British Columbia is enacting legislation which allows the province to refuse driver’s license renewals if you haven’t paid your COVID-19 public health fines. So basically, if you were at an anti-mask event or if you help organize a protest against Public Health orders, you can’t get your driver’s license renewed until those fines are paid. My first thought was wow, clever, and then my second thought was – how many more unregistered drivers are going to tooling around British Columbia? There has been appetite by some Saskatchewan residents to up the fines for not obeying public health orders or for organizing protests. But to what end? How much teeth do these fines actually have. Public prosecutions dropped the $14,000 fine issued to the Prince Albert Full Gospel Outreach Centre. It was handed out last October and a series of their meetings led to 175 cases of COVID-19. The crown will drop a case when they don’t think there’s much likelihood of getting a conviction. So what, in the end does that tell us? That the whole exercise of issuing fines was nothing but smoke and mirrors in the first place?

That’s Coffee Talk, I’m Vanese Ferguson.