Steve Sullivan
CEO,
MADD Canada
Mandatory Alcohol Screening saves lives by deterring impaired driving, increasing enforcement visibility, and changing behaviours. Prevent tragedies: plan ahead and drive sober.
MADD Canada has been raising awareness about the risks of impaired driving and educating young students in particular for decades. As a result of this, laws have been changed at all levels of government, lives have been saved and injuries have been prevented.
Despite this progress, hundreds of Canadians are killed every year and thousands more are injured. An Ontario roadside survey found that 1 in 5 drivers had alcohol and/or drugs in their system. That is one in every five cars on the road.
Why are people still driving after consuming alcohol, cannabis and/or other drugs?
We wondered that too, so we asked people. They told us they drove impaired because they did not have far to go, did not feel impaired and thought they could drive carefully. There is no good excuse, but their answers tell us something. None of them think it can happen to them. No one who was hit by an impaired driver ever thought it would happen to them either but it did.
There is no easy solution but we know that proactive and high-profile enforcement is essential. People’s perception of getting caught impacts the decisions they make, so drivers need to know police are on the roads looking for impaired drivers and that they will be caught.
In 2018, Parliament passed Bill C-46 which added Mandatory Alcohol Screening (MAS) to law enforcement’s toolbox. Previously, if police wanted someone to provide a roadside breath test, they had to have a reasonable suspicion that the person was driving impaired. Police missed a lot of drivers because detecting impairment is not easy.
With MAS, police can demand a breath sample from any driver they lawfully stop. If they pull someone for speeding or running a red light, they can require that person to take a test.
MADD Canada urges every police service to use MAS at every lawful traffic stop and some police forces have been doing it. Police in Alberta routinely use MAS and the OPP in the GTA is using MAS at every stop. The RCMP in Saskatchewan and the Halifax area have done it and Ottawa police are using MAS more.
MAS is not about increasing the number of people who get caught, although that is a positive thing. It is about changing people’s behaviour which has been the experience of other countries that have used MAS longer than Canada.
Police cannot do this alone; we all have a role to play. That includes making a plan if we are going to be consuming alcohol, cannabis and/or other drugs. If you see someone you think might be driving impaired, call 911. You may be stopping a crime in progress but more importantly, you may be saving someone’s life or sparing them from life-altering injuries.
Talk to your family, your friends and the young people in your life about the choices they make. These conversations can be uncomfortable but they are far less difficult than receiving a call from someone who has been arrested or is in the hospital.
None of us want to have the conversation with police on our doorstep in the early morning hours or ever for that matter.
To learn more, visit madd.ca.
