ONgov and McCann Reframe Cannabis Impairment as a Driving Risk
ONgov's "Barely High is Still Too High to Drive" is a 2019 Canadian public interest film campaign created by McCann Worldgroup Canada that argues even mild cannabis intoxication renders a driver unsafe, using four comic character studies — titled "Giggles," "Dance," "Smokey Eye," and "Toes" — to make the case through recognisable, everyday behaviour rather than graphic consequence.
The campaign was published in Canada in August 2019, arriving in the immediate aftermath of the country's legalisation of recreational cannabis under the Cannabis Act of 2018. That legislative shift created an urgent public education gap: a population newly permitted to consume cannabis in many settings needed clear guidance on where impairment remained legally and physically dangerous. Driving was the most pressing frontier. The Government of Ontario, operating as ONgov, commissioned McCann Worldgroup Canada to build a creative platform that could speak to casual users — people who might not consider themselves "high" in any meaningful sense — and disrupt the assumption that a low level of impairment is a safe level of impairment.
The strategic premise is contained in the campaign title itself. "Barely High is Still Too High" functions simultaneously as a legal proposition and a behavioural insight: the threshold for unsafe driving does not align with the consumer's internal sense of how intoxicated they feel. To dramatise that gap, McCann constructed four short film executions, each named for a specific physical or behavioural tell associated with cannabis use. Each portrait presents a character whose impairment is visible, slightly absurd, and entirely recognisable — not a cautionary worst-case scenario but a plausible version of someone who might genuinely believe they are fine to drive. The campaign comprises four media assets in total, as documented in the Clapboard archive, and was entered in the Social Good category of the 2019 Clio Cannabis Awards, where it received a shortlist placement, according to cliocannabisawards.com. Clapboard rates the campaign 64 out of 100.
Canada legalised recreational cannabis nationwide in October 2018 under the Cannabis Act. That policy shift placed road safety communicators in a difficult position: how to reach a population that, for the first time, could legally consume the substance but was still prohibited from driving under its influence. Ontario's government identified the behavioural grey zone — the casual user who consumes a modest amount and self-assesses as unimpaired — as the highest-priority audience. "Barely High is Still Too High to Drive" is built entirely around that insight. The campaign does not address heavy or chronic users; it addresses the person who feels fine.
The competitive context within Canadian public safety communications is instructive. Public Safety Canada's national "Don't Drive High" campaign, running concurrently, generated 223 million impressions across television, cinema, and online video in 2019, according to Publicsafety Gc Ca. That federal programme prioritised reach and frequency at scale. ONgov's McCann-led effort pursued a different objective: creative specificity. Rather than broad awareness, the campaign sought to close the self-assessment gap by making mild impairment feel visible and concrete. A separate 2017 campaign by Parachute, the national injury-prevention charity, had taken a myth-versus-reality approach to cannabis impairment, as documented by adsoftheworld.com, establishing an educational precedent that ONgov's 2019 work moved beyond through character-driven narrative. The Canadian Council of Road Safety Advocates, or CARSP, has consistently documented the challenge of changing driver attitudes toward drug impairment, underscoring the complexity of the behavioural problem McCann was asked to solve. By grounding each execution in a specific, named behaviour rather than a legal warning, the campaign attempted to make impairment legible to the very people most likely to underestimate it.
The creative team at McCann Worldgroup Canada built the campaign around a deceptively simple structural device: name the symptom, then embody it. Each of the four film executions — "Giggles," "Dance," "Smokey Eye," and "Toes" — takes its title from a single observable sign of mild cannabis intoxication and dramatises that sign through a character study, allowing the audience to recognise the behaviour before the campaign frames it as dangerous. The effect is comic and unsettling in equal measure, which is precisely the tonal register the strategy demanded.
Executive creative director Josh Stein led the McCann creative team, with Chris Duffett and Rob Trickey serving as creative directors. Duffett also holds the copywriter credit, and Trickey the art director credit, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and Little Black Book. Agency executive producer Jacqueline Bellmore oversaw production, with the account team comprising Tracy Curtis and Michelle Li. The production company was Soft Citizen, with direction handled by The Perlorian Brothers — a Canadian directing duo known for comedic craft and precise character performance. Production executive producers Eva Preger and Link York are also credited, per lbbonline.com.
The Perlorian Brothers' casting and performance direction are central to how the campaign earns its argument. Each character is credibly ordinary: not a stereotype of a drug user but someone the viewer recognises from daily life. The "Toes" and "Giggles" executions in particular rely on sustained comic performance that lands the behavioural observation before the safety message arrives. The film medium was the right choice for work that depends on embodied performance rather than graphic data. Four assets across a single coherent platform gives the campaign enough surface area to make the point from multiple angles without repeating itself, demonstrating considered creative planning rather than executional padding. Production credits are fully documented across adsoftheworld.com and lbbonline.com.
No verified performance data for "Barely High is Still Too High to Drive" is publicly available. No media spend, campaign reach figures, or documented behavioural outcomes have been confirmed through trade press or government sources. The campaign does not appear in published coverage from Adweek, Ad Age, Campaign, The Drum, or Contagious, according to the research record available to Clapboard.
The externally verifiable marker of industry recognition is a shortlist placement in the Social Good category at the 2019 Clio Cannabis Awards, as confirmed by cliocannabisawards.com. That placement positions the campaign among a small set of works assessed to have advanced public interest communication within a cannabis-specific context — a newly constituted award category reflecting the legal and cultural moment the campaign was designed to address.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness argument rests on three design decisions. First, the behavioural specificity of each execution reduces the audience's ability to self-exempt: it is harder to dismiss "Giggles" as someone else's experience when the character is recognisable rather than extreme. Second, the tonal choice — comedy over consequence — is likely to reduce defensive processing among casual users, the exact population most resistant to conventional road safety warnings. Third, the four-execution platform sustains message contact across multiple touchpoints without requiring audiences to engage with the same creative twice, increasing the probability of at least one execution landing with any given viewer. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 64 out of 100, reflecting competent strategic construction and craft discipline within a category where tonal missteps are common, offset by a limited public footprint and the absence of documented results.
ONgov's "Barely High is Still Too High to Drive" is a 2019 Canadian public interest film campaign created by McCann Worldgroup Canada. It uses four short film portraits — "Giggles," "Dance," "Smokey Eye," and "Toes" — to argue that even mild cannabis impairment makes driving unsafe, targeting casual users who may underestimate their own intoxication.
McCann Worldgroup Canada created the campaign for the Government of Ontario. Executive creative director Josh Stein led the team, with Chris Duffett and Rob Trickey as creative directors. The Perlorian Brothers directed the four film executions through production company Soft Citizen, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and lbbonline.com.
The campaign received a shortlist placement in the Social Good category at the 2019 Clio Cannabis Awards, according to cliocannabisawards.com. No further verified award wins or trade-press recognition in publications such as Adweek, Ad Age, or The Drum have been publicly documented for this ONgov campaign.
ONgov targeted the behavioural grey zone created by Canada's 2018 cannabis legalisation. Casual users who consume modest amounts often self-assess as unimpaired. The campaign's strategic premise, built by McCann, is that the threshold for unsafe driving does not match an individual's internal sense of how high they feel.
Public Safety Canada's concurrent national "Don't Drive High" campaign generated 223 million impressions across television, cinema, and online video in 2019, according to publicsafety.gc.ca, prioritising reach at scale. ONgov's McCann-created work pursued creative specificity instead, using character-driven comedy to make mild impairment visible and personally recognisable to casual cannabis consumers.
Clapboard rates "Barely High is Still Too High to Drive" 64 out of 100. The score reflects competent strategic construction and tonal discipline from McCann Worldgroup Canada in a category where missteps are common, offset by a limited public footprint and the absence of any verified campaign performance data.
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