The Ottawa police service said at its board meeting Monday that it’s ready to go when it comes to the legalization of cannabis on Oct. 17.
Deputy chief Steve Bell gave a presentation to the board outlining the major focus of enforcement when pot becomes legal later this month. The service’s primary focus when it comes to cannabis will be impaired driving and the service says it has a good system in place for detecting those who may get behind the wheel while high.
“Public safety is always where we focus our efforts,” Bell said. “Our public safety concern around the legalization is specifically around impaired driving. Most of our efforts have been driven towards making sure that we are enforcing drug-impaired driving laws.”
When it comes to detecting whether someone is high behind the wheel, Bell says that Ottawa police have 28 drug recognition experts as of Oct. 9 who have been trained to properly determine whether someone is high and can testify to this in court. On top of that, the service has more than 270 trained field sobriety test officers who can also determine on the spot whether a driver is high.
Bell reiterated that Ottawa police will not be stepping into the technological side of detection and will be avoiding the use of the Drager Drugtest 5000 which is the device that has been approved for use by the federal government.
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“Technology is very new in this area and still emerging,” Bell said. “We’ve said right now that we’re not going to step into that. We’re going to wait, use the tried and tested system that we have and let that technology emerge so that when we’re buying something down the road, we know it’s the right device for us.”
During his presentation, Bell said that the service has put in place fit-for-duty guidelines as to the appropriate use of cannabis by their officers should they indulge. Chief Charles Bordeleau later confirmed that officers will indeed be permitted to use cannabis while off-duty.
“We feel like this is the best approach respecting the fact that it’s a legal product now, but that an officer or a member of the police service needs to be fit for duty regardless of what he or she may be doing off duty,” Bordeleau said.
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