Highway Traffic Charges Rise In O.P.P. Blitz

Summer long weekends are synonymous with many things. Among them: barbecues, warm weather, cottage country and of course, dangerous driving on Ontario’s highways.

The Ontario Provincial Police were out in full force over the Canada Day weekend and with good reason, because so were some dangerous Ontario offenders.

Among them, a man who left his van parked in a highway passing lane with his children in it while he “went to relieve himself behind a bridge,” said Sgt. Cam Woolley.

“Luckily, the first car to come along was a police car and prevented what likely would have been a tragedy.”

As of Sunday afternoon, the OPP had laid more than 1,000 charges across the province, 400 in the Greater Toronto Area alone.

More than half of the charges were for speeding, one of which was issued to a man in a rented convertible that allegedly clocked in at 200 kilometres per hour.

“The driver told the officers he has such a terrible driving record, it’s cheaper to rent a car than pay for insurance if he owned his own car,” Woolley said.

“He’s licensed right now, but I doubt it will stay that way for long, because he was charged criminally with dangerous driving.”

Also high on the list of offences is not wearing seatbelts, a charge that befell six of eight people in an SUV heading north who were also drinking inside the vehicle.

Thirty-six per cent of people that have died on provincial highways this year weren’t wearing seatbelts.

“I’m really still surprised that that many people don’t wear seatbelts,” Woolley said. “It’s absolutely foolhardy.”

And of course car safety is still an issue, proven by the fact that more than 140 vehicles deemed unsafe were yanked off the road. The main offender in this category had its door tied together with swimming pool rope.

What it all added up to was collisions rising compared to last Canada Day weekend, with five fatal crashes in central Ontario alone since the blitz began Friday.

The weekend was also the first where the province’s new law targeting drunken boaters was in effect. Those charged with impaired boating under the law will have their motor vehicle driver’s license automatically suspended.

Last week, a 34-year-old woman boating naked on Lake Rousseau became the first charged under the new law for allegedly operating the boat drunk.

“(The law) really hasn’t made much difference for our efforts towards that because we’ve always been targeting people that are drinking in vessels and impaired operators,” said marine unit Sgt. Daryl Grenville.

“It just gives us another tool to deal with them in which we didn’t have in the past, so our efforts haven’t really changed.”

The holiday blitz wraps up at midnight Monday.

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