Last December, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States lost his job after being arrested driving drunk late at night.
The crime had nothing to do with his work, nor did it take place at his office. It’s not as if he had been drinking on the job.
But he is now without work and who knows what will become of him.
That same month, Edmonton MP Peter Goldring withdrew from the Conservative caucus after he was charged with refusing to take a breathalyzer test following a fundraiser where alcohol was served.
The patrol that pulled Goldring over at about 12:30 a.m. was doing roving checks to catch inebriated drivers.
Drunk driving is now the crime de jour, thanks to the breathalyzer, which provides law enforcement with a non-invasive test providing immediate results to determine an individual’s alcohol concentration at the time of testing.
For instance, a blood-alcohol content of 0.10 means that 0.10 (one tenth of one percent) of a person’s blood, by volume, is alcohol.
While the Criminal Code sets the legal limit at .08, Alberta and Ontario have created a legal grey area where drivers with a blood alcohol level above .05 can be fined or lose their licence. No due process, no right of appeal.
Let’s look at this whole issue through the prism of previous crusades.
McCarthyism, after all, identified a real evil, Communism, but eventually went too far.
An article in the National Post of Jan. 11 reveals that this crusade, too, is going off the rails.
The newspaper reported that in May of 2011, an 82-year-old Cranbrook, B.C., woman with medical problems was made to stand outdoors for more than two hours while RCMP officers attempted 15 times to obtain a breath sample.
She had just arrived home when an off-duty RCMP officer pulled up and told her she had been driving badly and uniformed officers were on their way to check for impairment.
“When the stone-cold-sober pensioner with poor lung capacity was unable to blow hard enough to activate the roadside screening device, Margaret MacDonald was cited for failing to blow, her licence was suspended, she was fined $500 and her car was towed,” reported the paper.
“I was treated as guilty of driving while impaired without anyone even asking me if I had had a drink,” she said.
“I have had a motor vehicle licence for 63 years without any other incident. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I was standing in the cold, lungs congested, legs hurting and dry mouth. They did not care.”
She quickly went to the local hospital where she had her blood tested for alcohol and obtained a medical certificate that said there was none in her system.
But it will take longer for her to get over her humiliation.
Of course everyone should oppose drunk driving – that goes without saying.
Drunks on the roads are a menace. But common sense has disappeared.
That’s what happens in crusades.
Henry Srebrnik, who very rarely drinks alcohol, is a professor of political studies at UPEI.
