Canada’s Roads Are Having Their Deadliest Year in a Decade, and the Cause Is No Longer Alcohol

The last full national count hit a 12-year high, and every jurisdiction reporting 2026 data is running worse than last year. The cause has changed as well. Drugs now appear in more Canadian road deaths than alcohol, and speed and screens kill more people than winter conditions.

DrivingTest.ca Road Safety Desk · November 11, 2026 · figures and claims linked to sources throughout

Canada recorded 2,050 road deaths in 2024, the highest national count in 12 years, according to Transport Canada’s collision statistics. The year we are living through looks worse. Since July, police forces in three provinces have independently raised alarms about 2026 fatality counts, each one running well ahead of 2025: Ottawa has already logged its most road deaths in more than a decade, Alberta’s provincial roads are on pace for their deadliest year since 2015, and Saskatchewan’s highways saw a summer stretch in which deaths more than doubled.

Every one of those alarms traces to behaviour: phones, speed, and above all drugs, which have overtaken alcohol as the leading factor in Canadian road deaths.

The worst year on paper, and the pace beating it

A full national tally for 2026 will not exist for roughly a year, because the National Collision Database assembles provincial reports with a lag. The “deadliest year” claim rests on the 2024 record plus the 2026 pace in every jurisdiction that reports early, and so far that pace points one direction. Canadians are also driving more, and Transport Canada notes the death rate per billion vehicle-kilometres edged down, from 4.6 to 4.5, between 2023 and 2024. The count rose because exposure rose and because a rate improvement two decades in the making has flattened out, right when behaviour is getting worse.

Three forces counting the dead, one direction

Read the rows together and the same pattern runs through all four: the increases are concentrated in the crashes that kill. In Saskatchewan’s summer window, deaths per crash rose from 1.0 in 2025 to 1.17 this year, meaning more multi-fatality collisions, the kind that happen when a vehicle crosses a centre line at highway speed. Between July 10 and July 22 alone, 17 people died on the province’s highways, nine of them in a four-day stretch. Alberta RCMP Sergeant Darrin Turnbull said members historically expect about 82 more deaths in the last four months of the year, which would put 2026 near 274 deaths on RCMP-policed roads.

Deaths are up even though crashes aren’t

Ottawa police told CBC that overall collisions as of mid-September were roughly the same as last year while fatal collisions jumped 77 per cent. With crash counts flat, the rise points at the factors that convert a survivable impact into a fatal one, speed, inattention, impairment, and missing seatbelts, and away from explanations like more vehicles on the road, a bad winter, or a growth in kilometres driven.

Ontario’s provincial police published exactly that breakdown for their roads in 2024.

Ottawa’s road safety unit describes the same mix in 2026. Sergeant Josh Callaghan, head of the Ottawa police road safety unit, cites stunt driving, impairment, rising speeds, and distraction, and offers one detail that captures the distraction problem: he recently pulled over a driver watching Buffalo Bills highlights behind the wheel. The Ottawa Safety Council’s Kim Kimbell describes a culture shift in smaller terms; she watched nine cars drive through an intersection while school crossing guards were still standing in the middle of the road.

Drugs have replaced alcohol

According to the Traffic Injury Research Foundation’s national fatality database, a larger share of road deaths has involved drugs than alcohol, distraction, or speeding every year since 2013. TIRF’s fact sheet, released July 30, 2026, puts the trajectory in numbers.

In raw counts, road deaths involving at least one drug-positive driver climbed to 571 in 2023, up from 487 in 2019 and 230 in 2000. That is two-fifths of all road deaths, versus less than three in ten for alcohol. “For decades, alcohol has been the primary focus of impaired driving strategies, but the data are telling us a new story that requires different solutions,” TIRF COO Ward Vanlaar said with the release.

The drug-positive drivers in this data look little like the stereotype Canadian road safety messaging was built around. Among fatally injured drivers between 2019 and 2023, the shares testing positive looked like this:

“Drugs” here means everything a toxicology screen can find: cannabis, illicit drugs, prescription medications, and over-the-counter products. Cannabis positives among fatally injured drivers rose from 22.4 per cent before legalization to 27 per cent after, but central-nervous-system stimulants, methamphetamine and speed, have grown faster than any other drug class in TIRF’s data, and they encourage the speeding and aggressive driving that police keep naming in this year’s death counts. At the other end of the age spectrum, CNS depressants dominate among drivers 65 and over, which largely means sedating prescriptions and pharmacy-counter medicines. Anyone assembling a medicine cabinet, including a learner driver’s first one, should know that an antihistamine or a sleep aid can show up in these statistics.

Testing positive is not the same as proving impairment caused the crash, and improved testing over 23 years explains part of the rise. Even so, the crossover’s direction and the 2026 enforcement data pointing the same way make the trend hard to explain away.

One year ago, Ontario switched off its speed cameras into this

On November 14, 2025, Ontario’s automated speed cameras were shut off across the province, banned by a fast-tracked Ford government bill after the premier called the program a municipal “cash grab.” The cameras had recorded cabinet ministers’ vehicles speeding more than 20 times. Toronto’s mayor said the city would lose 100 camera-related jobs and face a $40 to $50 million hole in its road safety budget; the province offered $210 million for speed bumps, roundabouts and flashing signs instead.

A SickKids hospital study found speeding in Toronto fell 45 per cent where cameras operated. Brampton’s own city-council data showed average speeds dropping 9.33 km/h at camera locations, with five zones down by 20 km/h or more and the largest drop of 25.39 km/h on North Park Drive west of Massy Street, across the 185 cameras the city operated.

On November 10, 2026, the first one-year dataset was published. MyChoice.ca reviewed more than 68,700 auto insurance quote records and compared what drivers reported from December through September, 2025 and 2026.

How to drive in the new risk profile

Treat drift as dangerA vehicle that wanders within its lane, varies speed for no visible reason, or reacts late to signals is the visible signature of both distraction and drug impairment. Increase your following distance and pass when you can; Ottawa police describe distraction as the driver behind its rising death count even as total crashes stayed flat. Respect midnight to 6 a.m., then stay alert in daylight tooImpairment-related deaths are still most common between midnight and 6 a.m., so that window keeps its old reputation. But drug-involved deaths happen almost as often in daytime, so the old habit of relaxing your guard after sunrise no longer matches the data. Audit your own medicine cabinet“Drugs” in the fatality data includes sedating antihistamines, sleep aids, benzodiazepines, and opioids. The 65-and-over cohort’s 43.8 per cent positive rate is largely prescription-driven. If a label says it may cause drowsiness, treat that warning as a driving instruction. Belt up, every seat, every tripSixty of the 382 deaths on OPP-policed roads in 2024 involved unbelted occupants, and Saskatchewan RCMP list seatbelts among the four factors in most of its fatal collisions. It is the one protection fully under your control. On rural highways, assume the oncoming lane is not guaranteedSaskatchewan’s summer deaths came disproportionately from head-on and multi-vehicle crashes at highway speed, and Alberta RCMP’s 570 excessive-speeding tickets (50 km/h or more over the limit) were the most since 2022 for that period. Scan far ahead, keep an escape gap, and give wide berths to vehicles tracking poorly. If you see it, report itBoth the Alberta and Saskatchewan RCMP explicitly ask witnesses to dangerous, impaired, or distracted drivers to pull over safely and call police. With automated enforcement shrinking in Canada’s most populous province, other drivers are increasingly the enforcement.

Notes, methods, and sources

• National counts: Transport Canada’s National Collision Database, via the 2024 annual report addendum tables and Canadian Motor Vehicle Traffic Collision Statistics: 2024. The 2023 value shown (2,000) is the revised figure from the latter publication; the addendum table’s preliminary value was 1,964.
• “Deadliest year in a decade” combines two verified facts: 2024 was the highest national count in 12 years, and 2026 is running ahead of 2025 in every jurisdiction reporting early. The full 2026 national count will be published by Transport Canada roughly a year after year-end.
• Police figures cover the roads each force patrols. Alberta and Saskatchewan RCMP numbers exclude cities with their own police services; OPP numbers exclude municipal roads in self-policed cities.
• The Brampton after-effect data come from MyChoice.ca’s comparison of 68,700+ insurance quote records and are self-reported. Directionally consistent with the city’s pre-ban speed data, but not a substitute for police collision records, which lag.
• TIRF’s drug figures mean at least one driver tested positive; presence is not proof of causal impairment, and testing completeness improved between 2000 and 2023.
• Change percentages throughout are our calculations from the reported counts.