CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Raising the Driving Age

NARRATOR: In most Canadian provinces, a sixteen-year-old can walk into a licensing office, pass a written test and begin the long apprenticeship of learning to drive. That threshold, set generations ago when far more young people worked on farms, is now being questioned. A growing chorus of safety advocates argues that the minimum age should be raised to eighteen, as it already is across much of Europe. Their opponents contend that such a change would impose an unwarranted burden, particularly on families outside the cities.

NARRATOR: Doctor Helen Okafor, who studies injury prevention at a hospital in Halifax, is among the most vocal proponents. Collisions, she points out, remain a leading cause of death for Canadian teenagers, and the danger peaks in the first months of driving alone. Okafor attributes this less to a lack of skill than to biology: the regions of the adolescent brain that govern impulse control, she says, keep maturing into the early twenties. Two more years would not eliminate reckless choices, in her estimation, but would make them considerably rarer. Graduated licensing, which limits nighttime driving and passengers, has helped, she acknowledges, but in her view it treats the symptoms rather than the cause. She is unmoved by claims that teenagers need cars for work, which she regards as convenience dressed up as necessity.

NARRATOR: Raymond Gauthier is unpersuaded. A driving instructor in rural Saskatchewan for nearly thirty years, he notes that many of his students drive to part-time jobs, to hockey practice forty kilometres away, or to help on family farms where no bus has ever run. For them, he insists, a licence is hardly a luxury. Gauthier also challenges Okafor's reasoning head-on. Inexperience, he maintains, is hazardous at any age; raising the threshold would merely postpone the riskiest period until young people have left home, when no parent is sitting in the passenger seat. A sixteen-year-old practising with a mother or father, he argues, is safer than an eighteen-year-old learning alone in an unfamiliar city.

NARRATOR: Okafor concedes that rural teenagers face genuine hardship and has proposed exemptions for farm work. Gauthier counters that such exemptions are notoriously difficult to enforce and would leave teenagers in towns feeling cheated. Notably, neither of them disputes that new drivers need far more supervised practice than most currently get. Each, in other words, is worried about the same untested driver; they simply disagree about when that driver should appear. That shared ground may deserve more attention than the birthday on which the practice begins.