Winter tires will be mandatory in Quebec by the fall of 2008
RHÉAL SÉGUIN
December 20, 2007
QUEBEC -- Quebec has become the first province to require car owners to install winter tires on their vehicles as part of a new road safety law aimed at reducing fatal accidents.
It will become mandatory next fall for all vehicles to be equipped with a full set of winter tires from Nov. 15 to April 15. Currently, 90 per cent of Quebec drivers switch to winter tires. But Minister of Transportation Julie Boulet wanted to make snow tires compulsory, even though buying them will represent an additional cost for some owners.
"There is no price when it comes to road safety," Ms. Boulet said yesterday. "What we want is to save lives and this is just one of the measures that will allow us to do this."
Last year, 717 people died as a result of accidents on the province's roads.
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The new law also prohibits drivers from using hand-held cellphones, a measure that will be gradually introduced beginning Jan. 1. This was a controversial proposal made by the task force on highway safety this fall, and the government decided to implement it immediately, convinced that cellphone use has become a serious obstacle to safe driving.
The province will also begin testing photo radars and cameras at traffic lights in 15 communities across three regions of the province as part of a pilot project to evaluate their efficiency in reducing accidents. Furthermore, it will be compulsory for new drivers to take driver education courses, and heavy trucks will have to be equipped with governors to limit their speed to 105 kilometres an hour.
In the fight to reduce drinking and driving, Premier Jean Charest's minority government failed to receive support from opposition parties to drop the blood-alcohol limit from 0.08 to 0.05. Ms. Boulet had proposed suspending the driver's licence for 24 hours of anyone caught driving with a blood-alcohol level above 0.05 but less than 0.08. She said there would no fines or demerit points, arguing that it was simply an "administrative penalty" aimed at discouraging anyone who consumes alcohol from driving.
However, the Action Démocratique du Québec asserted that the measure was targeting the wrong people. ADQ transportation critic Pierre Gingras said it was "inadequate" because it was penalizing those who drink moderately while doing little "to take the repeat offenders, real criminals, off the road."
The Parti Québécois said some drivers could be wrongly penalized by their insurance companies and would have no legal recourse if they were falsely accused of breaking the law. PQ critic Serge Deslières argued that the government would be better off hiring more police officers, and strictly imposing the current 0.08 limit if it was serious about reducing fatalities.
The Liberals accused the opposition parties of bowing to pressures from bar owners who feared a major drop in business if the stricter blood-alcohol limit was adopted.
Ms. Boulet said 6 per cent of all fatal drinking-and-driving accidents involved people who had a blood-alcohol level between 0.05 and 0.08. She said that would average out to about 12 deaths a year. "We believe this measure would have saved that many lives. Each life is worth saving and we strongly believed it," the minister said yesterday. But she was forced to drop the measure in order to ensure yesterday's adoption of the bill.
