IT SEEMS THAT HARDLY a day goes by without us hearing about a traffic fatality in which alcohol was involved.

And suspicions that impaired driving is becoming even more of a threat were buoyed by the release of statistics from festive R.I.D.E. (Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere) programs which showed an increase from last year in the number of charges laid despite a slight drop in the number of spot checks.

It's not as though efforts to curb the menace have gone unpublicized. In fact, every driver must know by now that for the average person the legal blood alcohol limit of .08 milligrams per 100 millilitres is reached by consuming just one drink per hour.

There's little doubt that a few decades ago our society saw impaired driving as a nuisance rather than a crime. In those days, the maximum penalty was just two years in jail.

But as awareness of the problem grew, our federal politicians did respond, by amending the Criminal Code to increase the penalties greatly for drunk drivers who killed or injured someone. Today, a life sentence is at least hypothetically possible for such killers.

In the circumstances, it's hard to believe that any intelligent adult would get into a muscle car after a three-hour lunch in which he and three acquaintances downed 31 drinks, let alone speed along a twisting road, lose control and plunge into a river. Yet that's precisely what happened last July, and what now has triggered charges against the directors, two bartenders and a manager of a Muskoka-area golf resort.

Ontario Provincial Police last week laid charges under the Liquor Licence Act against three employees of the Lake Joseph Club and 13 senior executives of ClubLink Corporation, which owns the club. All face charges of permitting drunken behaviour on the premises and serving liquor to people who were obviously intoxicated.

(The club has been described as a laidback hangout for the cottage set. Its website lists an initial membership fee of $62,500, with annual fees of $4,590.)

Although it's possible ClubLink could lose its licence at The Lake Joseph Club, our suspicion is that the most that will happen is a notional change of ownership accompanied by a commitment to start monitoring members' drinking.

Predictably, public reaction to the charges has been mixed, with some supporting the move and others suggesting the real problem was a lack of parental discipline that led to a 20-year-old son who already had committed driving offences and been found guilty of drunkenness in a public place being left in possession of an Audi.

Ironically, the charges were laid the same week two Toronto lawyers were in court challenging new federal legislation that's designed to eliminate the so-called "twobeer defence" almost routinely raised by those charged with impaired driving.

Before the new legislation took effect last July 2 (a day before the Muskoka fatalities), those accused of driving with more than the legal limit of blood alcohol — particularly if they were only marginally over the .08 limit — would claim the breathalyzer reading must be wrong because they had consumed only a couple of drinks or had drunk the last one just before the breath test, which could have resulted in more alcohol in their breath than was really in their blood.

Under the new changes, part of the government's Tackling Violent Crime Act, an accused who wants to challenge a breathalyzer result must show the court technical evidence proving the equipment was malfunctioning or not operated properly.

In the court challenge, York University law professor Alan Young and Toronto lawyer Joseph Neuberger are representing three male drivers who are charged with having unlawful blood alcohol levels.

The lawyers say the legislation is unconstitutional because the new rules for challenging breathalyzer results set an impossible standard and leave an accused with only an "illusory" defence to the charges.

"The particulars of the breath machines, including maintenance records, specs and the manufacturer's manual are shrouded in secrecy, withheld by the Crown and the manufacturer," Mr. Neuberger told a reporter.

With hundreds of other impaired driving cases in the system and the constitutionality of the new law likely headed for the Supreme Court of Canada, the lawyers want to take the legal challenge directly to the Superior Court.

Sadly, we suspect there's a real likelihood the law will be struck down as going a little too far in attempting to achieve a laudable goal.

Since the only real question was whether the reading that formed the basis for the criminal charge was erroneous, the new law ought to have been limited to cases where the readings were well above .08 or where one breathalyzer's reading was confirmed by a second machine.

After all, the new law was passed in the wake of countless instances in which judges acquitted drivers who had breathalyzer readings far above .08, simply because they believed a witness who recalled the accused as having had too few drinks to produce the high reading.

As we see it, the main reason the war against impaired driving isn't being won is that drinkers don't see much risk of being caught, let alone being jailed.

In the circumstances, our ever-tougher laws designed to combat the menace must be accompanied by a lot more policing, to the point where everyone leaving a bar will expect to encounter a R.I.D.E. check, any day of the year.

And perhaps the ultimate sanction for repeat offenders should be their designation as dangerous offenders who'll face jail until they're physically incapable of driving.