Morgan discusses new penalties for excessive speeding, stunt driving

New legislation could be coming to Saskatchewan this spring that would see harsher penalties for stunt driving and excessive speeding.

Don Morgan, the minister responsible for SGI, introduced a new bill to cut down on speeding, stunting and speed racing in the province last week.

The legislation calls for increased punishments for those exceeding speed limits by 35 kilometres per hour and 50 km/h and drivers going twice the legal limit by increasing fines at each interval.

Fines would start at $530 for 35 km/h over, up to $809 for 50 km/h over and even higher for those doing double the posted limit.

Police would also be granted authority to suspend drivers’ licences and impound vehicles immediately for drivers charged with excessive speeding, stunting or racing.

Morgan said racing and stunting has been a problem under existing traffic safety legislation and sometimes difficult to get convictions for.

Morgan said that in 2018, there were 177 stunting collisions, which increased to 213 in 2020. There were 52 injuries in 2018 and 49 in 2020, with both years registering one fatality connected to stunting.

“Clearly there’s a risk to the public, (there’s a higher) number of accidents (and a higher) number of insurance claims, so we think it’s worthwhile to try and increase the penalties and to try and promote just a generally safer level of driving,” Morgan told Gormley on Monday.

According to Morgan, the new legislation that was introduced gives more clarity and direction to courts on how to address these offences.

“The expectation is we will get a higher number of convictions for people that are charged with stunting,” Morgan said.

Morgan said the issue of driving without due care and attention is a spectrum that ranges from distracted driving to criminal realms, depending on the actions an individual is or isn’t taking behind the wheel.

How police treat an offence depends on variables like the time of day, volume of nearby traffic and light or visibility.

Going 50 km/h over the posted limit or double the limit are already subject to stricter fines under current driving laws, but the new legislation would increase those fines further while also allowing for the roadside seizure of the vehicle.

The bill doesn’t differentiate between highway or urban driving, with Morgan noting stunting near schools could pose a significant risk to safety.

“All of those offences … all contain the same number of demerit points for each,” he said.

“When we look at the collisions and injuries we’ve got from excessive speeding — and that would fall into that 30 (km/h) category — in 2018 we had over 2,000 (and), in 2020, 985. Plus we’ve had a number of fatalities.”

Excessive speeding has been attributed to 23 deaths in Saskatchewan in 2018 and 18 in 2020.

“Our numbers aren’t getting drastically worse but they’re certainly not coming down as fast or as significantly as we’d like them to,” Morgan said.

The new legislation, if passed, would take some of the discretion away from police officers when it comes to interpreting what speeding is “excessive” by putting that offence at the 35 km/h baseline.

“We know that speed makes a significant difference on the number of accidents that take place and the number of injuries that take place,” Morgan said.

Despite those numbers trending downward, Morgan said they aren’t dropping quickly enough, and are increasing with more people on the road again.

If the bill is passed, Morgan said he expects it would come into force sometime in spring 2022.