Herald Column: What About "Safer Roads"?

My latest Calgary Herald column looks at the mysterious delay of Alberta's impaired driving legislation:

Given how intent the Alberta government was in pressing ahead with its new impaired driving legislation, word that the law will be delayed represents a remarkable turn of events.
After all, it was not long ago that Premier Alison Redford was suggesting that the tough new measures would be in effect by Christmas. Now we’re being told that the law may not take effect until after the expected spring election.
On the surface, the reversal seems to make very little sense.
The government’s urgency in passing the law — which involved invoking closure and extending the brief fall sitting of the legislature — was justified by the argument that lives were potentially at stake and that safer roads could not wait.
Well, it turns out they can.
The same government that was completely uninterested in hearing from anyone other than cheerleaders of the legislation, is now delaying the implementation of that law to consult with the very same people they did not want to consult with just two months ago.
What’s even more bizarre about this new outreach to industry, is that the industry was previously viewed by the government as part of the problem.
On Dec. 8, in response to a Twitter comment about the hospitality industry’s concerns, the premier’s chief of staff, Stephen Carter, replied, “When the industry says ‘Drink and Drive’ they do not reflect the people of Alberta.”
So in December, concerns from industry are derisively dismissed as encouragement to lawbreakers. Suddenly, now in January, concerns from industry are serious enough to warrant the dispatching of a senior cabinet minister and the delaying of a major piece of legislation.
Last week, Redford declared that consultations between the hospitality industry and the Transportation minister must come to a conclusion before the law could go ahead.
However, it remains unclear as to exactly what it being discussed or why the implementation of the law is contingent on these talks.
Ostensibly, this is all about bars and lounges implementing technology that would allow patrons to test their own blood-alcohol levels.
At one point, the premier stated that the consultations were centred solely on that issue, but at another point, she stated that it was “one of the issues” being discussed.
Certainly the hospitality industry has been outspoken about many issues, but the idea that bars must first be equipped with do-it-yourself breathalyzers does not seem to have been a top priority.
Mind you, if the government feels that such a system is crucial to implementing this law, perhaps it could have approached the industry much sooner.
One has to wonder, however, whether this is something the industry is really pushing for. Certainly if some bars would like to offer such testing, there’s nothing stopping them doing so.
On the other hand, though, there are many reasons why bars might have reservations. For example, if a driver gets a green light from the bar’s breathalyzer device, is the bar then potentially liable if that driver causes a crash?
From the province’s perspective, this could actually undermine what they say they’re trying to accomplish.
By making the blood-alcohol level of .05 per cent subject to new penalties, the government is sending the message that those on the low end of the impairment scale represent a serious threat, too.
However, there is the risk that offering breathalyzer readings to drinkers might mean more of them are inclined to get behind the wheel.
Defenders of the legislation often make the assertion that .05 is higher than people might think, and that even two or three drinks might not even put you at that level.
If so, it’s certainly conceivable that someone who has consumed two or three drinks and is then feeling tipsy enough to question his driving skills, might be reassured by a breathalyzer device that reads .03 or .04.
In the end, it’s hard to understand why the government’s mad dash to pass this legislation has suddenly stalled over an issue like this.
Given that we are on the verge of an election, however, the real explanation might lie in the backlash that this flawed legislation has generated. Score another one for political expediency.