Skip to main content

Canada puts $2.5m into tackling drug-impaired driving

The government of Canada is investing CAN$2.5 million over five years to tackle drug-impaired driving in the province of Prince Edward Island. The move is part of a CAN$81 million package to support public and road safety activities. Funding will help train more police officers in standardised field sobriety testing and drug recognition expert evaluation. The money will also be used to purchase approved drug screening devices and develop standardised data collection and reporting practices to analyse
August 21, 2019 Read time: 2 mins
The government of Canada is investing CAN$2.5 million over five years to tackle drug-impaired driving in the province of Prince Edward Island.


The move is part of a CAN$81 million package to support public and road safety activities.

Funding will help train more police officers in standardised field sobriety testing and drug recognition expert evaluation. The money will also be used to purchase approved drug screening devices and develop standardised data collection and reporting practices to analyse trends of drug-impaired driving.

Bill Blair, minister of border security and organised crime reduction, says the government wants people to understand the dangers of driving while impaired by alcohol and drugs.

“Stronger penalties and law enforcement alone can’t resolve the problem; public education and awareness are important pieces of making it socially unacceptable,” he continues. “Today’s investment ensures that frontline police officers have the tools they need to detect drug-impaired drivers to keep our roads safe.”

Related Content

  • The importance of going with the flow
    April 6, 2018
    Ensuring worker safety and up-to-date driver information is crucial to ensure that roadworks are not a source of danger and delay. Andrew Williams looks at a scheme on the A14 in Cambridgeshire, UK. In recent years, portable workzone ITS solutions have emerged as important tools in the management of major roadworks and system upgrade projects - and are viewed as an increasingly vital means of ensuring any ongoing traffic flow disruption is kept to a minimum. The technology forms a central component of an
  • GHSA laments ‘staggering’ trend in US pedestrian deaths
    March 14, 2025
    Drivers killed 3,304 pedestrians in the first half of 2024
  • Joined-up thinking for future ITS
    May 8, 2015
    David Crawford looks at a US model which, for modest federal funding, is producing substantive results. Outward and upward is the clear message emerging from the US$458,000, 2015 workplan of the US government’s ENTERPRISE (Evaluating New TEchnologies for Roads PRogram Initiatives in Safety and Efficiency) joint funding scheme for ITS research.
  • Getting to the point
    September 4, 2018
    Cars are starting to learn to understand the language of pointing – something that our closest relative, the chimpanzee, cannot do. And such image recognition technology has profound mobility implications, says Nils Lenke Pointing at objects – be it with language, using gaze, gestures or eyes only – is a very human ability. However, recent advances in technology have enabled smart, multimodal assistants - including those found in cars - to action similar pointing capabilities and replicate these human qual