Slowing down MADD

>> The Canadian Safety Council argues that the attempt to lower the legal blood alcohol count
for drivers is misguided

by CHRIS BARRY

Canada has some of the toughest legislation in the world with respect to drinking and driving. Get pulled over with a blood alcohol count of .08 or higher in this country and be prepared to lose your license for a year, pay out at least a couple of thousand dollars in fines, legal fees, and increased insurance payments—assuming you can still find a company willing to insure you—and start getting used to your new identity as a bona fide criminal—with all the negative social implications that this entails.
If you’ve ever experimented with one of those bar room Breathalyzer tests, you’ll recognize that it doesn’t always take too much booze to get your BAC up to a rip-roaring .08. And while few people are keen to argue that the current legal BAC limit is unreasonably low, there are plenty who are actively lobbying the federal government to reduce it even further.
Chief among them is the Canadian chapter of U.S-based lobby group Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Last November 27 MADD formally approached then-federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan with their “Taking Back Our Roads” initiative, demanding that the federal government make criminals out of anyone caught behind the wheel with a blood alcohol count of .05 or over.

McLellan has since requested that the Justice Committee look at lowering the BAC limit to MADD’s specifications, and has further directed Justice Canada officials to review MADD Canada’s initiatives vis-à-vis drug impairment and police enforcement issues.
No one should be surprised if MADD succeeds in having their agenda passed into law. Few politicians are eager to be seen as callous towards the very real problem of drinking and driving, and fewer still like the idea of being perceived as insensitive towards a citizens’ group primarily comprised of grief-stricken parents who have lost children in alcohol-related road tragedies.

The chronic and the social

But not everyone in Ottawa policy-peddling circles is rallying behind the neo-prohibitionist agenda. At least one organization, The Canadian Safety Council, has recently gone on record criticizing MADD’s position.

“Listen,” says CSC president Emile Therien, “of course I feel tremendous sympathy for the personal suffering these individuals have had to endure, but good law is not made on the basis of emotion or hype. It’s got to be based on solid, objective facts and taken from there. In 90 per cent of cases the people involved in drinking and driving fatalities are two or three times over the current legal limit. And lowering the legal BAC limit a few points is certainly not going to change the behaviour of chronic offenders—the one per cent of drivers who tend to be alcoholics and responsible for a disproportionate number of road crashes, injuries and deaths. All this will do is criminalize social drinkers.”
The CSC points to last November’s report by the Ottawa-based Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) which estimates that there were over five million impaired driving trips in the past year and that less than five per cent of drivers accounted for 87 per cent of these trips: hard-core chronic offenders who are highly unlikely to change their drinking and driving habits because of a reduced legal BAC limit.

“What we’re really talking about by lowering the limit to .05,” Therien continues, “is criminalizing responsible people who may go out to see a hockey game and drink two or three beers. Think of the effect this sort of thing will have on the hospitality industry, let alone the demands it will make on the court system, or the social consequences for those convicted. And really, the bottom line is that adult males drinking two to three beers over the course of a hockey game simply do not wind up leaving the building impaired.”
According to the CSC, the rush to lower the legal BAC to .05 is misdirected and distracts from the more serious and complex issue of how to deal with chronic offenders.
“You know,” Therien explains, “based on race, ethnicity and size, one glass of wine could result in a .05 BAC for some people. As a society do we really want to make driving home after consuming a glass of wine a criminal offence? Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet that is going to solve the problem of impaired driving. This is a complex issue that needs to be addressed rationally, not by criminalizing social behaviour.” :