SEEKING A NEW WAY FORWARD
Weyburn pioneers innovative program to curb impaired driving
It was warmer than usual on the night when a few thousand pounds of metal and rubber and plastic crossed one line at highway speed, and in doing so drew a new line across the arc of Dakota Schmidt’s life, forever dividing it into before and after.
The truck that came barrelling out of the gloaming and braked for less than a second before smashing into the car Schmidt was driving, injuring her and killing her 41-year-old mother Daphne, opened a new and unfamiliar phase in her life.
“It’s been a little bit rough, not going to lie,” Schmidt said 10 months after she watched her mother die and less than 16 weeks after 35-year-old Wade Ganje pleaded guilty to impaired driving causing death and was sentenced to 45 months in prison.
“It’s really hard, too, because my mom was one of my best friends. So I think it’s a little bit different when you lose somebody like a cousin. Where for me, not only did I lose my mom but I lost my best friend. She was my cheerleader, my rock, my biggest support.”
While Schmidt watched her mother die, Ganje walked away from the crash. Court heard that police found him by a shed on a nearby farm, unable to stand or walk without assistance. His blood-alcohol content was two and a half times the legal limit.
Since that night on Highway 6 near Southey, Schmidt has emerged as a vocal advocate for people whose lives have been cleaved in two by someone else’s choice to drink alcohol and get behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Now, the young woman is throwing her support behind a new program aimed at eliminating drunk driving, established earlier this year in Weyburn, a city of almost 11,000 that happens to be the hometown of the man whose actions killed her mother.
While she maintains that anyone who has the cash to go out drinking by definition has enough money to find a safe ride home, Schmidt said it’s worth spending public money on anything that can get a drunk off the road. Even one life is worth it, she said.
Marlo Pritchard can’t remember how many times he responded to crashes caused by drunk drivers during the three decades he spent with the Regina Police Service. The best estimate the veteran officer, who is now Weyburn’s police chief, can give is “a vast number.”
“Officers go to a lot of serious accidents and see a lot of horrific and unnecessary injuries and deaths,” Pritchard said. “There’s going to be accidents, but the alcohol-related ones are not necessary. Alcoholrelated deaths around impaired driving are not necessary.”
That belief, coupled with the aftermath of two fatal crashes involving community members, led Pritchard to spend a year helping turn an idea proposed by Melinda Mintenko, a constable on the Weyburn police force, into reality.
The idea is simple: A partnership between the police, cab companies and local bars and restaurants, that allows anyone to trade their keys for a taxi voucher. Funded in part by Saskatchewan Government Insurance and the Ministry of Justice, the program launched in September.
Pritchard said about 60 people have taken advantage of the program so far. While the data pool is too small to draw any firm conclusions, a six-per-cent reduction in impaired driving charges this year suggests the city is onto something, he said.
“We have (also) seen a significant increase — and I mean significant — in vehicles being left at liquor establishments. They may not be partaking in our program, specifically, but our officers have seen a huge increase,” he said.
Pritchard said the community has for the most part been supportive of the program, which the Weyburn Police Service is already considering expanding to private functions and even house parties — with no consequences for anyone under the legal drinking age.
While data from the southern city’s experiment still has to be gathered and analyzed, Pritchard said he thinks it can be replicated or adapted for communities across the province.
That might be difficult in rural Saskatchewan, where the distances to outlying farms are great and the infrastructure to support a program offering free rides home is all but nonexistent, according to the mayor of Allan, a small town southeast of Saskatoon.
Unless a local organization was prepared to volunteer its members’ time, the only practical solutions to drunk driving are the old standbys of designating a driver or simply avoiding alcohol, Les Alm said.
“Politicians can talk all they want about cleaning up impaired driving, but in rural Saskatchewan … there is a big obstacle because you have distance, and you can’t just call a cab,” Alm said.
At the same time, some businesses are doing what they can to help, he said.
Hank’s Tavern, a popular bar and hotel in nearby Bradwell, is one of them. Hank Ukrainetz said she has been offering drunk customers a place to sleep it off since she bought the place more than eight years ago.
“I do that just to try to get more people to not drink and drive,” she said, noting that most of her customers have few other options apart from a taxi ride back to the city — which is possible but expensive, with the meter often ticking past $150.
While people are often surprised by the bar’s policy and the 10-bed hotel fills up if a band is playing that night, Ukrainetz said she is continually surprised by how many people profess interest but wind up sneaking out to drive home after a few hours.
Others promise to stay over the next time they come out, which Ukrainetz finds even more baffling. What’s to plan for? she mused. All you have to do is go upstairs and crash. And yet, she said, people find ways not to do it.
“In the end, you can’t 100 per cent stop someone from (driving drunk). But I don’t understand. If I had that option, I’d be hopping all over that. If I went to the city out for one night I’d love to have an option like that.”
Schmidt isn’t the only antidrunk driving advocate to praise Weyburn’s experiment. Bonny Stevenson said every community in the province should join the southern city and “think a little outside the box,” because the services offered today are not enough to eliminate the practice.
“We can’t seem to get through to people that it’s just not OK to do it,” said Stevenson, whose 17-year-old son, Quinn, was driving to work at a golf course south of the city on Aug. 3, 2013, when 25-year-old Robin Tyler John ran a red light and crashed into his car.
Quinn, who had just finished high school and aspired to work as a sports broadcaster, died in the crash. John, whose blood contained twice the legal limit of alcohol, was sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary, plus two years of probation.
Stevenson said she is frustrated because expensive advertising and awareness campaigns don’t seem to be working in Saskatchewan, which in 2015 had the highest rate of impaired driving of any province — more than 85 per cent higher than Alberta’s.
“You see it all the time, where people are having more and playing the game. I’m not saying they’re rolling on the floor drunk, but they legally shouldn’t be driving.”
Schmidt said there’s no reason not to expand Weyburn’s program. The cost would be justified if it saves a single life, and the alternative — “sitting back and doing nothing” — will inevitably carve more lives in two, she said.
In 2015, the last year for which Statistics Canada data is available, 575 impaired driving charges were laid for every 100,000 people in the province.
Last year, 1,100 collisions in Saskatchewan were caused by alcohol or drugs; 464 people were injured and 57 people died.
Schmidt acknowledged that stiffening sentences for convicted drunk drivers would probably deter others from doing it, but said it’s also important for people to know what it’s like to lose a loved one, a friend, a mother in a senseless crash.
“I know everything I’ve went through, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”