OPP Lay 168 Charges Across Grey Bruce and South Bruce Over Civic Holiday Weekend
Grey Bruce OPP laid 30 seatbelt charges over the long weekend, second-highest in West Region, while its speeding total ranked among the region's lowest.
Ontario Provincial Police officers laid 168 charges across the Grey Bruce and South Bruce detachment areas during the force’s Civic Holiday long weekend traffic campaign, according to detachment-level figures OPP West Region released August 5.
The campaign ran from July 31 to August 3. It targeted speeding, failure to wear a seatbelt, distracted driving and impaired driving. Officers also enforced Ontario’s Move Over law, which requires drivers to slow and change lanes when passing stopped emergency vehicles.
Grey Bruce detachment officers laid 72 charges: 37 for speeding, 30 for seatbelt violations and five for impaired driving. The detachment recorded no distracted driving charges and no Move Over charges.
South Bruce detachment officers laid 96 charges: 82 for speeding, 10 for seatbelt violations, three for distracted driving and one for impaired driving. South Bruce also recorded no Move Over charges.
The Grey Bruce seatbelt figure is the outlier in the release. Its 30 charges rank second among the region’s 13 detachments, behind only Essex at 36 — and Essex is a detachment area that includes Windsor’s surrounding highway network. Across West Region, officers laid roughly one seatbelt charge for every five speeding charges. In Grey Bruce, the two totals were nearly even.
Grey Bruce also recorded the region’s third-lowest speeding total, ahead of only Oxford at 11 and Lambton at 32. South Bruce’s 82 speeding charges ranked fifth-highest.
These numbers measure enforcement activity, not driver behaviour. The OPP did not release detachment-level traffic stop counts, officer hours or deployment decisions, so the figures cannot show whether Grey Bruce drivers buckle up less often than drivers elsewhere, or whether Grey Bruce officers ran more seatbelt-focused checks. Both explanations fit the same data.
Region-wide, West Region members laid 1,815 charges following 2,107 traffic stops. The five categories broken out in the detachment addendum account for 1,104 of those charges. The release does not identify the remaining 711.
Distracted driving charges were scarce across the entire region — 14 in total, against 856 speeding charges. Nine of the 13 detachments recorded none. South Bruce’s three tied it with Middlesex for the second-highest total behind Essex.
Grey Bruce’s five impaired driving charges tied it with Huron for fourth-highest in the region. Essex led with eight, followed by Middlesex and Perth at seven each. The regional total was 45.
Officers laid 11 Move Over charges across West Region, five of them in Middlesex.
Acting Traffic Inspector Tara Bolstad, the OPP West Region Traffic Safety and Marine Manager, said in the release that 14 people have died in speed-related collisions in West Region so far this year, and that speeding remains a leading contributor to crashes, fatalities and injuries across Ontario. Bolstad said officers will continue to educate drivers and treat speed enforcement as a priority.
The release does not break the 14 speed-related deaths down by detachment area, or say how that figure compares with the same period in previous years.
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