The government of Alberta has proposed tough, new rules around drunk driving. These include automatic, multi-day license suspensions and car seizures with (effectively) no appeal as the suspensions would be over before the appeal could be heard. Paula Simons has a thoughtful critique of this program.
According to Minister of Solicitor General and Public Security Jonathan Denis, “Alberta’s approach targets those most likely to repeatedly drive drunk. It’s about changing driver behaviour through enforcing tougher sanctions.”
The rationale for these changes include the injury toll from drunk driving. In 2010, there were 96 fatalities and 1384 injuries resulting from drinking and driving in Alberta.
My question is why target drinking and driving for new measures instead of, say, workplace safety? While certainly impaired driving is bad and the injury toll is concerning, it can’t hold a candle to the injury stats in Alberta workplaces.
In 2010, there were 46,000 disabling injury claims (serious injuries were a worker could not do their job the next day) accepted by the WCB. This includes some 570,000 days lost from work. If you were to include all forms of workplace injury, the actual number of workplace injuries in Alberta would be closer to half a million annually.
The fatality data is a bit confusing but the 136 fatalities in 2010 reported here seems to be about right (accepting that there is significant underreporting for occupational disease). The upward trend-line in raw numbers and that fatalities appear to broadly track economic activity are both notable.
So why come down hard on impaired drivers?
One factor may be that extra punishment for drunk drivers is administratively easy and basically cost neutral. There is already an effective enforcement system in place, which will simply be granted extra powers to punish violators. In fact, if the police begin levying administrative fines instead of laying charges, this could result in a net reduction in court costs. This would not be the case for increasing enforcement of OHS rules. This would require many more inspectors and entail significant additional costs.
A second factor is that drunk drivers are already social pariahs and have no organized political lobby. The same cannot be said of employers who injure and kill workers—those employers are a powerful group in Alberta politics. And rolling out a system of administrative fines would be a significant change that they have resisted each time it has been discussed over the past 10 years.
It will be interesting to see if the government actually creates a meaningful enforcement system for workplace injuries over the next year. Based on the past 10 years of inactivity, I’m not holding my breath.
-- Bob Barnetson
6 comments:
Disabling injuries are not lost time claims. A disabling injury can occur and ZERO work can be lost. Get your facts straight before you spout off. Increases in fatalities (and continued increases) are due to occupational diseases where exposures occurred 15-30 years ago (asbestosis, mesothelioma, lung cancers).
Thanks for your note. I think you have mis-read my post. I said:
"In 2010, there were 46,000 disabling injury claims (serious injuries were a worker could not do their job the next day) accepted by the WCB. This includes some 570,000 days lost from work."
A disabling injury is an injury where workers could not do their jobs the next day (although they may have been able to do some part of their job or some other job). In this way, disabling injuries include both time-loss injuries (could not go to work) and modified work injuries (could not do job; needed some sort of accommodation).
The broad category of disabling injuries includes a certain number of days lost (the time-loss portion of disabling injuries).
I'm not entirely clearly on your concern re: fatalities. If you go to the link I provided you can see a variety of different numbers (both absolute and expressed as a rate). If you look on page 16, you can see that the absolute number of injury-related fatalities and the percentage of fatalities caused by injuries have increased over time frame presented (although these is substantial year-to-year variability as you'd expect with relatively small numbers). The rate (controlling for population) has decreased, but only very slightly over time and with fairly big swings.
I hope that is helpful.
Bob
fantastic blog....
According to Minister of Solicitor General and Public Security Jonathan Denis, “Alberta’s approach targets those most likely to repeatedly drive drunk. It’s about changing driver behaviour through enforcing tougher sanctions.” i like it....
drink drive solicitor manly
In occupational health and safety we talk a lot about prevention programs in the workplace to recognize hazards and prevent injury. The same sort of stance as to be taken with the mix of motor vehicles and intoxicating substances.
A preventative suggestion would be to have automobile manufacturers (through federal government legislation) and or cars sold in Canada to be equipped with an alcohol measuring device as standard equipment requiring each driver to blow into the device and measure a breath sample of each driver before the vehicles ignition system will start. At the moment only repeat offenders are required to have this device in their cars and must be court ordered to be installed before a repeat offender will be allowed to drive. There are some legal minds reading this that will say that such a device impairs driver's freedoms under the Constitution and Charter of Rights. You have to ask yourself though is such measure intended as a preventative measure to reduce injury and death or to unreasonably risk personal freedoms. With the number of deaths and injury associated to drinking and driving I would choose the prevention reasoning. Sometimes the state as to choose what is good for the interests of public safety.
Similarly, meaningful prevention, education and enforcement programs are needed in the workplace to reduce the number of injuries each year. This starts with educating young people in high school of the dangers associated to work and this should be a mandatory course before each student graduates from high school. Those that leave high school before graduating should be required to take such a course at their first employers expense. It must be remembered that people work to earn a living they do not go to work to get injured, maimed or die. Likewise employers should be taking steps to warn employees of dangers work situations rather than have the employee come upon them. This then incurs the quandary for the employee on whether to decide to refuse unsafe work. What is foul is that an employer simply has to ask another employee to perform the unsafe work without taking any measurable actions to make the work or work area safer. Safety from impaired operation of a motor vehicle to safety on the job should be everyone's responsibility. In this respect governments and employers have to take the lead. If we want a safer society especially in the someone as to take the lead.
The last sentence should read "If we want a safer society especially in the area of road safety and workplace safety, someone as to take the lead."
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