RANDOM BREATHALYZERS CROSS THE LINE

Imagine if you opened your front door to find a police officer
demanding to search your home without either a warrant or any specific
reason. He just wanted to know if you happened to be doing anything
illegal. "Got any dead bodies in your basement, sir?" "Is that
marijuana I smell?"

You'd send him packing, and rightly so.

We object to the idea of allowing police officers to pull over any
motorist they please and administer a breathalyzer test --an idea
floated in a recent Justice

Department report and supported by Justice Minister Rob Nicholson --
on the same basic principle. Civil liberties advocates are justifiably
worried that random roadside tests could lead to racial or
socioeconomic profiling. But the larger point is that such a law would
allow police officers to profile Canadians however they liked.

Canadians have a fundamental right to conduct themselves lawfully
without interference from agents of the state, and we've already given
up plenty against that basic entitlement. Drunk-driving checkpoints
inconvenience the law-abiding, but society has come to accept them as
an effective means to a noble end -- and crucially, police must have
cause to believe a driver has been drinking before they make him blow
into a tube. Far more distressing are new laws allowing police to
impound an automobile if its driver blows .05, even though the legal
limit remains .08. This undermines the very concepts of "legal" and
"illegal."

If the current approach to impaired driving wasn't working, there
would at least be a public safety argument to make for taking the
government's power to intrude on basic liberties further. But drunk
driving rates have dropped significantly over the past decades.
Traffic Injury Research Foundation statistics show there were 1,296
alcohol-related deaths in Canada in 1995; in 2006 there were 907 -- a
30% drop in just a decade.

Very drunk drivers remain the biggest problem: Among fatally injured
drivers with alcohol in their system, almost 60% tested at more than
twice the legal limit. Happily, the very drunk are the easiest for
police to spot on the roads, and that's precisely where they should
focus their efforts. If the law is to change in order to deal with a
small number of incorrigible repeat offenders, it should be through
ever-stiffer sentences, not by further eroding the rights of
law-abiding citizens.

Taking to the highway is a risk, and it always will be. It's hardly
comforting, but worth remembering, that 63% of traffic fatalities in
Canada in 2006 did not involve alcohol. Theoretically there are no
limits to the powers our governments could grant themselves in an
effort to eliminate impaired driving, but the line has to be drawn
somewhere. We have no qualms about drawing it here.