Police forces across the Greater Toronto Area will be conducting a traffic safety blitz over the long weekend with a particular emphasis placed on cracking down on the four leading contributors to fatal collisions.

The blitz, dubbed ‘Operation Impact,’ will begin today and run through Thanksgiving Monday.

During the blitz, police say that officers will be on the lookout for aggressive driving, alcohol/drug impaired driving, inattentive driving and lack of seat belt use.

Ontario Provincial Police say that those four factors have been the leading causes in the deaths of 156 people on Ontario roads so far this year.

“There have been more than 175,000 charges already laid this year that are corrected directly to those big four factors but it is not the charges that we are counting, it is the people that are dying that are absolutely preventable,” OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt told CP24 on Friday morning. “The big important thing for drivers to know is that they need to share the road and a consequence for a bad decision can be much more than a traffic ticket on the side of the road.”

Police forces across Canada will be participating in ‘Operation Impact.’

Schmidt said that while enforcement and the issuance of tickets is certainly part of the campaign, it is also about educating drivers.

“This long weekend people will be out enjoying the colours and enjoying the scenery but you need to focus on the road if you are sitting behind the steering wheel,” he said.

The campaign is conducted every Thanksgiving weekend.