-day suspension. But the repeat offenders and the high-BAC drivers rarely learn until it’s too late.
Just last week a Morinville man was sentenced to three years in jail for killing a young woman while he was drunk – his third impaired driving offence.
Why does the federal law set the minimum penalty for a first-time impaired driving at $1,000 fine or 30 days in jail – the exact same penalty if the driver kills someone? That just makes no sense at all.
This could turn out to be another misdirected piece of legislation that misses the true target — those hard-core drinkers who are causing death on the road.
