ONTARIO — Ontario Provincial Police say officers laid more than 9,800 traffic-related charges during the Thanksgiving long weekend, with speeding accounting for nearly half of the total.

The enforcement ran from October 9 through October 12 as part of Operation Impact, a national road-safety campaign organized by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.

Speeding made up the largest named category

The OPP reported 4,924 speeding charges, 506 seatbelt charges, 174 impaired-driving charges and 108 distracted-driving charges.

Those four categories add up to 5,712 charges. The OPP release did not itemize the remaining charges included in the total of more than 9,800, so they should not be attributed to a particular offence without further information.

Charges are allegations. They do not establish guilt, and the province-wide figures do not show how many individual drivers were charged with more than one offence.

Campaign targets four high-risk behaviours

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police describes Operation Impact as a Thanksgiving-weekend campaign combining education and enforcement. It focuses on impaired driving involving alcohol, drugs or fatigue, aggressive driving, distracted driving and the use of seatbelts and child restraints.

Police services across the country participate and may publish their own local results. The numbers in the OPP release cover OPP-patrolled roads in Ontario; they are not a complete count of charges laid by every municipal police service in the province.

How the figures compare with 2024

The OPP's 2024 annual report lists 4,902 speeding charges, 388 seatbelt charges, 163 impaired-driving charges and 85 distracted-driving charges from that year's Thanksgiving Operation Impact campaign.

Compared with those category totals, the 2026 campaign produced 22 more speeding charges, 118 more seatbelt charges, 11 more impaired-driving charges and 23 more distracted-driving charges. The comparison does not by itself establish that the underlying behaviours became more common: enforcement levels, traffic volumes and reporting practices can also affect charge totals.

Sources

Lead image: 2011 file photograph of an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser by Nick3501, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Illustrative image; it does not depict the 2026 Operation Impact campaign.