CONSERVATIVE POLICY IS SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Unless you're inebriated like Cheech and Chong--swerving down the
road in a van made of marijuana, holding a bong between your legs and
sparking a joint with your free hand--it's pretty hard to get
reprimanded for driving stoned in Canada. Or at least until now, apparently.

Staying truer than ever to the standard Conservative agenda, the
Harper government has introduced a new bill to crack down on this
oversight in our criminal code, pushing for tough new measures that
would give police a much-needed boost in their enforcement against
impaired driving.

But before we commend the Conservative government for dealing with
this odd gap in Canadian legislation, some major inconsistencies need
to be addressed. If the government is so concerned with making roads
safer, why did they cut police training programs to detect drug use
in drivers that were already in place?

Currently, authorities rely on a bevy of traditional testing methods
to determine if a person is driving drunk--including breathalysers,
walking in a straight line and touching your nose with your eyes
closed. The breathalyser, when properly used, at least provides a
quantitative (though often legally contested) assessment standard.
Unfortunately, there are no handy 'breathalyser'-equivalent tools
available for detecting if a person is chock-full of THC or other
illicit chemicals, making laws against driving high much more
difficult to enforce.

Unless, like Cheech and Chong, you have the drugs sitting beside you
in the front seat, it's pretty difficult to prove you were smoking
without a voluntary urine test, which would probably make roadchecks
a heck of a lot messier. And even if you get busted for having weed
on you, as long as it's less than 30 grams you're in the clear.

The federal government is now giving the impression that they can
change all this with this new bill that would provide police the
ability to force whoever is in question to provide a urine and/or
blood sample if they fail a field sobriety test. Until a less
invasive way is developed to test for drug use, this one will just
have to do. This is actually a good policy to keep high drivers off the road.

But if drug use is so much more difficult to detect than alcohol, how
does the government expect to enforce this new law without any
training programs on recognising drug intoxication?

The drug detection training program created by the previous Liberal
government was one of the many initiatives terminated by the Harper
government's notorious $1 billion budget cut announced in September.

Critics are thus calling this new bill an underhanded way to get
votes for an upcoming election--get this amendment passed in the
House, give the authorities more power, and neglect the way you've
financially starved the institution that you intended to help.

If the Conservatives really want to get tough on crime, they should
be providing the infrastructure to fund their policies. Developing
new methods to recognise drug users does not happen without the
proper education and laws are useless and easily abused without
proper police training.

It's silly for the Tories to have cut a program intended to address
the problems they claim they need new laws for. And the new law,
ironically, is quite subjective and open to abuse. In anticipation of
an upcoming election Harper has picked a good herring, since Mothers
Against Drunk Driving (MADD) supports the bill and the Opposition has
to support it otherwise they look like Satanists. Nicely played, but
he isn't initiating a more responsible stance on crime by
relinquishing the resources to enforce it. This is not only
hypocritical--it's counterproductive.