“How could I have been so stupid?” British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell wondered aloud at a press conference held last Sunday. Ironically, that’s exactly the question that B.C. voters have been asking themselves.

Arrested last Friday in Maui and kept in jail overnight, Campbell has admitted that he is guilty of driving while under the influence of alcohol, although he has steadfastly refused to admit that what he did was a crime. Instead, he continually refers to the offense as “a horrible personal mistake” and emphasized on Sunday that “this misjudgment happened on my personal vacation.” The relevancy of this hair-splitting is highly questionable; no one would accept it in connection with any other crime committed while on vacation.

Make no mistake, drunk driving is not a personal indiscretion; it is a crime, with enormous societal consequences that Campbell and his supporters are now downplaying (the sympathy being now expressed for Campbell by the same reporters and commentators that went after Glen Clark and Mike Harcourt, neither of whom did anything wrong, is particularly galling). In fact, I would submit that Campbell’s actions and his subsequent orgy of excuses have done more to set back the campaign against drinking and driving than any other event in recent memory.

And that campaign had been working, to the point where drinking and driving had become socially unacceptable. But, unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped people from doing it. As the Edmonton Sun editorialized on January 5, “We would have thought that the drinking and driving message would have sunk in by now. It’s a very simple message, actually: if you’ve been drinking, don’t drive. But some morons out there still haven’t gotten the message.”

In the United States, where Campbell chose to commit his crime, a crackdown on drinking and driving was announced just before Christmas. “Impaired drivers represent one of our nation’s greatest threats,” said highway safety administrator Jeffrey W. Runge, M.D. “There are nearly one billion drinking and driving trips annually which kill more than forty-five people every day. This crime will not be tolerated. Today marks the beginning of a yearlong effort focused on what we know prevents impaired driving — highly visible detection, arrest and prosecution.” According to American government statistics, in 2001, 17,448 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes, representing approximately forty-one per cent of the 42,116 total traffic fatalities that year.

The numbers are equally disturbing in Canada. For the first time in eight years, the percentage of traffic fatalities linked to drinking actually increased (from thirty-three per cent to thirty-six per cent). The Canadian Centre for Health Information reports that car crashes are the most frequent cause of severe injuries (nearly half of all reported severe injuries), and one in eight of those collisions involves alcohol consumption above the national legal limit of 0.08 per cent.

That legal limit (it’s the same in Hawaii, by the way) is in itself coming under scrutiny. A new European study, published in the journal Science, has concluded that even moderate alcohol consumption can be dangerous if people get behind the wheel. Dutch researcher Richard Ridderinkhof, co-author of the study, argues that it proves that “the legal blood alcohol limits of 0.08 per cent for driving in Canada, Britain and many U.S. States are dangerously high. Indeed, the limit of 0.05 per cent in the Netherlands and several European countries is even too high.” According to the study, “performance was severely diminished at a blood alcohol content of 0.04 per cent, a level men reach after just two glasses of wine, or two beers, or two shots of spirits within an hour.”

Keep in mind that Campbell’s breath sample was taken only after a forty-five minute drive to the police station, yet he still blew over 0.08 per cent (although Campbell claims that he took the breathalyzer at the side of the road, police records show that he had only a roadside sobriety test). He also claims that he doesn’t know his blood alcohol reading, though it’s difficult to imagine him not asking for that kind of information under the circumstances. After being released on bail, he did find the time to call back to the police station to ask whether the information regarding his arrest would be made public. Only then did he call his family and his political staff.

Campbell has a long history of being sanctimonious about ethical issues, and his past public pronouncements are now coming back to haunt him. While he is vowing to continue on, it’s difficult to imagine him having the moral legitimacy to govern after this incident. If he doesn’t resign, his own party may push him out prior to the 2005 election. In his press conference, Campbell said one thing that made I thought made a lot of sense: “I do not intend to contest the charge. I will suffer the full consequences.” Those consequences should include his resignation.

picture-2299.jpg

Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...