Good morning. Mothers Against Drunk Driving plans to fan out across Parliament Hill today to push for in-vehicle impaired-driving detection systems. More on that below, along with updates on an Alberta separatist petition and plans to reveal the next Governor-General. But first:

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I’m Josh O’Kane, filling in for Danielle Groen again today. I spent five years of my reporting career writing about promising new technologies and the ways they can reshape society – and developed a kind of sixth sense for predicting when well-intentioned tech will face pushback.

My colleague Jill Mahoney reports today that MADD advocates are in Ottawa this week, pressing the federal government to mandate in-car devices to detect when a driver has consumed too much alcohol.

There are a bunch of initiatives trying to develop this technology, including the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety program, or DADSS, which began research and prototyping work in 2008. It’s backed by a coalition of major automakers and the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and has gained traction since the U.S. passed a law in 2021 to develop rules around tech to prevent impaired driving.

The stats

While MADD says that the number of people who die in drunk-driving crashes has fallen by more than half since the mid-nineties, it remains a serious problem. The Ottawa-based Traffic Injury Research Foundation found that deaths rose 14 per cent in 2022 over the prior year – 521 in 2022 and 457 in 2021. Police in 2021 also issued an average of nine charges an hour for alcohol- or drug-impaired driving.

The ideas

There are two layers to DADSS that could someday find their ways into vehicles. Both would be designed to prevent cars from turning on when the driver’s blood alcohol content is at or above 0.08 per cent, which is the limit in many U.S. states. The mechanisms are passive, meaning a driver wouldn’t need to breathe into a special device just to turn on their car.

Instead, DADDS tech proposes checking a driver’s breath through sensors in the cabin that use infrared light beams to measure alcohol levels. Proposed sensor locations include the steering column and driver-side door – placed in such a way that other passengers’ breath wouldn’t affect the measurements. A second proposal would use non-invasive touch sensors, possibly on ignition buttons or on the gear shift, to measure alcohol levels in the blood beneath the skin.

The caveats

There are a lot of ifs here. Many of these technologies, including DADSS, are still under development. In February, the NHTSA confirmed in a report to U.S. Congress that the tech isn’t ready yet. Even when they are, manufacturers would need to sign off and then start integrating them into vehicles en masse – a prospect that might be easier if both Canada and the U.S. align on policy.

In the U.S., the 2021 law imposing the development of a new safety standard has faced pushback in Congress and, according to the National Law Review journal, “lots of hand wringing around privacy and data governance questions.”

Opponents and skeptics have christened the legislation the “kill switch law.” The prospect inherent in that nickname, however, of governments gaining remote powers to switch off your vehicle, isn’t really fair – at least in the case of DADSS. The car’s on-board computer would presumably be empowered to make the call. But that raises separate concerns.

The concerns

First, the creators of whichever system gets implemented would have to figure out a way to convince the public that it truly minimizes false-positive decisions. In other words, the system should ideally not deem a driver is drunk when they’re not, nor assume the breath of a drunk passenger belongs to the driver.

There are also numerous other proposals circulating for anti-impaired-driving tech beyond DADSS. If cameras or potentially invasive biometric sensors were implanted into vehicles, they might bring about inherent privacy risks. Many vehicles today are digitally networked; even if a camera isn’t intended to broadcast you arguing about the Raptors elimination or picking your nose at a stoplight, there are a lot of ways that bad actors could try to access this footage.

And then there’s the notion of “mission creep”: the gradual, often unnoticed expansion of a technology’s purpose. Any data collection would need informed consent from drivers – and strong guarantees that collection would stick to its original purpose, be minimized at all costs and get stored with extensive security.

The hope

No one should be drunk driving, man. It’s 2026. Call an Uber. An old-fashioned cab! Maybe your mom? But since people still drive drunk (and high), let’s hope regulators can firm up technology that keeps fools off the road, but that also manages tech risks. Here’s hoping.

Alberta separatists