Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides that “Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.”  Court cases have interpreted this provision as meaning that a police officer can only legally conduct a search or seizure on the basis of reasonable and probable grounds for concluding that a crime has been committed.  Breath tests are considered searches under the law but they have not been held to be unreasonable since they can be demanded only when there are reasonable and probable grounds for believing the driver is impaired.

After five years of Parliamentary debate, as of July 2^nd, 2008 new federal laws on impaired driving finally provide the police with powers to detect, investigate, and lay charges for drug impaired driving, and the courts with defined sentencing options. Although drug-impaired driving has been an offence in Canada since 1925, enforcement was extremely difficult and remained so even as the rate of drug impaired driving rose steadily to its current unacceptably high levels. The following summary updates these new laws previewed in Road Rules during the debate stage.

Slogans can be useful habits of the mind. For example, "Don't drink and drive" is a slogan, or should be, that people repeat silently to themselves and verbally to their teenagers. This short and simple message drilled into the brain by persistent repetition, as annoying as people may find it, might also be the single most effective protective habit of mind for driving that a person will ever acquire.  Because when alcohol is mixed with cars and driving, the moments of miscalculation, of abandonment, of silliness that can change a life completely are more likely to occur.

It is safe to say that every driver knows about the risks of speeding and the risks of driving while impaired. It is also generally accepted that the two problems are linked, in that one of the effects of alcohol on driver behaviour is acceptance of higher risks and tolerance for higher speeds.

"Kids” would probably be your first thought…and you would be on the right track according to recent data from 94 police departments showing that drivers aged 19 to 24 represent 56 per cent of all reported criminal driving incidents. (Are twenty-something’s still considered kids these days?)