OSOYOOS TIMES-November 24, 2010
Whatever happened to governments looking before they leaped?
For the past two months, drivers across the province have worked to adapt to tougher drinking and driving penalties.
The new penalties have been coupled with a dramatic increase in police enforcement when it comes to impaired driving.
No one would argue that fighting drinking and driving is a bad thing.
But the penalties have undoubtedly caused collateral damage for the hospitality industry.
Whether this kind of damage could have been foreseen is difficult to say, but the government is now second-guessing itself on its decision to bring about the new penalties as a chorus of concern from restaurants, bars and other businesses dependent on liquor sales grows.
The provincial government has announced it’s going to assess the penalties and the stepped-up enforcement by police and hopefully come up with ways to coax a public frightened to even sniff alcohol before setting foot in a vehicle back into B.C.’s pubs, wine bars and eateries.
How does the government plan on doing that?
Education.
“People need to know that they are able to legally drive their vehicles if they drink small amounts of alcohol over time,” the provincial minister of public safety and solicitor general said earlier this month. “Most people can still enjoy a glass of wine with dinner or a beer after work.”
It seems like common sense, but a climate of doubt has permeated the air as friends share first and second-hand accounts of police blitzing any vehicle seen within a mile of a bar and handing out driving suspensions like they’re going out of style.
OK, so maybe we need to be reassured a little and educated on how much we can consume before it’s unsafe to get on the road.
The question is, why didn’t the government start educating the public prior to the introduction of the new penalties?
The provincial minister of public safety and solicitor general has already admitted that the public is not as well informed as they should be on the matter.
Did no one in the government, whether elected official or bureaucrat, consider that the new penalties might have unintended consequences such as scaring the public away from drinking outside their homes?
This is the second high-profile policy decision in the past year-and-a-half where the government has come out and said it could have done a better job providing information to British Columbians.
Granted, the driving penalties matter hasn’t hurt the government as much as the HST fiasco.
But like the HST, the new tougher driving laws have affected consuming habits and contributed to challenges for a number of businesses.
You would think that a government that toots its own horn so much about the ways it has improved the economy in this province would have spent a little more time and used the resources available to it to consider all contingencies when implementing a new policy.
What’s obvious is that the government needs to communicate a little more with us before it does something, not afterwards.
