Stiffer penalties help, but convictions key to safety

The Ontario government wants to start suspending the drivers’ licences of people caught texting at the wheel and jailing drivers who kill people while driving carelessly, Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca says.

The point, said Del Duca on Wednesday, is to “keep the most vulnerable road users — including pedestrians and cyclists — safe.”

It’s the province’s second legal crackdown on distracted driving in two years. In June 2015, the Liberals passed a law increasing the fines for distracted driving and applying demerit points to convicted drivers.

It doesn’t seem to have taken. Deaths among vulnerable road users were about the same last year as in the years before; Ottawa sees a steady eight to 10 pedestrians and cyclists killed in collisions each year.

Stiffening penalties doesn’t make anybody more likely to be caught but it does increase the consequences if they are. Until now, the Highway Traffic Act’s philosophy has been agnostic about the consequences of bad driving. If you change lanes without shoulder-checking, the action is the same regardless of whether you hit nobody, crunch into a tractor-trailer, or kill a cyclist.

Driving recklessly can be a violation of separate provincial and federal laws, which dish out separate penalties. Dangerous driving causing death is a federal crime that can theoretically bring a 14-year prison term; in extreme cases there’s another federal charge, criminal negligence causing death, for which the maximum sentence is life in prison. These charges are rarely laid.

Historically, we’ve punished an episode of bad driving as an oopsie that usually does little harm, rather than as bad judgment that a driver knows could be lethal. That’s resulted over and over in drivers — whose inattention kills people — pleading guilty to, say, provincial charges of changing lanes unsafely or failing to signal turns. They get tickets and a couple of demerit points and their insurance premiums go up.

When you’re piloting a steel-andglass machine that weighs over a ton, at speed, in an environment that’s increasingly crowded with people not in protective cages like yours, you need to focus. For all the whining people do about reckless cyclists and phone-focused pedestrians, they’re not remotely as dangerous as drivers who choose not to pay attention to what they’re doing.

The new legislation, which Del Duca promised he’ll present this fall, will hike the minimum fine for distracted driving again, from $300 to $500, and raise the maximum fine for subsequent offences. Repeat offenders could have to pay as much as $3,000. It’ll also add automatic driving suspensions of three days for a first offence, seven days for a second and 30 days for a third.Del Duca also said he’ll increase the fines for driving through crosswalks with pedestrians in them — “failing to yield to pedestrians” — and create a new provincial offence for careless driving causing death, which could come with a two-year jail term and a fine of up to $50,000. Making careless driving that kills someone a distinct offence from careless driving that doesn’t is a different move away from the Highway Traffic Act’s blindness to consequences. The first set of changes treats every bit of sloppiness at the wheel as potentially deadly; this one says killing someone makes carelessness especially egregious.

If you’re texting and driving specifically, you’re 23 times more likely to be in a crash or dangerous near-miss as an undistracted driver. The trick remains: Convicting bad drivers of these things. The possibility of killing someone doesn’t seem to affect behaviour much. But if new rules change some bad drivers’ calculations of the risk they’re taking, that’s progress.