Many people and businesses are celebrating the end of the hockey lockout/strike. From taxi drivers, ticket resellers, restaurant and bar owners, hospitality industry workers, the people and the companies that sell advertising, the businesses that supply all of the sports bars and restaurants and stadiums with all of their stuff — they’re all happy, and in particular the breweries because in a matter of days, people will be out watching hockey games and spending their money to buy tickets, taxis, food and beer. Lots and lots of beer.
Of course, a number of folks won’t take taxis. It turns out hockey and drunk driving are often connected. Lawyers who defend a large number of drinking driving cases all know that the phone starts to ring within days of the beginning of hockey season. The police are also aware of the phenomenon.
Last week we conducted an informal poll of six Vancouver police officers. The questions we asked was which has had a greater impact on the reduction in drinking and driving in Vancouver: IRPs or the hockey strike?
100% said the hockey strike.
Of course we know this because we deal with drinking driving cases every day. But the Vancouver Police, in cahoots with the Government, are busy trying to dupe the media, the public and the courts into thinking that the IRP scheme deserves the credit. As we’ve explained before, the IRP scheme does not stop people from driving drunk. Enforcement stops people. With the IRP scheme or the old now largely unused criminal scheme, if you blow a Fail on an ASD, you’re off the road either way.
But it’s not just hockey that has skewed the numbers. It turns out that people have been posting the location of Vancouver Police roadblocks on Twitter and as a result a number of drinking drivers are successfully avoiding the police on their blurry drive home.
Interesting is that in Regina they now prefer roving police over static roadblocks because of this very problem. In Regina they are now stopping 3 impaired drivers for every 1 stopped in Saskatoon, the larger of the two cities.
What does all of this mean? It means that when the Government claims that the IRP scheme has somehow reduced drinking and driving in BC, they are willfully misleading us. They know damn well that the mechanism to remove drunk drivers from the road is the same. They know damn well that the factors that impact the numbers are too varied to allow one to point to one specific reason for any reduction.
You may recall that in July the Vancouver Police told us that drinking and driving is up. Apparently they hadn’t read the Government’s talking points. Now with the appeal of the IRP scheme only weeks away they want to claim that, due to IRPs, drinking and driving is down.
Drinking and driving may have been down. What a skeptical media should keep in mind is that there has been a hockey strike and that hockey and drunk driving are often closely associated.