From left to right: Debbie Hammond (Coalition for Safer Alberta Roads), Cindy Blinston (GP & Area Safe Communities), Sgt. Cameron Palfy, Lyle West, Tyler Wold.

By Sheena Roszell

safer roads

Special guests take over morning shows Thursday to talk Coalition for Safer AB Roads and impaired driving

May 17, 2019 | 8:40 AM

The Coalition for Safer Alberta Roads and special guests visited Everything GP, Big Country 93.1 and Q99 Thursday morning to talk about the coalition and impaired driving.

“The coalition is a non profit organization made up of members of the community including the oil and gas industry, forestry, the County, the City, the M.D. of Greenview and the Chamber of Commerce and we all work together collectively to make a difference in our community by having safer highways,” said Debbie Hammond, Executive Director for the Coalition for Safer Alberta Roads.

She says Highways 40 and 43 are arteries in and out of the Grande Prairie community and the coalition wants to make sure people can travel them safely.

“Our number one goal is to educate drivers using these highways and ensure that they have the resources and the information they need to make safe choices behind the wheel.”

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Sgt. Cameron Palfy, an Integrated Traffic Commander with the Grande Prairie RCMP was on hand to share some alarming stats about drinking and driving. He says the average drunk driver will drive 58 times a year over the legal limit.

“Canada has a drinking and driving problem,” he explained. “On a Friday and Saturday night from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. one in eight people on the road is impaired by alcohol. So that is not even including any kind of drugs like cannabis.”

Palfy says there are tools in place now to help combat the drinking and driving situation, with the mandatory alcohol screening and efforts of prevention. He says even through all the awareness, drinking and driving is still very prevalent.

To put it into perspective just how bad drinking and driving is in G.P., Palfy said most people in Grande Prairie don’t have to worry about someone breaking into their house and committing a crime when they’re at home. Yes, it happens sometimes, but most people need not to worry about it every day.

Palfy said the scary reality is you absolutely do have to worry about driving your family from point A to point B and getting hit by a drunk driver.

“It’s one of my biggest fears,” he said.

This past October cannabis became legal. Some people believe law enforcement can’t test for intoxication by cannabis. Palfy says this rumour is false. If officers have reasonable suspicion to believe a driver is intoxicated by marijuana, they will conduct a standard field sobriety test.

“There are three tests that we look at, there’s what’s called a horizontal gaze and nystagmus, there’s the walk and turn and the one leg stand.”

Depending on how the driver performs on these tests, results could give RCMP reasonable grounds to arrest them.

From there the motorist is taken to the detachment and there is a 12 step process to be followed through there. The test here requires a urinary analysis.

To show the dangers of being fatigued and behind the wheel, Big Country 93.1’s Lyle West and Q99’s Tyler Wold stayed up through the night Wednesday and came into work Thursday on zero sleep. (Don’t worry we picked them up for work.) They did this to show just how difficult it was to do every day tasks exhausted, let alone getting behind the wheel of a vehicle.

“I did not feel good at all,” said West. “I would not have driven. There is no way I could have driven, not even to Sexsmith, let alone a long distance. It was difficult to focus.”

Wold said he felt physically ill.

“Staying up all night was mentally draining and then to continue on working, I felt extremely hungover. There were a couple of times I wanted to vomit. There’s no way I would have been able to drive.”

You can find out more about The Coalition for Safer Alberta Roads at saferalbertaroads.ca

Here is a video with some highlights from Thursday morning with the coalition:

(Video by Courtney Almeida)