LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Focus on dangerous driving

The Steinbach city council is recruiting the Ste Anne police to help ticket drivers as part of an MPI initiative. Deputy Mayor Michael Zwaagstra dismissed detractors by saying “If you don’t like the fact you’re getting pulled over by a Ste. Anne officer while you’re racing down Main Street, I don’t care because you shouldn’t be racing down Main Street. So, if your car gets impounded, I don’t really care which officer it is that’s impounding your car. Tough luck.”

Zwaagstra oversimplifies the issue. Police enforcement of traffic laws is somewhat sporadic. This is because the Highway Traffic Act, like many laws, tends to be onerous and unjust (offenses listed go well beyond street racing), and strict enforcement causes needless problems for drivers. The problems get worse when Buford T. Justice invites his out-of-town cousins to pile on and prowl Steinbach. The solution here is simple. Firstly, Ste. Anne police belong in Ste. Anne, and the Steinbach RCMP should focus their purportedly limited resources on street racers instead of minor HTA violations.

The reality is that Steinbach city council is using street racing as a convenient excuse for mass ticketing, or revenue generation. Just ask Mayor Earl Funk. “This time [MPI says] anything that’s ticketable is fair game, and I like that.”

So, everything from street racing to utterly harmless behaviors like not wearing a seatbelt or motorcycle helmet, and “improperly transporting cannabis,” whatever that means, are under the microscope. Even if one doesn’t even break the law, police are allowed to pull over any driver at any time, ostensibly to check their licence and registration, which is essentially arbitrary. Furthermore, police can run even sober drivers through a breathalyzer test under threat of arrest. These two particular and unacceptable laws put all drivers in the crosshairs.

Undoubtedly some people drive too fast down Main Street, and while a 50 km/h speed limit is easier to justify, it would be helpful to know how fast the drivers were going and where they were caught. A recent enforcement drive down Main Street over Easter saw 34 tickets given—none of which appear to be serious offense notices.

If Ste. Anne can send its officers to help throw the HTA at drivers in Steinbach and on the Trans-Canada Highway, well outside their municipal boundaries, it begs the question of whether that town is overpoliced. In any case, the Buford T. Justices of the world need to refocus and regain their perspective and focus on actual dangerous driving.