Thunder Bay police have launched the 2024 Festive RIDE program in an effort to crack down on impaired driving over the holidays.

Police traffic Const. Tom Armstrong said the program kicked off last weekend, and will continue throughout the month of December.

Armstrong said impaired driving remains an issue in the city, with about 164 charges laid so far this year, with 83 of those charged individuals being impaired by drug.

“We’re seeing more and more of those, which has been the trend the last number of years, and a very concerning one,” he said. “The service is really kind of working hard to to adapt to this new problem.”

“A significant number of our frontline officers are trained in standard field sobriety tests,” Armstrong said. “We’re expanding our drug recognition expert program, and we’re just becoming far more adept at identifying those drug-impaired drivers.”

“If you’re on prescription medication, you use any sort of illicit drugs, you use any sort of marijuana products, you need to be very, very conscious about driving.”

Armstrong said getting the message out about the dangers of impaired driving has been a struggle.

“We tried the public education campaign, we do enforcement and people just make the conscious decision,” he said. “They know the risks, they know the the potential costs of it, and they just think it’s not going to happen to them.”

“We’re going to continue doing enforcement and hope that people see us out there and start to kind of get the message and finally wake up a little bit.”

Steve Sullivan, CEO of MADD Canada, said there are geographical trends when it comes to impaired driving, with remote, rural communities tending to see higher rates.

“Part of that is because people don’t have the kind of options you might have in a larger city like Toronto or Ottawa,” Sullivan said. “Having said that, there’s no excuse for anybody to drive impaired.”

The problem, he said, is a difficult one to address.

“There’s no one solution to it,” Sullivan said. “There’s levers like education and awareness and legislation and punishment and enforcement. It’s a combination of all those things.”

“The good news is most of us get it,” he said. “There are fewer people who drive impaired today than 20 years ago.”

However, he added, there’s still a segment of the population that chooses to drive impaired.

“We ask them in surveys, ‘why do you do this?'” Sullivan said. “They’ll say they have a short ride home, they didn’t feel impaired and they didn’t think they’d see a police officer.”

“They never think they’re going to get into a crash,” he said. “They never think they’re going to be that person.”

“Working with families who’ve lost loved ones or been injured, they never think it’s going to happen to them either. But it happens with somebody every day.”

Sullivan said while mandatory alcohol screening, which allows police to ask for a breath sample from drivers they’ve stopped and was introduced in Canada in 2018, has led to a drop in impaired driving in other jurisdictions.

He said, however, anti-impaired driving technology, which would passively detect if a driver is intoxicated, will likely have a positive impact.

“In the U.S. they passed legislation to require every new car and truck to have anti-impaired driving technology,” Sullivan said. “It’ll take a couple years for that to be fully implemented.”

“But I think ultimately, as long as you give people the choice to drive impaired, there are going to be those people that do. And I think technology is going to be the ultimate long-term solution.”