Still weeding out problems
Police have no reliable test for dope or fine procedure
A month from Monday will be Weed Wednesday in Canada, the first day dope smokers in this country will no longer have to fear the police sniffing them out and tossing them in the clink for toking up an illegal herb.
The recreation use of marijuana will finally be legal on Oct 17, making it one of the few promises kept by the Trudeau Liberals who have yet to do much else in the first two years of their mandate except blossom the debt and deficit.
How are they doing with NAFTA? Don’t ask. According to Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland everything is fine, just slow moving.
Pipelines? Again, don’t ask. And don’t ask about the billions in revenues being lost for our inability to get the bounty of the Alberta oilsands to tidewater.
Chill, instead. Toke up. Get buzzed.
For weed aficionados in the nation’s capital comes the good news (for them) that the determination of their drugging and driving will not be reliant on a roadside saliva test, at least not the technology that the Trudeau Liberals have decided is as courtroom-worthy as the triedand-true breathalyzer for booze.
Ottawa Police Chief Charles Bordeleau wants nothing to do with this buzz detector, a $6,000 piece of equipment known as the Drager Drug Test 5000, used in some 40 countries to measure TCH levels in a driver’s spit.
He doesn’t trust it. Now, as anyone who lives in Ottawa knows, it is not exactly the warmest place on the planet when winter rolls in. In fact, it is apparently the seventh coldest capital in the world, but not far off degreewise from being the coldest, which is Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.
The Drager, however, apparently doesn’t like the cold.
It is so temperature sensitive, in fact, that it only functions properly when the thermometer is above 4C.
In snowy Ottawa, that’s a heat wave.
“We’ll monitor the technology to see how it works,” Bordeleau told reporters earlier this week. “The issue around keeping swabs at a right temperature is problematic in our climate, so we’re going to see how other police services are dealing with that.”
In other words, he won’t be the guinea pig.
The latest numbers show that Ottawa Police has upwards of 475 patrol vehicles in their fleet, which means going all-in with the Drager saliva tester would have set back ratepayers some $2.8 million.
Bordeleau has decided, instead, to wait it out, and use standardized field tests for assessing and identifying drug-impaired drivers.
Most know the drill. Touch your nose, walk a straight line.
So, while the Drager sits on the sidelines, Bordeleau has indicated that 246 officers have been trained as field drug testers, and that another 24 have been trained as drug-recognition experts who will be available every shift to make the final determination whether to lay impaired charges.
“We’re as ready as we can be with the information that we have,” he said, which is not exactly a thumbs-up.
So, with only four weeks to go, what will the fine be for someone caught smoking dope in public, rather than legally out of sight?
What will it say on the ticket being issued? What will be the fine, and what will be the court process to anyone wanting to fight the ticket?
For the answer to these questions, don’t ask Bordeleau or any other police chief in the country because none has yet been told by the Trudeau Liberals, despite the looming Pot-Freedom Day.
“The assumption,” said Bordeleau, “is we will have that (information) before (Oct. 17), and that will be entered into our system.”
This hardly sounds ready.