I keep hearing that people have been drinking more during COVID-19. Does that mean more people are drinking and driving? Should I be worried on the road?
There’s been a rise in the number of Canadians who say they’ve driven drunk this year, a survey shows.
In an annual survey by the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) almost 10 per cent said they’ve driven when they thought they were over the legal limit. That’s the highest it’s been since TIRF started asking the question in 2004. It’s a 30-per-cent increase over last year’s 7.5 per cent – the biggest annual increase TIRF has seen.
“It’s still a minority of drivers, but it’s growing steadily,” said Ward Vanlaar, TIRF chief operating officer. “If we say there are 27 million licensed drivers in Canada, ten per cent is 2.7 million drivers – it’s a problem.”
The number went down last year from 8.6 per cent in 2019, possibly because people were driving less in the first few months of the pandemic.
So why are more of us drinking and driving?
“It might have to do with people drinking as a way to deal with stress related to pandemic,” Vanlaar said.
The survey also showed more people are drinking alone at home than before the pandemic, Vanlaar said.
It’s about 27 per cent now compared to about 19 per cent between 2017 and 2019.
“So that’s a result of lockdown measures and restrictions on social gatherings,” Vanlaar said.
If you’re drinking alone at home, there’s no bartender to keep track of the number of drinks you’ve had, nobody to tell you you’ve had enough, and nobody to be your designated driver, Vanlaar said.
Roads more dangerous?
So will more people drinking and driving mean more crashes and deaths?
We won’t know for a while – 2018 is the most recent year with national impaired-related crash statistics, Vanlaar said.
“So we can’t draw conclusions about the pandemic,” he said. “But in the U.S., crash data is showing that the number of people dying in crashes involving alcohol has gone up.”
In the U.S. in 2020, there were nearly 2,600 more deaths than in 2019 – even though people were driving less at the start of the pandemic.
In 2018, 466 Canadians were killed in a crash involving a drinking driver. That number has generally been declining since the nineties. In 1996, there were more than 1,000 deaths.
With more people admitting to drinking and driving now, Vanlaar expects that downward trend to end.
“We anticipate, unfortunately, that the number of fatalities in Canada will increase during the pandemic,” he said.
While some police forces reported fewer alcohol-impaired driving charges in 2020, those numbers went up this year as more pandemic restrictions were lifted.
For instance, charges went up by nearly 28 per cent in Ottawa and more than 10 per cent in Peel Region, Vanlaar said.
Ontario Provincial Police said alcohol-impaired driving charges are up about six per cent this year from both 2020 and 2019. There have been 8,933 charges so far this year, compared to 8,435 at this time in 2020 and 8,464 at this time in 2019.
Starting in 2019, police charges have been increasing overall for the “first time in many years,” after laws changed to let police demand a breath sample during any traffic stop, said Eric Dumschat, legal director at MADD Canada.
“A large part of that increase is due to mandatory alcohol screening which has led to increased detection,” Dumschat said.
Because police were hesitant to give breath tests before vaccination was widespread, arrests didn’t increase much in 2019.
“You didn’t want one police officer to get [COVID-19] and then spread it to a bunch of people,” Dumschat said.
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