Rushing Ahead With Flawed Drunk Driving Legislation

My latest Calgary Herald column takes a critical look at Bill 26, Alberta's proposed new impaired driving legislation (which passed final vote Tuesday night, much to the chagrin of some Tory MLAs):

Alberta politicians were back at work Monday, later than had been scheduled during this brief fall sitting of the legislature.
With the government attempting to ram through six pieces of legislation, even the midnight sittings last week weren’t enough to crunch everything into a tight time frame.
The opposition parties have accused the government of “legislating through exhaustion,” and fear that these pieces of legislation are not receiving the debate and scrutiny they ought to.
One of those is Bill 26, which introduces tough new penalties for suspected drunk drivers. Questions abound with regard to its effectiveness and fairness, but the government is plowing ahead. The premier even speculated that the law could be in force by Christmas.
On Bill 26, it seems the only Albertans the Tories want to hear from are those who think the government is doing a wonderful thing.
Those asking tough questions and raising concerns are seen as a distraction and an obstacle.
Even after the B.C. Supreme Court declared part of that province’s impaired driving law to be unconstitutional, MLAs had barely a day to try to read the ruling and analyze how it might apply to Alberta’s legislation.
The Alberta government is convinced that its law is sufficiently different from B.C.’s, so that the issues laid out in the ruling would not apply here.
Others aren’t so sure. The president of the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association has indicated that his organization may pursue its own constitutional challenge of Alberta’s law.
B.C.’s law imposes heavy fines and lengthy suspensions for drivers who blow over .08 blood-alcohol content, as does Alberta’s proposed law. Alberta’s law, however, is predicated on a criminal charge being laid first, unlike B.C.’s law.
However, someone charged with a crime has not been proven guilty, so here, too, we are pre-emptively punishing the accused.
The provision under Alberta’s law that a suspension remains in place until the matter has been resolved by the courts may be harsher in some ways than B.C.’s penalties.
Given that it might be a year or more before a case gets to trial, even an innocent person might feel pressured to plead guilty.
The provisions of B.C.’s law dealing with motorists in the so-called warning range — those between .05 and .08 — were found to be constitutional.
Under Bill 26, those motorists would receive a three-day license suspension for a first offence, rising to 15 days and 30 days for subsequent offences.
Once again, we are imposing penalties on those who have not been convicted of anything — in this case, not even charged with anything.
Furthermore, given that the vast majority of impaired driving fatalities involve those well over the established legal limit, it’s unclear how effective a law targeting minimal impairment will be.
Those having a drink or two do not seem to be the problem.
Last week, Herald columnist Paula Arab argued that this law won’t target such people. She came to that conclusion after an evening of drinks and food accompanied by a police officer and his roadside screening device.
Yet, by her account, after one glass of wine in the first hour, Arab blew .49, a hairsbreadth from the warning range and the accompanying suspension. That doesn’t exactly mesh with her conclusion that “social drinkers have nothing to fear” from this law.
Meanwhile, columnist Robert Remington, writing on the Herald opinion blogs, argued that targeting drivers at the lower threshold will also target more dangerous drunk drivers.
That conclusion is at odds with the Traffic Injury Research Foundation, which finds that “there is a considerable body of research that clearly demonstrates that placing lower-risk offenders in more intensive sanctions can do more harm than good . . . and may actually increase their likelihood of repeat offending.”
As foundation president Robyn Robertson has observed, Alberta has a “good structure” in place to deal with impaired drivers and alcohol-related driving deaths have been declining since 1995.
Instead, we’re left with a law that we might not need, that might not work, and that might target and punish the innocent.
If ever there was a law worthy of more debate and scrutiny, it is this.