Dahlman: Same ignorance, different argument

By Medicine Hat News Opinion on December 11, 2020.

It’s a choice: plain and simple.

It bares repeating: do not drive while you are impaired. Doing so will increase the chance of harming yourself and others. It is a very simple concept.

So predictably there were groans about the newly formed SafeRoads Alberta adjudication branch and police are given more power through the Provincial Administrative Penalties Act which empowers police to get impaired drivers off the streets immediately.

“More red tape created by the provincial government with a Red Tape Reduction ministry”; “a dictatorship”; “a police state” blah blah blah.

Just don’t drink and drive. That mind numbing phrase, those same, repeated ad nauseum pleas of getting friends or making some sort of arrangements to get to wherever the hell it is.

Just don’t drive if you see three of the same person, you don’t know what letter comes after T and you close your eyelids which is a good thing because after the law enforcement agent tells a person to point to his/her nose, only to make an awkward and unintentional attempt to gouge their own eyes out.

As part of the widely advertised National Impaired Driving Enforcement Day Dec. 5, Alberta RCMP stopped 48 suspected impaired drivers. Incredibly, three of them had small children with them. A 38-year-old male him had a six year old boy with him, 28-year-old female had three children with her (the oldest was 5) and a 42-year-old male had a 7-year-old. Epitome of intellectually deficient, selfish recklessness.

Sadly, like a lot of Canadians, a lot of Albertans don’t seem to quite grasp the concept of seeing things outside their own beer goggle blinders.

Hence, a law had to be created which will not only safe lives – i.e. save us from ourselves more adequately than before – but to save on health care costs, both financial but more importantly the mental and emotional, not to mention on the whole legal costs from the administrative and judicial side.

We can’t seem to do it ourselves. Don’t drive while impaired, here are all the stats about deaths, the price to insurance premiums, here are examples of the toll it takes on victims’ families as well as the guilty party’s loved ones.

It is the same self-centredness which drives the anti-maskers. Yes, there are once-in-a-blue-moon legit reasons due to health why one can’t wear a mask. However, if you are out in the public, no one should have to take responsibility nor or pay in anyway for your actions because you didn’t want to put a mask on.

No, this is not the flu. Don’t remember makeshift morgues being set up at the University of Alberta hospital. Just because you haven’t been affected… yet, doesn’t mean you won’t in the future. Even the biggest anti masker, U.S. President Donald Trump who did everything to minimize the affects of the pandemic, his country recorded just a few people short of 200,000 new cases on Dec. 2 alone – 14.2 million people have tested positive and 276,000 have died.

But no, you keep arguing and resisting. The same way those who have driven impaired have resisted for years. It hasn’t affected them so why worry about it, right?

There are generally always a couple of reasons why people like this feel they are above the law.

No one, let alone a government is going to tell that person what to do. It is my body, it is my right to act as I want. I have rights. The other is that all these harsh penalties, tougher laws and new legislations are just an excuse to siphon more money from ordinary folks. A way to gain more control over the citizens, allowing the government to impose its will that much easier.

Now, what are the two preceding paragraphs referring to…COVID laws or the new impaired driving laws?

Hard to tell isn’t it?

“If you don’t think that COVID is real, right now, you’re an idiot,” Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister told residents there Dec. 3. “You need to understand that we’re all in this together, you cannot fail to understand this.”

This is also applicable to the new impaired driving laws and the dangers of that. Always has been a problem maybe always will be. Hopefully the pandemic fines and laws will sink in.

Either way, it is a choice and a rather simple one which many “idiots” choose to ignore.

Ryan Dahlman is the managing editor of Prairie Post East and Prairie Post West

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