I hate Julian Fantino

Yes, of course, Julian Fantino, the way to make the roads safer is to bore people to tears when you're talking about traffic safety instead of having the kinds of traffic safety reports that people look forward to and talk about around the water-cooler, what were we thinking?!
Idiot.
Click on the title of the post for some Cam Woolley gems.

Fantino quiets colourful Woolley
OPP chief plans no-nonsense style on highway safety
January 19, 2007
OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino is putting the brakes on Cam Woolley as the face of the OPP.

For years Woolley's traffic anecdotes have been a newscast staple, his reports on highway safety and traffic blitzes laced with dark humour and hilarious turns of phrase as he describes the crazy things motorists get caught doing on GTA highways.

Fantino says it's time for a more sober approach to dangerous driving.

"No more long weekend blitzes, no flavour-of-the-day enforcement, no more humorous stories about those who compromise public safety. Rather, every day, 24-7, OPP officers will be deployed in an all-out effort to put an end to the senseless carnage," Fantino wrote in an open letter to the citizens of Ontario dated Jan. 3.

"And this is the paragraph (media) people run nuts with," Fantino said, denying the move has anything to do with Woolley.

"It's got nothing to do with Cam. It's a corporate approach to an issue we've identified as our core responsibility," Fantino told the Star last night.

"What has happened, people have looked to him as the voice of traffic safety issues, and that's fine. But this is all about how we as an organization are approaching a very serious traffic safety issue, a public safety issue," Fantino said.

"He's (Woolley) still part of the traffic safety program of the OPP. But his duties and responsibilities are nothing I have anything to do with," he said.

"Absolutely," Fantino said, when asked if Woolley could still be doing traffic blitzes along with other officers.

"I don't want us to be focusing on a particular issue when we should be looking at all of the issues."

The move came after Fantino analyzed the "unabated accidents" that occurred even when impaired driving was highlighted during the OPP's seasonal RIDE (Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere) campaign.

"Beginning now on a province-wide basis OPP officers will be unrelenting in their pursuit of aggressive and irresponsible drivers," he wrote in his letter.

During the last five weeks of 2006, 43 people were killed and many more seriously injured in crashes, Fantino said.

"Every one of these collisions was preventable, every one the tragic consequence of inappropriate driving behaviour," said Fantino, reading from his two-page letter.

"I found we were focusing in certain areas when we should be looking at all the areas that contribute to diminished traffic safety. And that's what we're trying to do here," he said.

Fantino points out the leading criminal cause of death in Canada isn't murder; it's impaired driving because of alcohol or drug use.

"I believe that in the hands of an irresponsible person, a motor vehicle is no less dangerous than a loaded firearm in the hands of an equally irresponsible individual," Fantino wrote in his letter.

"In reality, the potential trauma is tragically similar and the consequences equally unacceptable."

Woolley told the Star, "I think (Fantino is) pointing out that he's a no-nonsense guy and not to expect the same thing as me."

He said he's not worried, and that reporting the results of weekend blitzes was never actually part of his official job.

"I think it's been misunderstood significantly," Woolley said.

"I think what's confusing some people or getting some tongues wagging is that over the years at times senior command in the OPP left provincial traffic messaging to me, but it's not my mandate, it's not in my job description," he said.

"In the past it was difficult for me, sometimes, to get my work done. ... Now I can concentrate on what my job is," Woolley said. "I'm supposed to be the ground guy and I'm reverting to my actual job assignment (in local traffic issues)."