welcome to the police state. My mom who grew up in communist Russia, says she has been stopped more often for spot checks in Canada than she ever was in Russia.

I think we are preaching to each other's choirs though. It seems none of us agree with these random spot checks.

Ken, laws are not created by the voting public in this country. They are created mostly by hired civil servants for lawyers, who are nominally elected, but then do their party line thing until, the next election. Most of the laws like this are actually meant to apply to the public servants, not the public, but they have got the tables turned and are applying it to citizens.

I think if you actually gave the public the choice of saying "yes we want random spot checks of every driver in order to catch the 1 in 1000 who might be impaired" versus "Yes, we want the police to stop suspected impaired drivers due to their erratic behavior on the road or the fact that they just staggered out of the bar."Which do you suppose the general public would vote for?

400,000 cars stopped in the last big spot check campaign here. 15 impaired charges laid. No other criminals caught. 399,985 innocent citizens inconvenienced and treated in accusatory ways on suspicion that they're criminals. Close to a million dollars wasted spot checking innocent people.


I think travel in current Russia, according to my family who still travel there, is about the same as here. You have to check at the border with the proper papers, but they do not really have checkpoints otherwise. My aunt in Moscow was with me once in a police spotcheck and she says they don't have such things in Moscow. She says the police would only check people they think are criminals. It is not even a requirement to carry one's driver's licence, as long as you actually are licenced, apparently. Here, if you are caught in a spot check not having the proper papers, your car will be impounded, you will be charged towing and impound fees amounting to about $200 and you will also be fined about $175 for driving without a licence and you will have to find your own way home, generally a $50 cabride. The cahrge of driving without your licence is spurious and should not be made. Just because you don't have the physical paper on your body doesn't mean you are not licenced. However, in this police state is is necessary to carry the proper papers and produce them on demand for a law enforcement officer even if you have committed no wrongdoing. Common law would have you ask the officer if they had seen you commit any crime or breach of the peace and if the answer is "No", common law gives you the right to travel on without identifying yourself. Common law is sonsistently ignored in this country and our rights are trampled on regularly.

Ken: I completely agree that driving is a skill and is not a right.
I don't believe people should drive impaired any more than you do. Get a grip.
The stats come from the published numbers in a local newspaper about a campaign of spot checks during a holiday. I think we agree that the police should be stopping impaired drivers, but we disagree on the usefulness of spot checks for that purpose. I believe if theior efforts were truly aimed at impaired drivers that they would be on the road, looking for poor driving. Man it's easy to spot.
But I believe that the impaired excuse is simply a cover for a widespread fear induction into the general populace, an interference in my right to enjoy my liberty as long as I hurt no one, which is common law.
The stopping of every single car to view and question their innocent occupants and view their "papers" or subject them to seizure of their chattel and arrest of their person at great expense for committing no crime. That is what I object to. That is Canada's police state.

My remark on travel in Russia was in answer to Standard's question. My mother and I will never travel again in the former soviet union due to what was done to our family there. But I have remaining cousins there who have visited us in Canada and cousins from Kazakhstan and Siberia, recently emigrated to Germany, where I visited them and discussed these matters.