Drunk Driving is OK in Canada
Often I find myself writing about transit and thinking that many lives would not have been lost were we to have more publicly funded transit options. However, despite all of that, we have governments that don’t ever equate the use of transit and the reduction of vehicular alcohol abuse.
Earlier this month, The Saskatchewan Party released details about its slate of candidates ahead of the election writ being dropped. What was interesting was a line stating that there are five candidates who have past drunk driving charges.
Scott Moe, both current leader of the Saskatchewan Party and Premier of Saskatchewan, is also included in this list of having an impaired driving charge in 1992.
However, what is not mentioned here is that he has had two other incidents including a 1994 charge of a hit-and-run and a 1997 collision that took the life of a mother of two sons.
In the 1994 incident, Scott Moe never received a breathalyzer test but did admit that he had consumed alcohol earlier in the day. However, there is a contradiction in all of this because this is what the police charge stating:
…control of a motor vehicle that was involved in an accident with a vehicle at the Shellbrook Co-op with intent to escape civil or criminal liability, fail to stop his vehicle and give his name and address…
With Moe clarifying in an interview when he was confronted over it:
I exchanged information with the owner of the other vehicle and I called in the accident to the police.
Of course, since he apparently only called in the accident to police, there would be no evidence of him being under the influence at the time. We will just have to take him at his word that in 1997 when he killed 39-year old Joanne Bolog and injured her 18-year old son.
No alcohol was cited here, but he was charged with driving without “due care” and “failing to come to a complete stop”.
Especially rich considering that in 2019, the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team had sixteen players killed when their bus was hit by a truck in a much similar fashion. The driver of the truck, who was just a permanent resident at the time, is now facing deportation.
Scott Moe commented on the tragedy:
“Nobody sets out one morning with any intent of being in a car accident of any type […] [to] some degree I feel for Mr. Sidhu and his family.”
Moe is just lucky that he has a certain degree of privilege that lets him get away with his past behaviour.
I could comment on other reasons for why Scott Moe (and his Saskatchewan Party) are a danger to others, but it doesn’t really matter what happens before you enter public life because it won’t matter when you are in office as Premier of a province anyhow.
In January 2003, while leaving friend and Vancouver-area broadcaster Fred Latremouille’s Hawaiian home, Premier Gordon Campbell was arrested and pled no contest to driving under the influence of alcohol.
In Hawaii, it was merely a misdemeanour and not a criminal offence such as the case is in Canada, so he was fined US$913 and sent on his merry way under the condition he be checked for alcoholism and participate in a substance abuse program.
Calls for his resignation were made from groups such as MADD, but he managed to survive another seven years in office only resigning in March 2011 after being bogged down by a poorly implemented sales tax.
Drunk driving is OK because these two idiots never faced the music for it.
