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Ottawa police are posting signs telling people where impaired drivers have been caught across the city.
It’s part of a new month-long campaign that runs until mid-June, where people will see signs across Ottawa saying “Impaired driver caught here.”
Signs go up wherever someone has been stopped by police either with a blood alcohol level above 0.05 or was believed to be impaired by other drugs.
“Impaired driving doesn’t discriminate by age, by gender [or] social impact status,” said Ottawa police Const. Dayna Coburn at a rural checkpoint on Thursday.
She said police have stopped 22.5 per cent more impaired drivers in the first four months of 2026 compared to the same time in 2025.
Ottawa police Const. Dayna Coburn stands by an impaired driving checkpoint on Albion Road. (Francis Ferland/CBC)
As of Friday morning, police had put up 24 signs across the city in just over a week.
Police said 10 of those stops came from someone calling 911, nine involved collisions, four were traffic stops and one from a RIDE (Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere) checkpoint.
Police have printed 80 signs and said they hope they don’t have to post them all.
“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. Impaired driving is an issue. It continues to be an issue,” Coburn said.
“[Think of the] phrase ‘A picture says 1,000 words.’ This is our way of presenting a picture to the public just to bring a realness,” Coburn said.
The most common age range is younger drivers in their late 20s to late 30s, Coburn said.
She said the program is the first time it’s being done in Ontario, but she has seen it elsewhere.
An Ottawa police officer asks a driver about whether they had been consuming alcohol or drugs during a RIDE program stop on May 21, 2026. (Francis Ferland/CBC)
It’s something MADD Canada CEO Steve Sullivan said has happened in places like Saskatoon and Fredericton.
“We have been seeing for a long time, even before [cannabis] legalization, the the number of fatalities with the presence of drugs … increasing,” he said.
He said he’s also noticed a distinct increase in impaired driving since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If we look at the mid 1990s to the early 2020s, we did see about a 50 per cent reduction in impaired driving deaths related to alcohol-impaired driving,” he said.
“There’s some movement in that after the pandemic we saw more substance use and so I think the numbers went up a little bit, but hopefully they’re going to go down.”
Sullivan said the signs can make a difference, showing the fact impaired driving is a problem in Ottawa.
“Hopefully if people see those signs and see how active Ottawa police service are, they will also call 911.”