Full interview available on CKNW:
CKNW: Let’s talk about distracted driving in our province now. we all know BC government has been sounding the alarm on the number of crashes and deaths caused by distracted driving in our province. they’re bringing in huge new penalties on people caught using their phones behind the wheel of their car.
You get set for even tougher action on this. With ICBC losing so much money, this is government is on the hunt for for new revenue so i suspect you might see those distracted driving penalties go even higher.
but are the statistics telling us the true story about the extent of deaths caused by using a cellphone behind the wheel? Paul Doroshenko is a Richmond lawyer with the acumen law group, I’m very pleased to welcome him back on the show.
Thanks for coming, this is a really interesting issue. Tell me about the research you’ve done on this.
Paul Doroshenko: Well we’ve just noticed that every time the government would talk about distracted driving they say distracted driving then they’d immediately move to the next thing, which is cellphones. years and years on here I haven’t had any case come through my door, a person who’s charged with an offence as a result of a cellphone, and hurting somebody or killing somebody. We couldn’t even think of an accident that was caused that came into the office that was cellphone related, so we made a freedom of information request to find out whether or not there was this carnage on the road.
The government’s claiming 78, 88 people dying every year in BC, they say distracted driving then they say cellphones all in the same sentence. we made this request to the coroner and we found out in 2014 nobody died as a result of a cellphone. in most years, the most was 2 people in the Lower Mainland. Like in Vancouver, there’s no history of anybody ever dying in an accident as a result of using a cellphone.
CKNW: That’s according to the coroner.
Paul Doroshenko: The coroner investigates many of these things and the evidence they rely on can be pretty weak with respect to suggesting the cause of the accident, if the person, if the driver died for example.
Regardless, the point is the government is claiming 78 to 88 people dead every year, they say distracted driving and they link it to cellphones and they use it to justify their cellphone enforcement that we’ve seen increasing over the last six or eight years with harsher and harsher penalties. When it turns out there isn’t the carnage on the roads from cellphones.
There is distracted driving. There is people looking at screens that are in their cars. There’s people whose dogs jump into their laps or they’re not even thinking about their driving, but it’s not cellphones. In the last eight months, it started under the Liberals, they started giving people four month driving prohibitions if they have a second cellphone offence within five years, and these are people mostly who picked up their phone at an intersection, cause that’s where police catch them, and looked at their phone for a second there. And we just think that’s disproportionate, they’re using these people as a way to make money.