Tis’ the season for holiday parties and Alberta Sheriffs and RCMP are out patrolling the province’s highways to ensure everyone has a safe trip home.

Police are ramping up Checkstops over the holidays and set up a vehicle stop near Airdrie on Saturday night.

The mobile Checkstop unit has everything inside it to help officers administer breath tests and is also set up to provide potential offenders with a room to call a lawyer or family members.

Sergeant Jason Graw is with the Alberta Sheriff Highway Patrol and says police run Checkstop programs throughout the year but that they do put a little more emphasis on them this time of year.

“It's important for us to focus on Checkstop at this time of the year though because people do tend to drink a bit more before Christmas and we do tend to find impaired driving a bit more prevalent at this time of year but we do want everyone to know that Checkstop is a year round program, 365 days a year, seven days a week and while we do put a little more emphasis on Checkstop at this time of year we do run it year round,” said Graw. 

Graw says the main message is don’t drink and drive and that alcohol accounts for about 20 percent of fatal collisions in the province.

“For every five collisions, fatal collisions that occur in Alberta, one of those collisions involves a driver who’d been drinking and that’s obviously far too many,” he said.

Police says it’s not worth it and the consequences of driving while impaired can be deadly.

“If you’re caught by the police and you’re charged with impaired driving, you will lose your driver’s licence for a period of time, you could receive a fine, you could end up in jail, you could lose your job, there are all kinds of consequences that can stem from that,” he said. “Obviously the worst consequence is not being apprehended and being involved in a collision and you could cause, obviously, someone else or yourself to lose your life, so really important, the message here is public safety. We want everyone to know that we will be out, we’ll be checking vehicles, we’ll be making sure that all those drivers are sober and that people are choosing good options.”

For more information on Alberta’s approach to impaired driving, click HERE.