The following is from a subscriber to our website, who wanted to share this sad story. His name has been changed to protect him from retribution by a government out of control. Senior Drivers Testing is a scheme designed to fail entirely innocent senior drivers.
“Heard of Randy Hillier’s petition from a very good friend who was a F18 jet pilot and team leader during the first Gulf War. Since he retired from the RCAF, he flies for Air Canada, but if he failed this DriveABLE test, he could not drive a car, but still would be qualified to fly Air Canada jet aircraft with hundreds of people on board, on international flights. This DriveABLE test is ill-conceived and discriminatory. Please pass the petition on to others, who will hopefully sign it.
Did you see the video summary of the DriveABLE test on their website? This test is designed to fail.
If you have arthritis or a stiff arm on the day of the test and cannot lift your hand off the button fast enough to touch the computer screen quickly, it will lower your score for being too slow to react.
In another part of the test, if you touch the screen, but not in the very center of the object, your score goes even lower due to inaccurate locating of the center of the object.
In another part of the DriveABLE test, they direct you to touch a box on the left or right while showing an arrow directing you to the incorrect box. In another part of the test, they show you several boxes on a screen where an x quickly flashes once, inside one box at a time, and they tell you to touch each box where the x flashed. You must then do this again, but are told that when the x flashes, you must touch the box where the x previously flashed, instead of where the last one actually just flashed.
The results are transmitted immediately to the Ministry of Transportation by internet, and they know within seconds if you have failed or not. This is why they tell you to have someone else drive you to your test. (You won’t be allowed to drive your car home).
Have a look at the video of the sample test on the DriveABLE website home page. Notice that the narrator in this video cannot even pronounce and enunciate his words correctly. For the word ” cognitively” he says “cognally” and for the word “test” he says “tess”. Perhaps he also should be tested for dementia and rewarded with a loss of his right to drive.
The Government should stay with the standard road test they use now if they question anyone’s ability to drive properly, instead of focusing on senior drivers alone. They should stop discriminating against people on the basis of age (or language, gender, skin colour, religion etc.) which violates our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They should not be illegally labeling seniors as “cognitively impaired” on the basis of an unfair test administered by non-medically certified laymen, and which was discredited by legitimate researchers repeatedly.
A friend of mine who has a cleft palate and cannot speak clearly was called in for a test in Ottawa when she turned 80 years old. As soon as they heard her speak, they assumed she had dementia and confiscated her licence on the spot with no test.
My friend does not have dementia, but gave up without a fight. She had been driving without an accident her entire life, and routinely drove between Ottawa and North Bay with no problems whatsoever. She has been dealing with discrimination due to her speech impediment(cleft palate) her entire life. The MTO victimized her once again.
She was forced to give up her independent lifestyle and move from her home to a nursing home. She died shortly thereafter. This is the kind of subjugation we can now expect from ill-informed, under-educated bureaucrats who can’t spell, speak properly, or use grammar correctly, but who are busy mapping out restrictive, life-changing controls for well educated baby boomers in their senior years.
What’s next? Legalized euthanasia on the basis of age to lower Ontario’s skyrocketing health care costs?”
Ronald – a concerned senior and taxpayer in Ontario.