Dankr.ca – Your Toronto Connection
Article by StratCac
Reported instances of drug-impaired driving increased significantly in Canada in the year following legalization, but only represent about 8% of all police-reported incidents of impaired driving in 2019.
Despite these increases, instances of cannabis-impaired driving may not have risen much at all, says Statistics Canada, who released the report this week. These increases are also likely to at least partially be attributed as much to an increase in enforcement and detection as an increase in actual impaired driving, notes the report.
The figures show an increase in reports of impaired driving in Canada in 2019, a total of 85,673 across the country, a rate of 228 incidents per 100,000 population. This marks the end of a downward trend of such instances of impaired driving that began in 2011, but instances of impaired driving are still lower than in 2011 and more than half as prevalent as in the 1980s.
While the rate of alcohol-impaired driving incidents increased by 15%, the rate of drug-impaired driving rose 43% (6,453 instances).
Statistics Canada notes that rates of drug-impaired driving in Canada have been steadily increasing since 2008 when the federal agency started distinguishing between impaired driving as a result of alcohol or drug impairment.
Furthermore, the legalization of cannabis in late 2018 also provided police with broad new screening and enforcement powers in relation to impaired driving powers to screen for alcohol and drugs, which Statistics Canada also notes may have contributed to the rise in the rate of police-reported impaired driving in 2019.
Despite this significant increase in drug-impaired driving, the report also references data from the National Cannabis Survey showing that cannabis-impaired driving does not appear to have increased following legalization. In that study, covering the first three quarters of 2019, 13.2% of cannabis users with a driver’s licence reported driving within two hours of use at least once in the three months preceding the survey. This is slightly lower than what was observed in the pre-legalization period covering the first three quarters of 2018 (14.2%).
The same survey also showed that the proportion of Canadians who said they had been a passenger in a vehicle driven by a person who had used cannabis fell from 5.3% in the pre-legalization period to 4.2% post-legalization. Similar findings were also found in the Quebec Cannabis Survey (Institut de la statistique du Québec 2020).
The discrepancy, argues the report, is that police-reported drug-impaired driving data includes impairment by any type of drug, not only cannabis.
As an example of increased enforcement, 604 drug recognition experts (DREs) were trained in the 2018/2019 fiscal year, bringing the total number to over one thousand. In that same period, more than 8,000 police officers completed training or upgrading on the standardized field sobriety test (also known as the “physical coordination test”).
