Send stronger message

Canada has to change the way it deals with drunk drivers who kill and injure people. This week, the case of Langford’s Kenneth Jacob Fenton was a sad and infuriating reminder of that.

On Monday, Fenton was handed an additional 18 months in prison for injuring a woman when he rolled a truck while drunkenly speeding away from police, only six weeks after he killed RCMP Const. Sarah Beckett in another crash. Before Monday’s hearing, he had already begun serving four years in prison for that offence.

Thanks largely to grassroots campaigns, our attitude to drinking and driving has shifted over the past few decades, and we now see it as the danger it is. Enforcement has toughened, and the police work hard to get impaired drivers off the road.

But the sentences for impaired drivers who kill or injure other people don’t seem to match society’s commitment to treating this scourge seriously. Courts, bound by previous sentences, dispense jail terms that treat deaths too lightly.

Mandatory minimum sentences can be too restrictive when every case is unique. But judges have to be empowered to hand out sentences that make it clear that death or injury at the hands of an impaired driver is not an accident. It happens because someone made a conscious decision to drink and a conscious decision to drive when they had had too much to drink.

If the risk of harming another person isn’t enough to change those decisions, the certainty of a long prison term might be more persuasive.