Sergeant Glenn Vermette leans inside a truck window, his head a hand’s length away from the driver’s face.
“Anything to drink tonight?” the Victoria police officer says, as he eyes the interior of the vehicle.
It’s Saturday night on Yates Street in downtown Victoria, and police have set up a seasonal roadblock aimed at nabbing drunk drivers. Sgt. Vermette’s literal in-your-face technique, honed over 22 years of conducting these CounterAttack snares, is the first test. “Your nose works wonders,” he reminded officers at a briefing earlier in the night.
The current state of B.C.’s drunk driving law means this roadblock is a fragile construction. Even two arrests for drunk driving here could bring the roadblock down for the night because it would tie up most of the officers with paperwork and process.
That is the unintended consequence of a Nov. 30 court ruling. For drivers who are suspected of being over the legal limit for alcohol in their bloodstream, police are forced to choose between time-consuming criminal investigations or just getting as many drunks off the road as possible.
One driver reeks of stale alcohol. He tells the officer he had a couple of beers and is asked to blow into a handheld Breathalyzer. The device shows his blood alcohol level is safely below the legal limit. “Thanks for telling us the truth,” Sgt. Vermette tells him, and the driver is on his way.
Had the screening device registered a “warn” – an intermediate rating for a blood-alcohol content between .05 and .08 – he would have been slapped with a three-day driving suspension.
If it flashed a red “fail,” he could have faced criminal charges. Then again, if police were really busy, the driver might have gotten off with as little as a 24-hour driving suspension.
“One of the short-term dilemmas we are going to have to deal with is, in theory, you could be treated more harshly by getting a warn than blowing a fail,” said Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham, who heads the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police Traffic Safety Committee.
Last year, the province rolled out what it billed as the toughest drunk driving law in the country – one that Chief Graham had a hand in crafting. It allowed police to dispense swift justice at the roadside. In half an hour, Sgt. Vermette could have an impaired driver off the road for 90 days.
It also effectively decriminalized drunk driving – just a small number of B.C. drivers have been charged since the law came into effect. But Andrew Murie, CEO of MADD Canada, said the new regime has proven to be a more effective deterrent. “The beauty of the administrative penalties is that they kept more police on the streets to stop people from drinking and driving,” he said Friday.
The new law, inevitably, was challenged in court. Mr. Justice Jon Sigurdson of the B.C. Supreme Court ruled last month that drivers who failed a test on a roadside screening device should have a better appeal process.
The province has vowed to amend the law early next spring to restore the full suite of immediate roadside prohibitions, or IRPs. This season, however, police are operating under two different laws depending on a driver’s level of intoxication.
Sgt. Vermette’s team last weekend included six officers. The first driver to fail a handheld Breathalyzer test was accompanied back to cells by two officers who spent the next three or four hours conducting the more rigorous breath analysis test, fingerprinting, dealing with lawyers and doing paperwork. Had a second driver been arrested for suspected impaired driving, there wouldn’t have been enough officers left to maintain the roadblock.
The government, police and officials from MADD talk about how the new IRP program saves lives. The first year under the new regime saw a 40-per-cent reduction in traffic fatalities related to alcohol.
