The first thing to be noted in terms of alcohol consumption is that prevention has played a huge role. There have been huge prevention campaigns. Health Canada has funded… One of my Master's level students prepared a list of all the programs funded by Health Canada in the schools. The department has conducted a huge campaign, which is absolutely fantastic, to explain to people how alcohol can impair one's ability to drive. If someone says to me that as a result of the police presence and the risk of receiving a penalty, the number of cases has gone down, I would answer that—and I have been teaching at the university for more than 25 years—when I present that part of the course and ask students whether they know which roads to take if they have been drinking, every single one of them is able to name one road the police do not patrol. If people are relying on the police to convince people not to drink and drive, they are making a mistake. People will simply find which road to take, because police officers cannot patrol every single road—unless we want to end up in a police state.
Prevention campaigns have really been the most effective way of reducing the number of cases and changing people's behaviour when it comes to drinking and driving. Similarly, it is clear that when it comes to preventing all causes of impairment… In terms of medications, as I was saying earlier, France has made tremendous progress by putting pictograms on product labels that people can refer to.
Certainly, if we want there to be fewer accident victims, people's behaviour has to change. It is not by bringing in tougher penalties that this will happen. People's behaviour changes primarily through prevention and through lighter, but more frequent, penalties, because people realize that there is a risk they will be caught and hit with the usual penalties: having their car seized or receiving demerit points. The objective is to target as many people as possible who drive impaired.