Bill C-32 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Criminal Code
(a) to create an offence of operating a motor vehicle while in possession of a controlled substance as defined in subsection 2(1) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act;
(b) to authorize specially trained peace officers to conduct tests to determine whether a person is impaired by a drug or a combination of alcohol and a drug;
(c) to authorize the taking of bodily fluids to test for the presence of alcohol or a drug;
(d) to create an offence of operating a motor vehicle with a concentration of alcohol in the blood that exceeds 80 mg of alcohol in 100 mL of blood and causing bodily harm or death to another person;
(e) to clarify what evidence a person accused of driving with a concentration of alcohol in the blood that exceeds 80 mg of alcohol in 100 mL of blood can introduce to raise a doubt that they were not committing the offence;
(f) to create an offence of refusing to provide a breath sample when the accused knows or ought to know that the accused’s operation of a motor vehicle caused an accident resulting in bodily harm to another person or death; and
(g) to increase the penalties for impaired driving.
The enactment also makes consequential amendments to other Acts.

[Chris White, Vice-President, Public Affairs, Canadian Automobile Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On behalf of the Canadian Automobile Association, thank you for inviting us.

From our establishment in 1913, CAA has been Canada's foremost voice, supporting the rights of Canadian motorists and travellers. With approximately 5.2 million members, CAA continues to advocate for a wide variety of safety initiatives, which have helped guide relevant traffic safety laws, public safety initiatives, and public policies throughout Canada. We continue to work with the federal government, our nine clubs, and other stakeholder groups to ensure safer drivers on safer roads in safer vehicles.

Mr. Chair, as one of Canada's largest member-based advocacy groups, we, like you and the members of the committee, are anxious to see fewer deaths and injuries on the roads as a result of impaired driving. In 1999, this committee tabled the report entitled,Toward Eliminating Impaired Driving. That report concluded that the current level of 0.08 adequately empowered police to remove impaired drivers from the road, while at the same time not burdening the justice system.

More importantly, though, the report stated the following:

...a legal BAC limit of 50 mg/100 ml of blood could result in a loss of public support, especially since scientific evidence suggests that not everyone would be impaired at that level.

Mr. Chair, CAA's only raison d'être on behalf of our members and on behalf of the travelling public is to be a credible advocate for safety issues for Canadians. With this as our sole motivation, CAA continues to support the approach cited in 1999. Based on figures from Transport Canada, we know that nationally 2005 crashes involving drinking and driving accounted for about 33% of all road users killed on public roadways. And until studies show overwhelmingly strong and consistent evidence for lowering the criminal BAC limit, it is our view that the current limit of 0.08 should be maintained and strongly enforced.

To address the growing concern of impaired driving, CAA strongly supports legislation, strict enforcement, and continued education to end the practices of driving while under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or medication. It is our view that this is where an investment of resources is most needed.

The committee's review of mechanisms to reduce impaired driving in Canada is timely and overdue. Current measures are clearly not providing adequate deterrents, nor are they removing dangerous drivers from the road. It is our perspective that we are not talking about a deficiency in law but rather a deficiency in the social behaviour of drivers. Most drivers inherently know when they have consumed too much alcohol to drive, regardless of the blood alcohol content. The more serious problem, though, is the drivers who lack this understanding and those who chronically and consistently get into their cars under the influence of alcohol well beyond the 0.08 levels. Repeat offenders and an underresourced judicial system are endangering the safety of everyone on the roads, and, as CAA has long maintained, driving is a privilege and not a right.

Furthermore, CAA, like many stakeholders, believes in a comprehensive approach to address the problem of impaired driving. We advocate for specific measures to deal with repeat offenders and measures to increase enforcement.

We would specifically like the committee to consider the following:

One, introduce tougher sanctions for recidivists and drivers with high BACs: the higher the blood alcohol level, the more serious the sanction.

Two, implement a mandatory requirement for the use of alcohol ignition interlock devices that become progressively longer with each subsequent conviction.

Three, encourage provinces to coordinate provincial legal drinking ages to reduce the practice of cross-border drinking and driving.

Four, recommend that the Criminal Code admit evidence from mobile digital breath testing devices in court. These devices have proven to be highly reliable compared to the first-generation devices that were initially used.

Five, encourage the federal and provincial governments to simplify the evidence-gathering and charging procedures, with the goal of reducing the paperwork and time needed to lay an impaired driving charge.

Six, and finally, strengthen coordination and increase funding to ensure that law enforcement agencies have the resources and legislative support to effectively detect and properly charge drug-impaired drivers.

The continued level of public concern about drinking and driving is justified by the persistence of the problem on Canadian roads. CAA appreciates the attention of lawmakers to this issue and is confident the implementation of the aforementioned recommendations will improve safety on the roads and highways and will also reduce the incidence of drinking and driving in Canada.

I would like to conclude by thanking the committee for undertaking this important study. In addition, committee members should be commended for their work on Bill C-32 during the last parliamentary session and the speedy passing of the violent crime bill, Bill C-2, last fall.

CAA strongly supports Parliament's efforts to strengthen the enforcement of drug-impaired driving offences in Canada and would persuade the members of this committee to encourage their Senate colleagues to do the same.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Tackling Violent Crime Legislation

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, let us look at some of the facts concerning these bills. The age of consent bill, Bill C-22 in the last Parliament, was introduced by the government on June 22, 2006. The government moved second reading on October 30, 2006, and only sent it to committee on March 21, 2007. That bill, which we offered to fast track in October 2006 and which could have been the law in December 2006, only was adopted at third reading in the House on May 4, 2007. The Senate only received that bill on May 8, 2007.

When the member says that all of the bills had gone through the House and were sitting in the Senate, he is being wilfully incompetent or he is being sheerly incompetent by not giving the actual dates. It is the same thing for Bill C-32, Bill C-35, Bill C-10 and C-27.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with some interest to my hon. colleague's comments. The claim about the eight days that the bill has been in front of the Senate is simply a fallacy.

If we take a look at the precursor bills to Bill C-2 in the previous Parliament, those being: Bill C-10; Bill C-22, age of protection; Bill C-27, dangerous offenders; Bill C-32, impaired driving; and Bill C-35, reverse onus on bail for gun offences; four of those five bills had already passed through the House and had spent a significant amount of time in the Senate. The only one that had not was Bill C-27, which had been to committee and had been amended.

We were a very accommodating government, I thought. We basically bundled all of that legislation as it appeared in the previous session of Parliament, with the amendments, put it back in a bill, put it before the House and now it is sitting in the Senate.

We are not asking for anything that is extremely onerous.

My colleague also brought up the fact that she wanted to get her numbers right on something. Well, it is very clear from the information that I see, whether it is on TV or through various polls, that 70% of Canadians support tougher legislation against crime.

Is it sheer incompetence of her leader and her party, or wilful incompetence of her leader and her party, that they cannot get the Senate to pass the legislation?

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, let us look at what some of the witnesses had to say at committee. They came before the committee on Bill C-22, age of consent. They came back for the impaired driving bill, Bill C-32. They came back for the reverse onus on bail hearings for firearm related offences bill. They came back for the dangerous offender bill. They came back for the mandatory minimums bill.

Let us hear what a representative from one of these associations had to said. This was on November 14, 2007, on Bill C-2, in front of the House of Commons legislative committee. It was the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. The representative said that quick fixes and band-aids were no longer sufficient, that a comprehensive national but locally focused strategy was required to really tackle crime and that the legislative priority for the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police were guns and gangs, child predators, as two example.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police said that because of its legislative priorities, it had asked and pleaded with the Conservative government for modernization of investigative techniques. The association said that the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act, also called MITA, under the previous Liberal government, died as a result of the election. The association pleaded with the Conservative government to bring it back. It waited all through 2006. The government did not act. It waited again all through 2007. The government did not act.

It is now February 11, and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police is still waiting for the government to bring in the legislation for which it has been begging and pleading, that it says it needs in order to deal effectively with violent crime, gun crime, gang crime, sexual predators and child sexual predators. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has asked the government to bring in legislation modernizing investigative techniques for over two years now. What has the government done? What has the government's response been to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and the Canadian Police Association?

First, the response has been not to bring in any legislation on that. Second, the government has refused to fast track my private member's bill that would do exactly this. I offered the government to take it over if it wanted the credit for it. It is more important to get it into the law and to give our law enforcement officers the investigative tools they need in the 21st century when they try to fight crime committed through our cyberspace. The government again, as it did with the Liberal offer to fast track the age of consent and the bail reform bills, as it did with virtually every attempt on the part of the official opposition to make Parliament be effective and efficient and put Canadians and their safety and security of Canadians first, turned its head and ignored the opposition. The government acted as though it heard nothing.

The government, through this motion, is trying to put the blame on the Senate. The Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada continues to say “the Liberal dominated Senate”. What he does not say is Bill C-2 only went before the Senate on December 12, 2007. Two days later the House adjourned and only came back on Monday, January 28.

Had the government been serious that Bill C-2 and its elements were of such importance to the government, that it was a matter of confidence and that the government was ready to go to an election because Canadians safety and security was of the utmost importance to the government, then why did it not put forth this kind of motion when it sent Bill C-2 to the Senate? The same power and authority and the same rule that allowed the government to put this motion, which it tabled on February 7, before the House to have it debated and then voted on could have been done last fall.

Again, I have to ask if it is sheer incompetence or wilful incompetence on the part of the Conservative government, the Conservative Prime Minister, the Conservative Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, the Conservative Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and all parliamentary secretaries who sit on the government side.

The Senate received Bill C-2 on December 12, 2007. The government tabled this motion on February 7. This means the Senate had the bill for two days in 2007, December 13 and 14, and then on January 28, January 29, January 30, January 31, February 1, February 4, February 5, February 6, and February 7, for a total of eight days. On the ninth day the government tabled its motion saying that the Senate majority was not providing appropriate priority to the passage of Bill C-2, when the government in fact was obstructing its own legislation.

All of the bills in Bill C-2 would have been law over a year ago and one of them would have been law for close to two years had the government not obstructed its own legislation either through sheer incompetence or through wilful incompetence.

Let me see how good I am at math. One year is 365 days. Two years would be 730 days, not counting the 31 days in January, 2008. If I go to February 7, when the motion was tabled by the government, that is 31 days plus 7, which is 38 days. The Senate has had the bill for literally eight sitting days. The government obstructed its own legislation for 730 days.

Who did not give appropriate priority to the age of consent legislation? It was Conservative members. Who did not give appropriate priority to the impaired driving bill? It was Conservative members. Who did not give appropriate priority to the dangerous offender bill? It was Conservative members.

Who did not give appropriate priority to the bill concerning conditional releases? It was the Conservative government. It was not the opposition. It was not the Bloc Québécois. It was not the NDP. It was not the official opposition. It was not the Liberals or Liberal senators in the upper house. It was the government itself. Imagine that.

Canadians must ask themselves the same question that I have been asking myself for the past two years: Is this Conservative government simply incompetent or wilfully incompetent? When one looks closely at the facts concerning all these justice related bills, when one looks closely at the actions and decisions that this Conservative government has taken, or has failed to take, one can only conclude that it is either simply incompetent or wilfully incompetent.

In closing, I would like to thank the members of this House for their attention. I would be happy to answer any questions they may have. If I do not have the answer, I will be frank. I will say so and try to address the issue with that member outside the House.

Tackling Violent Crime Act

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak in this House on a subject to which I have devoted most of my professional career. When I left university, I became a crown attorney, first at the provincial level, then at the federal level. Then I became a defence attorney. I was even the president of the Association des avocats de la défense. I was the Bâtonnier of the province of Quebec, and then minister of justice and minister of public safety. As you can see, I have long thought about crime in general and effective ways to fight it. I have also thought about the bogus solutions that are sometimes proposed and that have produced disastrous results in neighbouring countries. I would not want this country to follow in its neighbour's footsteps only to end up with the same results.

From the outset, I would say that I think we all share the same goal, and that is to fight crime. Where we differ is in how to go about it. I give my opponents credit and they should give me credit as well, especially since my past has shown that, in situations where I really had power, I could fight crime effectively. Our major victory over the Hells Angels in Quebec is a very clear example of that.

Nevertheless, I often heard from the other side that we were filibustering on Bill C-2. I do not know whether the people who said that know what a filibuster is. In French, the word is “filibusterie”. The word “filibuster” comes from the French word “filibustier”. This tactic was first used in the U.S. senate by an elderly senator who had serious objections to a bill. At the time, there was no limit on speaking time, as there is now in all legislatures, thanks in part to him. To express his disagreement with the bill, he decided to speak without stopping. He even took the Bible and read long excerpts from it, and he kept on speaking.

Today, we have measures to prevent filibusters and systematic obstruction. We have a set amount of time to present our arguments. Filibustering means using every possible procedural means to prolong a debate.

Bill C-2 groups together five bills that were introduced during the previous session, including the bill on bail. The motion at third reading was adopted unanimously, without a vote, on June 5, 2007. I therefore do not see how we could have delayed that part of Bill C-2.

Bill C-32 on impaired driving died on the order paper, even before the report stage. Once again, I do not see how anyone could accuse us of filibustering.

Bill C-27 on dangerous offenders also died on the order paper, in committee. What does it mean when a bill dies on the order paper? It means that ordinarily we should have resumed the deliberations that were interrupted in late spring, but the session was prorogued. The government prorogued it. It was the government that aborted the process these bills had to go through before becoming law. As a result, these bills could not be discussed any further.

The same is true of Bill C-22. Even worse, this bill had been adopted at third reading. Once again, it had received unanimous approval.

We voted in favour of these four bills. Where, then, is the filibustering, this tactic where members try to prolong the debate so that a bill they disagree with goes nowhere?

One major bill remains, Bill C-10, which provides for minimum sentences for offences involving firearms.

We were against it for a number of reasons, but the bill was passed at third reading on May 29, 2007.

The government decided to group these five bills together for one reason: none of the bills elicited systematic opposition. Knowing that we have some objections to Bill C-10, which I will discuss shortly, the government is trying to say that if we vote against Bill C-2 because we are against this part, we are also against all of the other parts.

This argument keeps coming up in this House, and I do not think it is well founded. I cannot understand why all of the parties keep using this argument. I myself have never used it and probably never will. However, when we vote in favour of blocks of legislation—such as the throne speech, which contains numerous measures—that means we support some measures, but are against others.

We weigh the measures we support against those we oppose. We explain why we vote as we do. For a throne speech, when the negatives outweigh the positives, we vote against it even though we support some of the measures it contains. It is utterly unfair to say that since we voted against a group of measures, we must oppose all of the measures in that group.

The same goes for the budget when they criticize us for voting against measures that we actually want to see in place. We voted against the budget because the cons, the measures we did not support, outweighed the pros. The same applies when we vote for a budget, which does not necessarily mean that we support every single measure in it.

The argument is a faulty one, but the government has come to rely on this tactic to influence public opinion during the coming election, an election that the government seems to want as soon as possible. For example, they will say that we are against changing the age of consent, even though the bill passed unanimously, and so on.

Let us get to the heart of the matter: minimum penalties. We have some objections in principle to minimum penalties. Based on my personal experience, I believe that minimum penalties do not influence crime rates. I think many people who have long been studying crime would agree with me.

First, I think that no member in this House would be able to tell me how many minimum penalties there are in the Criminal Code. People do not know the minimum penalties. In Canada, the most glaring example is marijuana. I passed the Bar exam in 1966. I started working as a crown attorney at the provincial level, and that was the first time I heard talk of marijuana. There was not much at the time. Throughout university, I do not remember hearing about anyone smoking pot. I did not even know that expression, and I was obviously not the only one.

I then became a crown attorney at the federal level and I started to work on cases related to these issues. Let us talk about marijuana and hashish from Indian hemp. The Indian hemp growing here had no hallucinogenic properties. So at the time, all marijuana, hashish and Indian hemp that people have been smoking since the late 1960s to the present day came from somewhere else.

Does anyone know what the minimum penalty was for importing marijuana into Canada? I am sure that people do not know, just like people at the time did not. The minimum penalty was seven years in prison for importing marijuana. It is one of the harshest sentences in the Criminal Code. But it was while we had that minimum penalty that marijuana use started growing, reaching peaks in the 1980s.

Since that time, levels of marijuana use have remained very high. We can clearly see that minimum sentences had little effect. The problem is that people do not know what the minimum sentences are.

On the other hand, we have an example of success, but it still needs to be taken a little further. I am referring to impaired driving. The minimum sentences have not been increased, but we have seen awareness campaigns and increased education. People know that it is a crime to drive while impaired. I remember when I finished my studies and I was buying my first car, no one talked about it. Our attitude was to consider if the person was capable of driving and we did not really see it as a criminal act. This is no longer the case.

The public has become much more aware and we have seen a decrease in impaired driving charges. In fact, they have decreased significantly. When authorities began conducting the first tests on our roads to see if people were driving while impaired, it was not uncommon to stop about 10% of drivers. When road tests are done today, with the same sample chosen in the same manner, less than 1% of drivers are found to be impaired. People have become more aware. I think of my children who drive and who, when they go to parties, have a designated driver, everyone taking their turn. These are habits they have learned without the fear of prison.

Thus, as we can see, the simple fear of a sentence does not have an impact. Plus, people do not know what the minimum sentences are. We must know a little about how the criminal mind works. I practised criminal law long enough to know a little about the subject. Does anyone really believe that criminals think seriously about the sentence they might have to serve if they are caught? First of all, most crimes are committed on impulse. What people want to avoid and what prevents them from committing crime is not the penalty, but rather the fear of getting caught. If there is a good chance they will be caught, people change their behaviour.

I also had another experience in my personal and professional life. When I began practising law in Montreal, it seemed to be the capital of armed robbery. Some of those listening may remember the famous movie called Monica la mitraille. It was a very good movie. I do not remember her real name, but I did see her in court. She was the leader of one of the groups who committed armed robberies in Montreal. There was about one a day at the time.

Does anyone remember the last armed bank robbery committed last year? I am convinced that almost no one does. Is it because thieves are now more afraid of the sentence than back when it was harsher? Why did they do it? Why has the number of these robberies decreased considerably? It is because of intelligent preventive measures. Banks are built differently and there is no longer access to large amounts of money. The risk of being caught in relation to the anticipated profits is not worth it. Furthermore, all kinds of measures have been put in place in banks and the efforts of bankers has also decreased the menace of armed bank robberies.

Putting in place a series of measures resulted in a true decrease in crime. Fear does not stop people from committing crimes.

The third example I can give is the death penalty. We abolished the death penalty in Canada 25 years ago. Since then the number of homicides has declined steadily rather than increasing.

I am not saying that we should not have sentences. We must have sentences and for certain crimes in certain circumstances they must be severe. However, the use of minimum sentences does not work.

I have another philosophical problem with minimum sentences and it is worth talking about. A judge hears a case and arguments, then weighs all the factors that need to be taken into consideration when handing down a sentence, such as individual and general deterrents, the seriousness of the charge, the seriousness of the crime, the circumstances under which the accused committed the crime, his involvement in the crime, recidivism if any, his home life, his responsibility or the influence others may have had, and so forth.

Implementing minimum sentences forces a judge, who went over all these circumstances in his heart and soul, to conclude that, even though that person should get 18 months in jail, the minimum sentence is 3 years. He is required by law, in that case, to commit an injustice. I have heard judges say that when they hand down minimum sentences.

We often forget that when we want to impose minimum sentences we are thinking about the worst offenders. When I listen to the examples given by the members opposite who defend this bill, I know full well they are thinking about the worst cases. We have to realize that minimum sentences do not apply just to the worst cases, but also to less serious cases.

I will give an example that I witnessed in my career. This will show that, although the members opposite claim that seven-year minimum sentences are not being handed out, a number of people have, at one point, served seven years in prison for importing marijuana.

I remember a young woman whose capacities were diminished after an accident. She had a daughter and her husband had left her. She met a charming, smooth talking American fellow with an education, like her, and she fell for him. He was willing to live with her handicap. He was very attentive towards her. They were in love. He seemed to have a income, without being very wealthy. One day, he left, saying that he would be sending her parcels. It was not immediately clear to her what he was talking about. Parcels did start arriving. Based on telephone conversations between them, it is obvious that she suspected that the parcels contained something illegal, because he asked that she not open them. She did not import anything. She simply stored parcels in her home. But because she suspected that there was something illegal going on, under the doctrine of wilful blindness, she was undoubtedly guilty, like him, of importing narcotics.

I wonder what sentences my colleagues in the House would hand down to that man and that woman respectively. Does it not seem profoundly unfair that the same sentence be imposed on both of them just because the minimum sentence prescribed is seven years? Since the offence involved relatively small amounts of hashish, the least dangerous drug, he may not have deserved a seven year sentence and she certainly did not. This goes to show how minimum sentences result in unfair situations. Different situations have to be considered.

In addition, the examples of cases raised in the House often appeared very serious, based on the two or three reasons for which the judge imposed such sentences. I doubt, however, that this was the case. The judge probably cited 10 reasons or so, which are not listed, for coming to the decision which is described to us as unacceptable. It is entirely possible that a few of the thousands of sentences rendered every day in Canada seem too heavy handed. In the case of a truly unacceptable sentence, the potential remedy would not come from Parliament, as is suggested by our discussions, but from the appeal courts.

In none of the arguments put forward in support of increasing sentences was an unreasonable decision by an appeal court ever mentioned.

Finally, the most important thing to know concerning firearms: in the United States, they incarcerate seven times as many people as we do, and guns roam freely, so to speak. As a result, three times—

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to take part in this third reading stage of Bill C-2. I would like, perhaps, to correct a number of perceptions that the government has done nothing to discourage in recent days concerning the work of the opposition.

First, we know that the Bloc Québécois supports Bill C-2. In fact, if my information is correct, I believe that our support is unanimous. I do not imagine that any of our colleagues will be defecting. However, we know that friendship is a fragile thing that we must always work to preserve.

I said that the Bloc Québécois supported Bill C-2. Any kind of offence could make even a man over 40 wish for young offender status.

In a more serious vein, we were presented with a number of bills. Of 12 bills that the government introduced since coming into office, six received royal assent, four made their way to the Senate and the remaining two were to be examined in committee. Naturally we had reservations about the dangerous offenders’ bill, which is a serious bill and I will come back to it. We still have those reservations. There was also Bill C-32 on impaired driving.

When the government suggests that the opposition did not work diligently, some explanation is in order. When a party has been in government for two years—not quite two years even—and you have succeeded in obtaining royal assent for six bills, when half of your legislative agenda has been adopted, I think the government’s criticism is not well founded. The Bloc Québécois has worked very hard in the Committee on Justice and Human Rights and the Committee on Public Safety and National Security. We will continue to work hard in the future.

I know that the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue will be speaking about this in a few minutes, but there is a problem of philosophy. For a democrat—let me put it the way René Lévesque did—the end cannot justify the means. Even if we know that judicial practice in our courts should be changed, my colleague for Abitibi—Témiscamingue will agree with me that when a person is held in detention before trial, for example, and they want to subtract two days from any sentence for each day in detention, there is perhaps something that we need to look at.

If the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin were with us today, he would join with me in recognizing that the government should have made tackling the parole system a priority. This is an area where the support of the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue is very firm, very strong, and not negotiable. You can be sure that I take comfort in this.

So I was talking about the question of sentencing, about release after one-sixth of the sentence. If a judge in a court of law, with defence counsel, Crown counsel and a jury as provided under the Criminal Code, has imposed a sentence, it seems that allowing the accused to be released after one-sixth of the sentence is very soon. There are philosophical questions that concern us, that cry out for answers. We are not prepared to accept everything in Bill C-2.

Generally speaking, I think we must remember that crime is dropping. There was an increase in crime in the 1960s and 1970s, both property crime and crimes against the person. This continued until the 1990s, with small variations. After that, crime has fallen. There have been peaks, for example in 1994, 1995 and 1996, when we had the whole phenomenon of organized crime. Some of my colleagues may recall this.

In fact, I owe this to history. To be truthful, I must point out that the Bloc Québécois was the first to call for anti-gang legislation. I recall very clearly having discussions with senior officials who wanted to dismantle the organized crime rings. At that point, there were 38 criminal biker gangs known to law enforcement agencies. The main one was the Hell’s Angels. The obvious face of organized crime in our communities was the Hell’s Angels.

Some senior officials wanted to dismantle the organized crime rings using the conspiracy provisions. The member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue will recall that this was section 476 of the Criminal Code, if memory serves me.

Obviously, in the Bloc Québécois, we were convinced that this was not possible. Why? Take the example of Maurice “Mom” Boucher. While he gave the orders, he was not the one who carried them out. There was a gap in the chain of command that meant that it was extremely difficult to lay charges against the organized crime kingpins, even though the people responsible for surveillance techniques, even though the law enforcement agencies, the Montreal police service, the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada and the RCMP, were able to identify who the kingpins of those criminal organizations were.

It was the Bloc Québécois, through the wisdom it has always had—wisdom that is perhaps not innate, because it took a lot of work to gain it—speaking in the voice you are listening to now, that took action to deal with this. The member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles also worked very hard on it, as did the member for Berthier—Montcalm. I think I can bring back fond memories in this House if I mention the name of Michel Bellehumeur. He was appointed to the bench because of his personal talent and his intellectual breadth. The member for Berthier—Montcalm had all the qualifications needed to be appointed to the bench, and today he is a judge of the Court of Québec, Criminal Division.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. I hope he will listen to me very carefully as well.

I have a problem with the bill. Yes, the Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of this bill. Nonetheless, two things bother me about it. Will the government address them?

My first point is this. Does the government realize that it is not by passing tougher laws with minimum sentences that we are going to reduce crime? Does the government realize that getting out of prison, not going to prison, is the problem? Convicts do not serve their entire sentence. That is the problem. Does this government realize that? Is this heading anywhere?

Since I do not have enough time to ask another question, I will go on to my second point, on former Bill C-32. The parliamentary secretary knows that I sat on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. As a criminal lawyer, I have one question: do we have the tools? In fact, does the department have the tools? Do the police have the tools to detect whether drivers are impaired by drugs? That is the problem with former bill C-32. Now, it is being lumped into Bill C-2. What is going to be done? Is there anything planned? Has anything been implemented or do we have to adopt the bill to see what happens?

I will close by saying that my primary concern is whether this government understands that getting out of prison, not going to prison, is the problem. Criminals are released too quickly. That is what people are complaining about.

Motions in amendment

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate on Bill C-2. I hope that my colleague from Wild Rose will remain with us so that we can have the kind of discussion that we had during our review of some other bills that have been adopted.

To begin, I wish to pay tribute today to the hon. Antonio Lamer, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, and probably one of the greatest criminal lawyers that the Canadian legal profession has known. As a criminal lawyer myself, I had the opportunity to get to know Mr. Justice Lamer, not at the Supreme Court, unfortunately, but through studying, analyzing and relying on decisions he had handed down. We know that in the years between 1980 and 2000, Mr. Justice Lamer and the Supreme Court rendered decisions taking into account the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that came into force in 1982. I pay heartfelt tribute to the hon. Justice Lamer. He played a significant role in the interpretation of the legislation that we must debate here and that will eventually be applied to the people of Canada, and in particular, of Quebec.

To return to Bill C-2, this is a strange bill called an omnibus bill. It brings together Bill C-10, dealing with minimum penalties for offences involving firearms; Bill C-22, which deals with the age of protection; Bill C-27, concerning dangerous offenders and recognizance to keep the peace; Bill C-32, on impaired driving; and Bill C-35, concerning reverse onus in bail hearings for firearm-related offences.

That said, the government wants to put together a package of bills into a single omnibus bill and have it passed. Right away, I should say that several of those bills, three in particular, had already reached the Senate but died on the order paper when the Conservative government decided to produce a new Speech from the Throne.

The Bloc Québécois is in favour and will be in favour of the principle of Bill C-2. We feel that former bills C-10, C-22 and C-35 have already been debated in this House. I myself have spoken against one of those bills. Nonetheless, as a great democrat, I am respecting the decision of this House and we will respect the democratic choice that was made to move forward with these bills.

However, I want to point out that a number of these bills, Bill C-27 on dangerous offenders in particular, deserved and still deserve a more in-depth review. The problem is that when a person commits a third offence from a list of a dozen very serious offences, there will be reverse onus of proof. Personally—I talked about this with my party and here in this House—I have always been against the reverse onus of proof because this implies that the accused has to incriminate himself and provide explanations or be held responsible.

Nonetheless, Bill C-2, and former Bill C-27, resolve part of the problem. Once criminals have to be monitored, there are reasons they have to appear before the court and the court has reasons for asking them why they would not be considered dangerous criminals who have to be monitored for a long time, in light of the offences they committed.

The Bloc Québécois wants to be very clear on this. We need to deal first and foremost with poverty, social inequality and exclusion, a fertile breeding ground for frustration and its outlets, which are violence and criminal activity. There is no point to just passing legislation; one day we will really have to think about how to attack crime. If we do not attack it by dealing with poverty and exclusion, some people will see no other way out except crime. Crime is not a solution of course, but some people see it as one.

The measures we introduce will really have to have a positive impact on crime and go beyond mere rhetoric or campaigns based on fear. They will have to be more than a weak imitation of the American model, which has had less than stellar results.

The crime problem in Canada cannot be solved—and I say this with great respect for the House—by imposing minimum prison terms or reversing the onus of proof but by dealing instead with a problem that has festered for far too long: criminals get out of jail too soon. Canadians are genuinely shocked that people sentenced to 22, 36, 48, or 52 months in jail are released after 5, 6 or 7 months.

Our friends across the aisle will have to understand some day that we cannot reduce crime by passing tougher laws but by ensuring that criminals who have been sentenced actually serve their time. This is the key factor and one of the obvious problems in Canadian society. Tougher laws will not ensure that people serve longer sentences. This is what will happen: the judges and courts will probably revise their decisions thinking that they are too onerous and tough. Contrary to what the Conservatives say, section 2 of the Charter applies and if a law is too harsh or a sentence almost too tough for a criminal, the court can revise this decision.

There are a number of objectives therefore. We know what Bill C-2 is all about. It strengthens the provisions on offences involving firearms by creating two new firearms-related offences and increasing the minimum prison terms. However, even increased minimum prison terms will not solve the problem. People are not frightened off by the possibility of long-term imprisonment but by the likelihood of being caught. We will have to check how judges and the police apply it.

I do not have a lot of time left. I would therefore like to say quickly as well that we need to do something about impaired driving. We hope that the police will find ways of determining the presence of drugs in the bodies of drivers. We still do not know how. When I sat on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, all the experts who came to testify said that no machine could detect whether someone had consumed cocaine or smoked marijuana and whether it was influencing his driving.

This is an important bill and I hope that when the House passes it, the Senate will also quickly do so. I know that some of the provisions to be amended by Bill C-2 will be studied by the courts and probably the Supreme Court over the next few years.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, if the truth can be stretched, the Conservatives stretch it as much as possible.

Why was there a need to combine all of the bills? Those bills themselves were complex in nature. If the member wants to blame the Senate, in almost every case the Senate dealt with the bills faster than this House did. Of the six justice bills that were not passed before the summer break, only four had even reached the Senate. The two bills that were in the Senate were Bill C-27 and Bill C-32. Of the four bills that were in the Senate, they had all only been sent in May or later.

Let us have some fairness and some truth.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I was mentioning, as parliamentarians we have to be cognizant and not pass bad legislation. We have to ensure that we do not interfere in the justice process as well.

These bills were thoroughly debated when they came before committee. Bills have to be handled properly if they are to get through Parliament. If they are to be handled properly, they have to be prioritized. It appears the Conservatives have no priorities. They only want to create a hodgepodge of stuff.

On October 26, 2006, the Liberals offered to fast track a package of justice bills through the House. These included Bill C-9, as it had been amended, Bill C-18, the DNA identification legislation, Bill C-19, the street racing legislation, Bill C-22, the age of consent legislation, Bill C-23, the animal cruelty legislation and Bill C-26, respecting payday loans. This offer effectively guaranteed that the Conservatives would have a majority to pass the legislation.

On March 14, the Leader of the Opposition added Bill C-35, the bail reform legislation, to the list of bills the Liberal caucus would fast track. Despite this offer, it took the Conservatives until May 30 to get the bill through committee. If the Conservatives were so keen on being hard on crime, as they have claimed, they should have taken this offer.

According to a report entitled “Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population”, produced by the JFA Institute, the tough measures, which the government claims it is bringing through its omnibus bills, are costly and pointless. The report says that due largely to tough on crime policies, there are now eight times as many people in U.S. prisons and jails as there were in 1970, yet the crime rate today in the U.S. is about the same as it was in 1973. There is little evidence that the imprisonment binge has had much impact on crime.

As legislators, we are supposed to be here to pass good legislation, not bad legislation. We are here to debate and to amend. Amendments were proposed to the bills and the members of the Conservative Party on the committee did not want to pass them.

It is important that we reflect on what these bills talked about.

Bill C-10 talked about minimum penalties. It proposed five years for a first offence and seven years on a second or subsequent offence for eight specific offences involving the actual use of firearms, attempted murder, discharging a firearm with intent, sexual assault with a weapon, aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, hostage taking, robbery, extortion and when the offence was gang related or if a restricted or prohibited firearm such as a handgun was used.

The bill was brought to committee and the committee made the necessary amendments. The committee still has very grave concerns that the bill needs to be properly documented and it has to be properly put in place so legislators know the intent of the legislation.

There is the creation of two new offences, an indictable offence of breaking and entering to steal a firearm and an indictable offence of robbery to steal a firearm. There is no difference with the version of Bill C-10, which passed through the House, and the language used in Bill C-2.

The question to be asked is why then group this in an omnibus bill? No one on the government side seems to give us an answer. All the members do is repeat their mantra that they are hard on crime. However, as I pointed out, the U.S. crime policy, which they so desperately want to follow, fails the system. It does nothing right.

Bill C-22, which was the age of protection bill, proposed to raise the age at which youth could consent to non-exploitative sexual activity. The age would be raised from 14 to 16 years of age and the age of protection of 18 years would be maintained for exploitative sexual activities.

Through amendments, the committee brought about a five year close in age. This was not there when it was proposed by the government. Therefore, another question arises. What happened to the good amendments in the mandatory minimum penalties in the age of protection?

What about Bill C-23, which was criminal procedure? According to the Official Languages Act, the committee ensured that there were changes to the bill. We said that a person who was a French-speaking person, if he or she were in court, should get a French counsel. It is important to protect language rights. In a country that has two official languages we have to protect minority rights as well. Why is this bill not mentioned at all?

Bill C-27 deals with dangerous offenders. It would provide that an offender who was serving a long term supervision order in the community and who was violating the conditions of the order would be guilty of an offence and the crown could choose to hold a dangerous offender hearing following convictions.

That was originally proposed by the Liberal justice critic. The bill would expand the possible sentence available to a judge following a finding that an individual would be a dangerous offender. The judge could now impose a long term supervision order or simply impose the sentence for the offence for which the offender had been convicted in addition to the previous option of detention in prison for an indeterminate period, which was previous available.

The Conservatives love to introduce bills. They want to take credit for a lot of things and make it on the six o'clock news. If something does not make the six o'clock news, like Bill C-23 because it was protecting minority language rights, they do not bother.

The last bill I will speak about is Bill C-32, the drug recognition experts to conduct roadside sobriety tests. It is good to promise all sorts of things, but there is no funding. When we do not have funding, how will we get these experts? For example, in Seacow Pond where would we get a person who is an expert?

It is very important that when we prepare bills and we make promises, those promises have to be kept. We have to provide the legislators with enough resources.

Tackling Violent Crime Act

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-2. The bill, which is an omnibus bill, combines five previously introduced Conservative justice bills into one, Bill C-10, Bill C-22, Bill C-27, Bill C-32 and Bill C-35.

Canadians need to know what exactly this omnibus bill is really about. It is an omnibus bill that tries to combine five pieces of legislation together. Why is it necessary to combine all these bills and how will it affect legislators?

What is the intent of the Conservatives in getting all these bills together when they were fast-tracked previously? They were debated in committee thoroughly, amendments were made, and these amendments strengthened the bill and the legislation.

We, as parliamentarians, have a responsibility, and the responsibility is to be cognizant--

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to address the bill that amends the Criminal Code and makes consequential amendments to other acts. As you know, I come from a region, Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean, where the crime rate is very low. Still, I want to take part in today's debate to raise an issue that is a major source of concern for people in my region and in my riding.

It goes without saying that the Bloc Québécois worked actively and positively in committee to improve some of the provisions of Bill C-2. Incidentally, I want to congratulate in particular the hon. member for Hochelaga, who did a great job at the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, and also the hon. member for Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, for her contribution.

Based on what we heard from a large number of witnesses, it is obvious that many Quebeckers and Canadians want some changes to the current justice model.

The committee's consultation process and the message conveyed by our fellow citizens showed two things. First, a large part of the population is concerned about the current justice system and, second, it does not want an American type of justice system.

We believe that the American justice system has produced disastrous results. The Bloc Québécois deemed appropriate to propose a series of amendments to Bill C-2. Unfortunately, the Conservative government kept none of the six amendments that we proposed, even though some of them enjoyed the unanimous support of the public security ministers in Quebec and in the provinces. It is unfortunate that the Conservative government does not take into consideration the fact that this is a minority government.

I would like to briefly mention the six amendments that reflect Quebeckers' values. In my region, the Minister of Labour, who represents the riding next to mine, said that Bill C-2 reflects the public's will. The Minister of Labour should have said, rather, that Bill C-2 reflects the ideology of the minority Conservative government. That is what he should have said first and foremost.

The Bloc suggested, therefore, that parole after one-sixth of the sentence has been served should be abolished. We should also put an end to virtually automatic statutory release after an inmate has served two-thirds of his sentence. The Bloc proposed another amendment as well to the effect that there should be a formal evaluation by a professional of an inmate’s overall risk of re-offending.

In addition, the Bloc suggested that onus of proof should be reversed in the case of criminals found guilty of the offences of loan-sharking, procuring, robbery, fraud over $5,000 and counterfeiting in order to facilitate the seizure of assets that are the product of crime.

We also said that the police needed better tools to deal with the problem of street gangs, especially longer warrants for investigations carried out by means of tailing with a GPS.

It should be against the law to wear any symbol, sign or other mark identifying the wearer as a member of a criminal organization that has been recognized as such by the courts.

Finally, we should eliminate the rule that the time spent in pretrial detention counts double when sentences are determined. Sentences should be deemed to have started on the first day of detention, rather than when sentences are passed.

The minister labour thinks that Canadians want new justice legislation. I agree with him to the extent that the Bloc supports the principle of these changes. This does not mean, however, that Quebeckers and Canadians agree with everything in Bill C-2. When bills are introduced, some changes can be made without changing them completely. We need to adapt to the realities of life in Quebec and Canada.

As I said, the Bloc Québécois supports Bill C-2 in principle and takes crime very seriously. However, when five bills are amalgamated into one, it is only to be expected that some doubts will arise. The Conservative minority government has a duty not to play partisan politics with an issue as important as the justice system.

The Bloc Québécois believes that what really needs to be attacked first and foremost are poverty, inequality and exclusion. They aggravate the frustrations and crime in our communities if not dealt with by the government on a priority basis.

The Bloc Québécois knows very well that many changes must be made to the current justice system and that some adjustments to the Criminal Code are essential. The government has a duty to take action and use the tools at its disposal to enable Quebeckers and Canadians to live safely and peacefully.

The measures introduced must have a positive impact on crime. They must be more than rhetoric or a campaign based on fear. We must avoid copying the American model, which yielded much less positive results than anticipated.

Crime has been steadily decreasing in Quebec, as it has in Canada for the last 15 or so years. Statistics Canada recent stated that in 2006, the overall crime rate in this country hit its lowest in 25 years. Quebec had its lowest homicide rate since 1962.

Unfortunately, there will always be crime in our society. We can never fully eradicate all crime. But statistics show that the current approach should not be discarded in favour of the US model. This means that we must look for improvements while keeping an open mind about the realities facing Quebeckers and Canadians.

In the past, Quebeckers have relied on individualized justice based on a judicial process that is flexible and suited to each case, with positive results. The homicide rate in Quebec is one of the lowest in Canada and is four times lower than in the United States.

Bill C-2 brings together old bills that we largely supported, such as Bill C-10, Bill C-22, Bill C-27, Bill C-32 and Bill C-35.

Justice is an important issue, and this model must truly correspond to the realities facing Quebec and Canada.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Quebeckers and my constituents from Chicoutimi—Le Fjord do not want a justice system based on the U.S. system.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in today's debate at report stage of Bill C-2, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

Briefly, on October 18, the Minister of Justice tabled omnibus Bill C-2, which regroups the main “law and order“ bills that were introduced by the government, during the first session of the 39th Parliament.

Indeed, Bill C-2 includes defunct Bills C-10, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (minimum penalties for offences involving firearms) and to make a consequential amendment to another Act, C-22, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (age of protection) and to make consequential amendments to the Criminal Records Act, C-27, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (dangerous offenders and recognizance to keep the peace), C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, and C-35, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (reverse onus in bail hearings for firearm-related offences).

Those who are listening to us should know that this government bill provides nothing new. During the last session, I had the opportunity to take part in the debate and to express Quebec's vision on justice, as it relates to several of those bills.

In fact, before prorogation, three of those bills were already before the Senate, namely Bills C-10, C-22 and C-35. As for the other two, that is Bills C-27 and C-32, they were in the last stages of the parliamentary process in the House.

However, all these bills died on the order paper, when the Conservative government itself decided, for purely partisan motives, to end the parliamentary session and to present a new Speech from the Throne.

Today, we find ourselves debating again the work that has already been accomplished in the House. This is why, when the government pretends to be the only one going to bat for innocent people through rehashed and amended legislation, I cannot help but wonder about such a preposterous claim.

The people of Quebec deserve that crime be tackled seriously, without playing petty politics with fundamental rights, and, above all, they deserve to be presented with the real picture. For those interested in politics, I point out that the Bloc Québécois was fully involved in the review process for Bill C-2, in spite of the very tight timeframe, to consider all aspects of that bill. My colleagues and myself believe that any bill of such importance, which could have such a significant impact on the people, has to be thoroughly examined.

It would, however, be somewhat tedious to examine again amendments made previously. With respect to former bills C-10, C-22 and C-35, in our opinion, the parliamentary debate has already taken place and the House has already voted in favour of those bills. We therefore respect the democratic choice that has been made. As for former Bill C-32, which died on the order paper before report stage, we had already announced our intention: we would be opposing it. This brings me to the part stemming from former Bill C-27, about which we expressed serious reservations at the time but which we nonetheless examined in committee so that it would be reviewed responsibly.

In short, the provisions in Bill C-2 which stem from former Bill C-27 amend the Criminal Code to provide that the court shall find an offender who has been convicted of three serious crimes to be a dangerous offender, unless the judge is satisfied that the protection of society can be appropriately ensured with a lesser sentence.

At present, the dangerous offender designation is limited to very serious crimes, such as murder, rape and many others, and to individuals who present a substantial risk to reoffend. An individual may be found to be a dangerous offender on a first conviction, when the brutality and circumstances of the offence leave no hope of the individual ever being rehabilitated.

We have some concerns regarding Bill C-27, particularly the impact of designating a greater number of dangerous offenders and reversing the onus of proof, two processes that definitely increase the number of inmates and that are contrary to the wishes of Quebeckers as to how offenders should be controlled.

We are not the only ones who have expressed concerns with regard to this aspect of Bill C-27. My colleague for Windsor—Tecumseh is proposing an amendment today that would remove the reverse onus of proof found in this bill. He believes it would not survive a charter challenge. Even though we realize that this amendment could lead to improvements in Bill C-2, we will reject it because the Conservative government, in attempting to govern with contempt for the majority in the House of Commons, would link this amendment to a confidence vote.

With regard to amendments, I repeat that the Bloc Québécois is aware that many improvements must be made to the current judicial system and that changes to the Criminal Code are required. The government must intervene and use the tools at its disposal enabling citizens to live in peace and safety. In our own meetings with citizens we identified specific concerns as well as the desire to change things by using an original approach. We wanted to make a positive contribution meeting the aspirations of our fellow citizens.

We therefore proposed a number of amendments that my colleague the member for Hochelaga, right here, worked very hard on with the caucus. We prepared a series of amendments to improve the bill and the justice system. These are complementary measures that will strengthen its effectiveness.

We proposed, among other things, realistic amendments to eliminate parole being granted almost automatically after one-sixth of a sentence has been served and statutory release once two-thirds of a sentence has been served, by having a professional formally assess inmates regarding the overall risk of reoffending that they represent to the community.

Another amendment was aimed at attacking the street gang problem—with which my colleague from Hochelaga is very familiar—by giving the police better tools, in particular, by extending the warrants for investigations using GPS tracking.

We put forward many other amendments. Unfortunately, none of them was accepted, even though some amendments are unanimously supported by the public security ministers of Quebec and other provinces. Consequently, Bill C-2 was not amended in any way during committee review. It is a shame that the Conservative government once again preferred an approach based on ideology rather than democracy. It preferred to combine bills that, for the most part, had already been approved by the House of Commons, rather than focusing on some others that deserved very close examination. Above all, it is refusing to improve Bill C-2 with respect to practical priorities.

In putting forward its amendments, the Bloc Québécois has remained consistent with its objective of using effective and appropriate measures to evaluate the relevance of each bill. It has also demonstrated its concern for prevention of crime, which should be high priority. Attacking the deep-rooted causes of delinquency and violence, rather than cracking down when a problem arises is, in our opinion, a more appropriate and, above all, more profitable approach from both a social and financial point of view.

That must be very clear. The first step must be to deal with poverty, inequality and exclusion in all forms. These are the issues that create a fertile breeding ground for frustration and its outlets, which are violence and criminal activity.

However, it is essential that the measures presented should actually make a positive contribution to fighting crime. It must be more than just rhetoric or a campaign based on fear. It must be more than an imitation of the American model and its less than convincing results.

I mention the important fact that for the past 15 years criminal activity has been steadily decreasing in Quebec, as it has elsewhere in Canada. Statistics Canada confirmed just recently that for the year 2006 the overall crime rate in Canada was at its lowest level in more than 25 years. What is more, Quebec recorded the smallest number of homicides since 1962. Indeed, in violent crimes, Quebec ranks second, just behind Prince Edward Island. Quebec also recorded a drop of 4% in the crime rate among young people in 2006, which was better than all other provinces. Those are solid facts which should serve as an example to this government and on which it should base its actions.

I will close by saying that we will be supporting Bill C-2 at third reading, on its way to the Senate. However, I remind the House that we were in favour of four of the five bills that are now included in Bill C-2 and those bills would have already been far advanced in the parliamentary process if the government had not prorogued the House for purely partisan reasons.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure, at report stage of Bill C-2, to deliver some comments to the omnibus crime bill.

I have had the experience of serving on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and also the legislative committees that were involved with the former Bills C-10, C-22, C-27, C-32, C-35 and C-23, which is not part of the omnibus bill.

I speak with experience at least with respect to the bills and I understand how we came to be here today to speak about what the bill contains. A lot of discussion took place in the debates of the House and in committee with respect to the direction we should take with respect to our criminal justice.

It is important for us, as parliamentarians, to consider what we do when we amend the Criminal Code and its corollary acts. We are dealing with the Criminal Code. It is an organic document. It changes with the times. It is copied and exemplified by one of Canada's justice ministers and prime ministers, Sir John Thompson, from eastern Canada. It has certainly changed with the times as has our society.

In the 1890s the crimes that were top priority might have been things like cattle and horse theft, murder and some common ones. However, with the changing times, we have seen a proliferation of gang related violence, e-crimes, things that would not have existed at the turn of the century.

The point of raising that is as our society changes and the code changes, we owe it to this place, to the committees, to the law enforcement official, which include prosecutors, policemen, probation workers, corrections officers, people in the correction system and judges, quite a fraternity of people involved in the criminal justice system, to say that we looked at these various laws. We looked at how Canada was changing and at the end, we did the very best we could to keep track of what tools would be best to tackle the new problems that exist in society. It is not as if we are inventing new aspects of law. Many of these bills represent an evolution or a progression of laws that already exist.

Just briefly on the guts of the bill, if you like, Mr. Speaker, Bill C-10, which is now part of C-2, was of course dealing with the mandatory minimum provisions which were increased by the introduction of this bill, but they were not increased as much as the government had wanted them to be originally.

I would like to thank the hon. member for Windsor—Tecumseh and the opposition Bloc Québécois critic on the committee as well as the Liberal members on the committee who fought very hard to have some sense reign over the debate with respect to the evidence that was adduced at the committee hearings regarding the efficacy of mandatory minimums in general.

A review is in order. Mandatory minimums existed before the Conservative government was elected. Mandatory minimums were in place for serious crimes with the known aspect of repeat offenders and with some hope, which studies will show one way or the other, that there might be a deterrent and a safety to the public aspect of mandatory minimums.

At least on this side we joined with the Conservatives who, I would say, were very sparse in their acknowledgement that mandatory minimums existed before they came into office, but we joined with them and said that these are good tools for the law enforcement agencies and good tools in the realm of criminal justice.

It is a matter always of how far we go. How far do we go in disciplining our children? Do we take away their favourite toy? Do we ban them from seeing their friends for two weeks? Are we less severe or more severe? Many of us are parents and we deal with this every day. It is our form of the justice system that rules in our own house.

With respect to mandatory minimums, it is a question of calibrating to what extent the mandatory minimums are useful, to what extent do they work, and to what extend should they be increased, if at all.

During the debate process we were very successful in getting the government to get off its basic premise, which is if it is good for the six o'clock news and sounds robust, steady and law and orderish, then it has to be good in the Criminal Code. That is where the slip from the cup to the lip occurred, where it was obvious 90% of the witnesses were saying that the severe mandatory minimums that the government side were proposing would be inefficacious.

We can be as tough as we want, but if it does not work, if it does not make society safer, then we have not posited a good solution to the problems that face our community, and that was the case when we looked at mandatory minimums.

The happy medium that exists in Bill C-2 I think will be borne out, but it is very important to remember that this is an organic process and we could be back here some day soon, perhaps, looking at mandatory minimums in general.

How more timely could it be than in today's Ottawa Citizen, a report called “Unlocking America” is reviewed. In this report, it makes it very clear that the mandatory minimums, one of the many tools used by the American government from the 1970s on when it was felt that the rise in criminal activity was abhorrent, was not as effective as the Americans would have hope it would have been. It left the United States with 2.2 million people behind bars, more than China. The nine authors, leading U.S. criminologists, said that they were convinced that they needed a different strategy.

I am happy to report that as a result of the efforts of the NDP, Bloc and the Liberal Party in general at committee, we did not go as far as the Conservative government wanted to, which was close to where the United States had been which now New York State and New York City admits, is ineffective.

The three effects of imprisonment, and emphasis only on imprisonment, at the cost of crime prevention dollars, if you like, Mr. Speaker, is that the heavy, excessive incarceration hits minorities very hard. In the United States, 60% of the prison population is made up of Blacks and Latinos.

We heard evidence at our committee that there is a preponderance, an over-exaggerated percentage, of first nations and aboriginal people in our jail system, according to their population, which is deplorable. It is overwhelming and undisputed that the negative side effects of incarceration outweigh the potential. That is the two bits on Bill C-10,

On the other bill, Bill C-22, the close in age exemption, was never brought up. Despite all the rhetoric from the government, nothing would save Bill C-22. The issue of sexual consent being given by a person of tender years has never been put forward by any member of the opposition while the Liberal Party was in power.

The close in age exemption was never put in there, so for members of the opposite side to say that finally we dealt with the issue of sexual exploitation of 14 year olds is simply not accurate. The close in age exemption, five years between a person of the age specified, will save many relationships that should not be criminalized.

Lastly, I noted that Bill C-23 was not included in Bill C-2. I have to wonder why.

I live in Acadia. And Bill C-23 included many improvements with respect to choosing the first language of prosecutors during a trial. French is the language spoken by most people in my province. That element was very important to us in Acadia, but the government overlooked this fact.

Why did the government turn its back on the francophone people of New Brunswick in this country?

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we should not even be here debating this bill, which should have received royal assent last spring. The government has been playing games with Parliament. It is not governing and it uses Parliament as a political playground. It has shown a complete lack of respect towards Parliament.

The government refused the fast tracking offer of our party and it actively delayed these important initiatives while hoping for an election last spring in which they could run on their crime and punishment agenda.

As was mentioned by the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, I too would like to remind this House of the scenario from last spring. Bill C-10 received first reading on May 6 and was delayed 38 days before second reading, 146 days before it was sent to committee. The committee met 105 days and then from the committee report to report stage it took another 75 days. From report stage to third reading, it took 22 days.

Bill C-22 received first reading on June 22, 2006 and was delayed 130 days before second reading, 142 days before it was sent to committee. The bill was 29 days in committee, four days until the committee reported, 11 days to report stage, and then to third reading on the following day.

Bill C-27 received first reading on October 17, 2006 and was delayed 199 days before second reading on May 4, 2007, four days to committee, and then 36 days to report stage.

Bill C-32 received first reading on November 21, 2006 and was delayed 77 days before second reading, 113 days until it was sent to committee, and then 20 days in committee and the committee reported the following day.

Bill C-35, an act to amend the Criminal Code, received first reading November 23, 2006 and was delayed 123 days before second reading, two days before it went to the committee where it was studied for 61 days, and then one day until it was reported in the House. It took five days to report stage and one day until third reading.

This is no way to tackle violent crime. In fact, again the government is simply posturing and using the Parliament of this country as a little electoral toy, instead of actually taking this seriously. The Conservatives are only posturing. I have never been so disappointed, from the committees to the behaviour here, to see that these parliamentarians have not been allowed to act like parliamentarians because of this appetite for an election and a majority.

Last evening, at the End Exclusion 2007 conference, one of the members of the disability community said to me that social policy and social justice was homeless in the government. In terms of tackling violent crime, women with disabilities, who are the most abused, most often the victims of violent crime, want to see some policies that will affect them.

The seniors that we met with the member for London North Centre are very upset in terms of the people looking after them. Elder abuse no longer has automatic charges and the poor, vulnerable seniors are still asked as to whether or not they want to press charges.

From early learning and child care where we know we can help effect the behaviour of young children, to bullying programs, literacy programs, to cutting women's programs that affect the Interval houses, to the summer jobs program where kids can finally maybe find out that they are good at something, the government has consistently cut the prevention and the causes of violent crime.

I remember in 1995 when I ran provincially. We knew then what premier Harris was about to do. He cut the arts programs, the music programs, the sports programs, the homework clubs and the family counselling, and 10 years later we ended up with terrible trouble with guns and gangs.

At the Tumivut shelter in my riding, when I meet with some of the members of the black community, it has been absolutely horrifying to hear that the results of those cuts were really to people who did not feel included. The first time this young man said that he had ever felt included was when he joined a gang. The first time he was told that he was good at anything was when he was shoplifting.

It is very upsetting to see that the government just does not understand that investing in programs allows kids to find talents in art and music and find summer jobs. It is absolutely horrifying to think that this idea of just locking up people and throwing away the key will be the way to get a safer society.

Canada used to boast the lowest recidivism rate in the world because of what happened to people in prisons. That meant an education. They might even get a bachelor's degree. Some of them have even obtained law degrees. With anger management and drug rehabilitation programs, they have been able to come out with new talents, meet new friends, and never reoffend again.

We do not want our prisons to become schools for criminality, where people are trained for a life of crime. It is hugely important, as we look forward to the real challenge of tackling violent crime in the long term, that the government address the causes of crimes and the kinds of programs that are so important in our prison system.

I feel that I cannot stand in the House without commenting that the government has rendered this place and the committees of the House to an all time low in my 10 years as a parliamentarian. Members of Parliament are not allowed to speak freely in committee, they are scripted and rehearsed in the Prime Minister's Office. There is this unbelievable inability of cabinet ministers to even speak or show up at events they had booked themselves. As the Clerk of the House of Commons so often reminds us, this building is to be something more than to hang Christmas lights on.

It is appalling that we do not understand that the job of chairs of committees is not to dictate. Their job is to find the will of the committee and put it forward. They are not to have, like what happened yesterday in the health committee, the minister whispering in the chair's ear in the middle of the meeting. It is not up to the chair of a committee to decide, with 15 minutes to go, that the minister gets 15 minutes to sum up.

There seems to be an absolute lack of understanding of the role of the House and the role of committees in terms of really calling the government to account. Government reports to Parliament. It is not the other way around. No amendments mean no democracy. This is a travesty of the role of citizens.

I hope that in the next election people will see that the ballot box question will be whether citizens have a role at all after the next election because citizens have been silenced, members of Parliament have been silenced, and ministers are being instructed what to do. I worry for the democracy of this country should these people be allowed to govern any longer.

Project Red Ribbon

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Mr. Speaker, impaired driving is a crime that is 100% preventable. That is why on November 13 volunteers for Mothers Against Drunk Driving from my riding of Prince Edward—Hastings launched their 2007 red ribbon campaign.

Last year this Conservative government introduced Bill C-32, which provided police with the tools to detect drug impaired driving. This bill, now part of Bill C-2, the tackling violent crime act, whose legislative committee I am proud to be a part of, authorizes police officers to conduct a series of tests to determine if a driver is impaired by a drug or a combination of alcohol and drugs.

There is general agreement in this House and in this country that drug impaired driving represents a serious criminal justice, health and traffic safety issue in Canada. Drug users are disproportionately involved in fatal accidents and impaired driving is still the number one criminal cause of death in Canada.

This Christmas season and throughout the year, I urge all Canadians to display a red ribbon in an effort to stop impaired driving.

[Andy Rady, Director, Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers]

Thank you.

Good morning to all. I'm here along with Evan Roitenberg on behalf of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers. I want to thank you all for allowing us to attend and be witnesses this morning. I'm going to make a few brief opening remarks and then Mr. Roitenberg will continue.

For those of you who aren't familiar with our organization, we are a council of defence lawyers from across Canada, including the territories, of 17 persons. We represent criminal law associations in all of the provinces; they all have a member on our association. So we respond on matters of national interest to the defence bar as a whole. We've been doing this since 1992, and we've appeared before this committee and other committees over the years.

Bill C-2 consisted of five other bills in the previous Parliament, and we've already made representations on those: Mark Brayford from Saskatchewan on Bill C-32, Bill Trudell on Bill C-35, Mr. Trudell and myself on Bill C-10, and Mr. Roitenberg was set to speak on Bill C-27 before Parliament dissolved.

It is our position that the current system of dangerous offender legislation in the Criminal Code works and need not be changed. We have concerns with Bill C-2. Our concern is that if society is going to seek to lock someone up indefinitely, the burden must in all cases be on society to show that this should occur. In other words, we're talking about what we call the reverse onus provision of Bill C-2 with respect to dangerous offenders.

It is our position that this new section really provides a false sense of security and nothing else to what we already have, which is a very careful system, because dangerous offender designations result in perhaps the most draconian penalities that we know in our law. We are concerned as well that what the burden-shifting does is place it on the defence and on the accused person. One of the things that appears not to have been considered is the effect this is going to have on legal aid plans throughout the country. Obviously, if the convicted person is going to have to try to demonstrate why they should not be declared dangerous, the kinds of resources they are going to require from legal aid plans are going to be very high. We're concerned that there isn't a corresponding amount of funding for that.

We also have some concern with respect to the fact that it would appear that aboriginal offenders represent--at least a few years ago--21% of all dangerous offender designations. This is not reflective of the overall aboriginal population. Again, that may have to do with a cost situation in terms of being able to defend dangerous offender applications. One of the things we read indicated that it takes the crown approximately 600 man-hours to put one of these together. If that burden shifts to the accused, we're going to see more dangerous offenders simply because they're not going to have the resources to meet this reverse onus test.

Mr. Roitenberg.

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm pleased to be joined at the table by Catherine Kane, the acting senior general counsel, criminal law policy section; and Douglas Hoover, counsel, criminal law policy section.

Mr. Chairman, I'm pleased to appear before your committee as it begins its review of Bill C-10, the Tackling Violent Crime Act.

This is the government's first piece of legislation in this session of Parliament. The Tackling Violent Crime Act underscores our commitment to safeguard Canadians in their homes and on their streets and in their communities. It is a confidence measure. Bill C-10 reflects the depth of this unwavering commitment by the Government of Canada.

As a confidence measure, Bill C-10 reflects the depth of this unwavering commitment.

Canadians are losing confidence in our criminal justice system. They want a justice system that has clear and strong laws that denounce and deter violent crime. They want a justice system that imposes penalties that adequately reflect the serious nature of these crimes and that rehabilitate offenders to prevent them from reoffending. Bill C-10 seeks to restore Canadians' confidence in our system by restoring their safety and security in their communities, and this is in fact what is reflected in the preamble to Bill C-2.

The proposed Tackling Violent Crime Act brings together five criminal law reform bills that we introduced in the previous session of Parliament. One of them, Bill C-10, imposed higher mandatory minimum penalties of imprisonment for eight specific offences involving the use of restricted or prohibited firearms or in connection with organized crime, which of course includes gangs, and also for offences that do not involve the actual use of a firearm--namely, firearm trafficking or smuggling--or the illegal possession of a restricted or prohibited firearm with ammunition. The Tackling Violent Crime Act reintroduces the former Bill C-10 as passed by the House of Commons.

It also includes one of my favourites, Bill C-22, which increased the age of consent for sexual activity from 14 to 16 years of age to protect young people against adult sexual predators. There is proposed, as I'm sure you are aware, a five-year close-in-age exception to prevent the criminalization of sexual activity between consenting teenagers. The Tackling Violent Crime Act reintroduces Bill C-22 as passed by the House of Commons.

It also includes Bill C-32, which addressed impaired driving by proposing the legislative framework for the drug recognition expert program and requiring participation in roadside and drug recognition expert sobriety testing; by simplifying the investigation and prosecution of impaired driving; and by proposing procedural and sentencing changes, including creating the new offences of being “over 80” and refusing to provide a breath sample where the person's operation of the vehicle has caused bodily harm or death. The Tackling Violent Crime Act reintroduces the former Bill C-32 as amended and reported back from the justice committee.

We also have Bill C-35, which imposes a reverse onus for bail for accused charged with any of eight serious offences committed with a firearm, with an indictable offence involving firearms or other regulated weapons if committed while under a weapons prohibition order, or with firearm trafficking or possession for the purpose of trafficking and firearm smuggling. The Tackling Violent Crime Act reintroduces the former Bill C-35 as passed by the House of Commons.

The Tackling Violent Crime Act also reintroduces reforms proposed by the former Bill C-27, addressing dangerous and repeat violent offenders, with additional improvements.

As I have noted, and with the exception of the dangerous offenders reforms, all of these reforms have been thoroughly debated, reviewed, and supported in the House of Commons.

These reforms included in Bill C-27 had not progressed to the same level of understanding and support in the previous session and now include additional improvements to address concerns that have been identified in the House of Commons as well as by my provincial and territorial counterparts. Let me take a moment to go through these reforms.

The Tackling Violent Crime Act retains all of the reforms previously proposed in Bill C-27 regarding peace bonds, which had been well received within the House of Commons and beyond. Accordingly, Bill C-10 proposes to double the maximum duration of these protective court orders from one to two years and to clarify that the court can impose a broad range of conditions to ensure public safety, including curfews, electronic monitoring, treatment, and drug and alcohol prohibitions.

I believe this particular provision will be well received across this country. Many people have complained for many years that by the time you get a one-year peace bond, it's too short a period of time, and that two years would be much more appropriate in terms of getting the bond and having it put in place.

Under this bill as well as under the former Bill C-27, crown prosecutors will still have to declare in open court whether or not they intend to bring a dangerous offender application where an individual is convicted for a third time of a serious offence.

We have retained some procedural enhancements to the dangerous offenders procedures, allowing for more flexibility regarding the filing of the necessary psychiatric assessments.

As in the former Bill C-27, an individual who is convicted of a third sufficiently violent or sexual offence is still presumed dangerous.

Bill C-10 also toughens the sentencing provision regarding whether a dangerous offender should receive an indeterminate or a less severe sentence. This amendment modifies Bill C-27's approach to make the courts impose a sentence that ensures public safety.

Finally, it includes a new provision that would allow a crown prosecutor to apply for a second dangerous offender sentencing hearing in the specific instance where an individual is convicted of breaching a condition of their long-term supervision order.

This second hearing targets individuals who were found by the original court to meet the dangerous offender criteria but were nonetheless able to satisfy the court that they could be managed under the lesser long-term offender sentence. If they show by their conduct, once released into the community, that they are not manageable and are convicted of the offence of breaching a condition of their supervision order, they would now be subject to another dangerous offender sentence hearing.

Importantly, this new proposal does not wait for the offender to commit yet another sexual assault or violent offence to bring the offender back for a second hearing for a dangerous offender sentence. Instead, it would be triggered simply by the offender's failure to comply with the conditions of his release contained in his long-term supervision order--for example, for failing to return to his residence before curfew or for consuming alcohol or drugs. Of course, this second hearing would also be triggered if the offender in fact did commit a further sexual or violent offence after his release into the community.

These new proposals directly respond to a serious problem identified by provincial and territorial attorneys general in recent months. Indeed, some of these issues have been flagged since about 2003. Since the 2003 judgment by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Johnson case, many violent offenders who meet the dangerous offender criteria have nonetheless managed to escape its indeterminate sentence on the basis that they could be managed; that is, the risk of harm that they pose to the community could be successfully managed in the community under a long-term offender sentence.

So we reviewed the dangerous offender cases since the 2003 Johnson case and identified 74 such violent offenders. We then looked at how these individuals fared once they were released into the community. To date, 28 of these 74 dangerous offenders have been released into the community. Of these 28, over 60% were subsequently detained for breaching the conditions of their long-term supervision and 10 were convicted of breaching a condition of their long-term supervision orders.

Bill C-10 will prevent dangerous offenders from escaping the dangerous offender indeterminate sentence in the first place and will enable us to more effectively deal with those who nonetheless receive the long-term offender sentence but then demonstrate an inability to abide by the conditions of their long-term offender supervision order.

Of course I have carefully considered the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights in respect of the totality of these new dangerous offender reforms, and I am satisfied that they are fully constitutional. These measures have been carefully tailored to provide a prospective, targeted, and balanced response to the real and pressing problem posed by these dangerous offenders.

To sum up, Mr. Chairman, the Tackling Violent Crime Act proposes reforms that have already been supported by the House of Commons.

In the case of the new dangerous offender provisions, it proposes modifications that many have signalled an interest in supporting.

I appreciate the collaborative spirit this committee and members have shown thus far to enable the commencement of the review of Bill C-10, and it is my hope and that of all Canadians that this collaboration will continue to enable expeditious passage of this bill.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Actually, I know that this will certainly be discussed at the steering committee, but I would have liked a look at it first. Do my colleagues want to see a list of all the witnesses? When we discussed it with our leaders, we definitely said that we wanted the committee to concentrate its efforts on the contentious matters from the previous session, that is to say Bill C-27.

I would not want us, for example, to hear again from all the witnesses that we heard in the last session when we were discussing Bills C-10, C-22, C-32 and C-37. I would like us to spend more time on Bill C-27 that caused us difficulty. I wonder if all my colleagues are of the same mind, given that it is more or less what the leaders agreed among themselves when they were discussing the legislative committee.

Tackling Violent Crime Act

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I must inform the House that our colleague did not tell us the whole truth.

First, with regard to Bill C-27, the committee met three times. We cannot say that we will adopt a bill after three committee meetings. The committee had just been formed when the House adjourned.

The government whip speaks of Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts. The fact is that we did not block the bill and, what is more, we were at report stage. We had agreed in committee that the chair would table a report. If the whip was in such a hurry to pass the bills, then why did his Prime Minister prorogue the House? We were ready to return and study these bills.

I believe that is a myth. The opposition parties co-operated with the government. However, we will not allow this government to tell the opposition parties that they will not do their job. And when we deem it appropriate, we will amend the bill.

I was not elected on the Conservative's platform. I was democratically elected, with 60% of the votes in my riding, as an alternative to the Conservatives. We will do our work. If we believe it necessary, we will amend the bill.

The Prime Minister must be more democratic.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Secretary of State and Chief Government Whip]

Mr. Speaker, as I have done with all the speeches this afternoon, I listened with great interest to the words of my colleagues from the opposition parties. I would like to take this opportunity to perhaps correct some of the motives the member attributes to the Conservative government in bringing forward this tackling violent crime act, Bill C-2, and then pose a question.

Toward the end of his remarks he asserted that our government is driven by partisan political considerations. I would like to state for the record that no, what we are driven by here is to try to reform our justice system or, maybe more appropriately, that we are driven by a desire to restore fairness and justice to our legal system in this country.

That is the real reason behind the fact that in our short-lived government we have brought forward so many new initiatives in the justice department. In fact, he mentioned the fact that we brought forward a dozen bills alone in this Parliament already.

The other fallacy that I would like to quickly correct for the record is this whole business that somehow by combining these bills we are going to delay them. The fact is, and my colleague clearly identified this, Bill C-2, the tackling violent crime act, encompasses some five previous bills. I will run through them very quickly.

Previously, Bill C-10, mandatory minimum penalties for firearms offences, was stalled in committee for 252 days and the bill died after a total of 414 days before Parliament.

Bill C-22, age of protection, was stalled in committee for 175 days and the bill died after a total of 365 days before Parliament.

Bill C-27, dangerous offenders, was stalled in committee for 105 days and the bill died after a total of 246 days before Parliament.

Bill C-35, reverse onus on bail for firearms offences, was stalled in committee for 64 days and the bill died after a total of 211 days before Parliament.

Finally, Bill C-32, drug impaired driving, was stalled in committee for 149 days and the bill died after a total of 210 days before Parliament.

I think Canadians are waking up to the fact that a lot of these bills were stalled in the upper chamber in our parliamentary system. What are we talking about? We are talking about an unelected, unaccountable, Liberal dominated Senate. In other words, an upper chamber dominated by our process in this Parliament by the opposition.

Obviously, even the temporary current leader of the official opposition, the leader of the Liberal Party, has no control over the Senate. He has no control over his colleagues over there in getting this legislation moved forward.

In the last election campaign, all four parties running in the election said they wanted to get tough with violent crime. Yet, when we put this legislation through, the Liberals allowed it to be stalled over there. What have we done? We have combined them because the Senate will be less able to stall one or two bills because Canadians will be awakened to the fact that if the Liberals stall Bill C-2, they will clearly understand that the Liberal Party has never been serious about violent crime. It says one thing but does the opposite.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, today we are debating what the government considers to be the most important component of the throne speech presented a few days ago, Bill C-2.

First of all, there is a myth that I would like to dispel. On several occasions the members on the government side have unfortunately taken some liberties with the truth. They have suggested that, in this Parliament, the opposition parties—the official opposition, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP—did not cooperate, that they acted like spoilsports and had unduly and excessively delayed passage of the justice bills. We need to set the record straight. This presentation of the facts is false, dishonest and, at the very least, misleading.

Since coming into power in January 2006, the Conservative government has tabled 12 justice bills. They were studied by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and the legislative committee and six of them have received royal assent. Therefore, since the government came into office in January 2006, six bills have been adopted and received royal assent.

I will mention them quickly, for information purposes: Bill C-9, on conditional sentencing; Bill C-17, on the salaries of judges; Bill C-18, on the DNA data bank; Bill C-19, which was meant as a tribute to a Conservative member who unfortunately passed away, and which makes street racing a new offence under the Criminal Code; the fifth bill, namely Bill C-48, on the United Nations Convention against Corruption and on international crime, was fast-tracked and supported by all opposition parties and the government; finally, the sixth one, is Bill C-59, creating a new offence, under the Criminal Code, for the unauthorized recording of a movie in a movie theatre. That legislation was quickly passed, at the request of the Bloc Québécois, which had enlisted the support of the official opposition and of the NDP.

Again, of the 12 bills introduced by the government, six received royal assent. That left six, with four of them being in the Senate. That was the case for Bill C-10, on minimum penalties for offences involving firearms, and for Bill C-22, on the age of protection. The Conservatives proposed to raise the age of protection from 14 to 16 years. As mentioned earlier, opposition parties requested that a close in age provision be included, to provide for a difference of five or two years, depending on the age being considered.

As I just mentioned, Bill C-10 and Bill C-22 were before the Senate. Bill C-23, which is a rather technical bill on the language used during a trial before a jury, was also before the Senate, as was Bill C-35, dealing with the reverse onus, at the pre-trial hearing, for a number of very serious offences. The committee was told that this was already the usual practice, and that a justice of the peace or a superior court judge very rarely grants bail at the pre-trial hearing, when the individual is accused of murder, assault or sexual assault. This was already an established practice.

In summary, six bills have been passed and have received royal assent, and four had already gone through third reading in the House of Commons and were in the Senate. This left us with two bills: the dangerous offenders bill, Bill C-27, which I will address later, and Bill C-32 dealing with impaired driving.

Could the Prime Minister and the Conservative team be asked to be a little more relaxed and show a more nuanced and respectful attitude toward the opposition?

We are going to do our job. In the past, we have given the government our cooperation when that was necessary, but we have introduced amendments because, unfortunately, an entire segment of the Conservative caucus has no idea of nuances. I will give examples. Had Bill C-32 been passed as written, without amendments, anyone driving his or her own car with a passenger on board who was in possession of a small amount of marijuana could have faced prosecution or arrest.

Was that the purpose of the legislation? This bill was intended to address a public safety issue, recognizing that no one should be operating a vehicle on public roadways while under the influence of drugs, and to allow for drivers to be subjected to standardized tests known as standardized field sobriety tests. The intention certainly was not to pass legislation to target drivers carrying drugs without their knowledge. That could happen. I could give three people a ride to my cottage without knowing that one of them has marijuana in his or her pocket. This would have made me liable to prosecution.

This is the sort of excess the Conservatives are guilty of, when we are talking about a bill, a motivation, and an intent that are utterly defensible in terms of public policy. But when the Conservatives are left to their own devices, when they are ruled by that extreme wing of their caucus and blinded by the idea of law and order, they come up with bills that have to be amended.

Conditional sentencing has been mentioned. When we began looking at Bill C-9, the first justice bill the Conservatives introduced—the member for London West will recall—we were told that conditional sentences represented only 5% of sentences.

If you look at all the sentences handed down in all the courts in Canada in recent years for which records have been kept, you see that conditional sentences, which allow offenders to serve their sentence in the community under supervision, represented only 5% of sentences.

If we had adopted the bill as introduced by the Conservatives, all offences punishable by more than two years in prison might have been excluded from this tool judges have for determining how a sentence can be served in the community.

I repeat that I am extremely disappointed with the attitude of the Prime Minister, who asks the opposition to vote for bills, but will not tolerate any amendments to those bills. How can anyone be so authoritarian? How can anyone be so cavalier? How can anyone be so disrespectful of Canadian democracy and tell the 57% or 58% of Canadians who did not elect Conservative members that if their representatives do not fall into line with the Conservative platform, they cannot introduce amendments in this House?

I assure my colleagues that we are going to consider the issue and that we will work very quickly, with all due diligence. And we will introduce amendments if we feel that they are in the interest of the people we represent.

The government wants this bill to go to committee quickly. The leaders have agreed on this. Later today, the whip will introduce a motion, and once again we have offered to cooperate.

Next week, we will have this bill before us, but we will not allow ourselves to be led by the nose by this government. When the Conservatives were in opposition, they were intractable and often mean-spirited. They constantly, systematically filibustered. Never have I seen such filibustering. Sometimes it went on day and night.

The current Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food did the filibustering. He led this House in circles regarding employment equity. At the time, I was a young, naive and vulnerable member. I had just been elected and was experiencing my first filibuster. Furthermore, the current Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development was uncompromising on the issue of employment equity, which was under the responsibility of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

They cannot have it both ways. A person cannot say that it is fine to filibuster when they are in opposition, only to turn around, once they are in the governing party, and refuse the opposition's right to present amendments. This is irresponsible and disrespectful.

Bill C-2 merges five pieces of legislation. Of those pieces of legislation, the Bloc Québécois supported four of them, with amendments. In committee, of course, we will not ask to repeat the work that has already been done.

However, we have a problem with Bill C-27, concerning dangerous offenders. As we all know, the Criminal Code has included provisions on this matter since 1947. In the past, we did not use the term dangerous offender, but rather habitual criminal. I wonder whether certain members, those who have been practising law for some time, remember that expression. The Liberals already changed those provisions by creating a new category of dangerous offenders—long-term offenders—in Bill C-55.

What is our line of questioning? I would like to be clear. I am telling the government that the Bloc Québécois would like to see three main groups of witnesses. First, we would like to hear constitutional experts on the constitutionality of the reverse onus principle, in the same terms in which this bill was presented.

We would then like to see a second group of witnesses. I would remind the House that when the Minister of Justice appeared before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, he was unable to tell us what it is about the administrative and judicial process for dangerous offenders that is not working.

Currently, a person can be labelled a dangerous offender after committing a first serious offence. Section 753 of the Criminal Code is very clear. If there is any reason to believe that that an individual is likely to cause a death, is out of control, or is likely to reoffend, that person can be declared a dangerous offender after a first offence. I am not saying that this is what usually happens. We are not talking about a large number of people here. About 350 people have been declared dangerous offenders, and some of them have been released under mandatory supervision. Of course, most of them are inside federal prisons.

We will run this by constitutional experts. It is our responsibility to ensure that this bill is not unconstitutional. We will ask people who make their living dealing with this issue before the courts to explain to us which parts of the current legislation are not working.

We will also ask a third group of witnesses about the list of offences. In the bill before us today, five types of offences would result in an individual being declared a dangerous offender. Naturally, most of them are serious crimes, such as attempted murder, murder, homicide and serious sexual crimes.

The government wants to expand this list to include 42 offences. The preliminary list includes 22 offences, one of which is assault. I do not wish to downplay the importance of assault. However, should an individual who has been convicted of assault three times be put on a list of dangerous offenders, with all of the consequences that entails?

There is a list of designated offences, which, I agree, are offences generally punishable by a sentence of more than five years. The question is, do we need to take this further? Is it important to have these two lists of offences?

Why ask this question? We are not questioning the fact that we need provisions in the Criminal Code for people who are so dangerous and present such a risk of recidivism that they need to be designated long term offenders, or dangerous offenders. A dangerous offender is someone who can be imprisoned for an indefinite period. Obviously, they are denied their freedom and denied eligibility for parole. Certainly—and I am not afraid to say so—this is justified in some situations. We understand that for some individuals there is no chance for rehabilitation and they have to be imprisoned for an indeterminate period.

Nonetheless, it is our responsibility to ensure that if we are going to pass legislation that considerably broadens the scope of this rule—which is in fact an exception to the general rule—then we have to be able to verify the facts in committee in order to make sure there is no risk of abuse or excess.

As hon. members know, the Conservatives are driven by partisan political considerations. That is “partisan” with a capital “P”.

As it stands, the crime rate has gone down in Canada. In any event, the homicide rate has gone down. The incidence of violent crime has gone down. I am not saying there has not been a worrisome increase in property crime in certain communities. However, generally speaking, we know full well that for a number of years now, major crime, such as homicide—crimes involving violence—has gone down year after year.

Criminologists who have studied these issues are saying that there is no correlation between a reliance on imprisonment and lower crime rates in a society. We do not live in a safer society and the communities are not safer because of widespread prison sentencing.

We know that the United States has an incarceration rate seven times greater than Canada's. In Canada, there are 132 or 134 prisoners for every 100,000 people.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, the member represents people who breathe in the fresh, misty and refreshing air on the banks of the Bay of Fundy, but who, like the people I represent, have to live with an unrestored Petitcodiac River.

On topic, I thank him for his continuing interest in criminal justice issues. I know what he wishes for is what all Canadians wish for, a safe society. I will have a speech rebutting a lot of his technical points, but the question is this. As the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, he heard much evidence, as we all did on the justice committee, about how to effect the legislation, the 13 bills with which we were presented.

I have a few very short questions.

Why has the Conservative government not fulfilled its promise of 2,500 police officers? How can it put into place a thousand RCMP officers when the RCMP itself is a thousand persons behind in its recruitment drive? Is the drug recognition expert program funded? If Bill C-32 is up and running tomorrow, will it work?

Finally, he heard evidence about the Centre for Forensic Sciences being quite behind in its deadlines with respect to DNA identification. Is that centre well funded enough? Will it work and be able to respond to the needs in the new DNA bill which we all supported?

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to join in the debate on Bill C-2, the tackling violent crime act.

As the Minister of Justice noted when he spoke in reply to the Speech from the Throne, safe streets and secure communities are the Canadian way of life. This is what I would like to focus my remarks on today, how we are building a stronger, safer and better Canada, beginning with Bill C-2.

I have had many opportunities, as probably all members in the House have had, to talk with my constituents, parents, community leaders, police, lawyers, and many others about their concern with crime and what we should do about it.

What I have heard has likely been heard by all hon. members as they have travelled throughout their ridings and indeed across Canada. Canadians are clearly expecting their government to take concrete and effective action to tackle crime.

Unlike previous governments on this issue, the current government listens. We share these concerns and we have made tackling crime a key priority for our government. We have made it a key priority for our government because it is a key priority for Canadians, but there is so much more that needs to be done.

We know what crime looks like in Canada. Crime statistics have been recorded since 1962 so we have 45 years of information. Statistics Canada reported last July that the overall national crime rate has decreased for the second year in a row.

We all want to see a lower crime rate. So this is the good news. But the national crime rate is an average and does not tell us about some of the more serious problems or localized problems.

The long term trends over the last few generations show us what we all know in the House, that crime has increased drastically. Since the 1970s, for example, the violent crime rate has increased 98%, but the national crime rate does not tell us what may be going on in individual communities. Community leaders, victims groups and law enforcement know their particular challenges, and we are listening to them.

Many Canadians have lost confidence in the criminal justice system and question if it is doing enough to protect them. They know that violent crime is all too common. They dread hearing statistics like those released on October 17 by Statistics Canada.

Those statistics tell us that 4 out of 10, or 40% of victims of violent crimes sustained injuries. They tell us that half of violent crimes occurred at private residences. They tell us that firearms were involved in 30% of homicides, 31% of attempted murders and 13% of robberies committed. They tell us that one out of every six victims of violent crimes was a youth aged 12 to 17 years old and children under 12 years of age account for 23% of victims of sexual assaults and 5% of victims of violent crimes.

Canadians are looking to the federal government to work with them to restore community safety. The government understands the need for leadership in criminal justice and this is what our tackling crime priority, and our commitment in this regard is all about. It is about reducing all crime and providing an effective criminal justice system. Our plan is ambitious, but Canadians can count on us to get it done. As they have seen on other issues, we have been able to get things done for all Canadians.

In the last session of Parliament the government tabled 13 crime bills. This is proof of our commitment to address crime and safety issues in our communities. It is interesting to note that it was 13 crime bills as it was 13 years of Liberal governments that have left us with a revolving door justice system in which Canadians have lost faith, a justice system that Canadians feel puts the rights of criminals ahead of the rights of everyday, law-abiding Canadians. This is what our government is going to address.

Six of these crime bills, of the 13, received royal assent and are now the law or will soon become the law. For example, one of the government's first bills and first priorities was to curtail the use of conditional sentences or house arrest for serious violent crimes.

We all know the issue of house arrest. In all of our ridings we have heard cases where someone has committed a very serious, sometimes violent, crime and there is an expectation in the community that there will be a severe consequence for someone who commits a severe crime. All too often the community is outraged when it hears that criminals will be serving out their sentence from the comfort of their own home.

Bill C-9, which received royal assent on May 31, 2007, and will be coming into force on December 1, 2007, makes it clear that conditional sentences or house arrest will not be an option for serious personal injury offences, terrorism offences, and organized crime offences where the maximum term of imprisonment is 10 years or more.

This change was a long time coming. It is well past due and Canadians will be better served by a justice system that does not allow, for these serious offences, criminals to serve a sentence in their own home. Canadians wanted this change.

Bill C-18 strengthened the laws governing the national DNA data bank. This will facilitate police investigation of crimes. Bill C-18 received royal assent on June 22, 2007. Some provisions are already in force and others will soon be proclaimed in force.

Bill C-19 made Canada's streets safer by enacting new offences to specifically combat street racing. These new offences built upon existing offences, including dangerous driving and criminal negligence, and provide higher maximum penalties of incarceration for the most serious of street racing offences.

As well, mandatory driving prohibition will be imposed on those convicted of street racing. In the most serious cases involving repeat street racing offenders, a mandatory lifetime driving prohibition can now be imposed.

We also took concrete steps to protect users of payday loans. Bill C-26, which received royal assent on May 3, 2007, makes it an offence to enter into an agreement or an arrangement to receive interest at a criminal rate or to receive payment of an interest at a criminal rate. The criminal rate of interest is defined as exceeding 60% per year.

We also took further measures to combat corruption. Bill C-48 enacted Criminal Code amendments to enable Canada to ratify and implement the United Nations convention against corruption on October 2, 2007. By ratifying the convention, Canada has joined 92 other state parties committed to working with the international community to take preventative measures against corruption.

Our bill to stop film piracy or camcording, Bill C-59, received widespread support. It was quickly passed and received royal assent on June 22, 2007.

Unfortunately, none of our other important crime bills progressed to enactment before Parliament prorogued. That is why the tackling violent crime act reintroduces the provisions of the following bills that died on the order paper.

The bill imposing mandatory minimum penalties of imprisonment for firearms offences, Bill C-10, is included in Bill C-2 as passed by the House of Commons.

Bill C-22, which increased the age of protection against adult sexual exploitation, has been included, as passed by the House of Commons.

Bill C-32, addressing drug impaired driving and impaired driving in general, has been introduced as amended by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and reported to the House of Commons.

Bill C-35, imposing a reverse onus for bail for firearms offences, has been included in this new bill, as passed by the House of Commons. This bill will make it tougher for those who have committed a firearms offence to received bail and be back out on the street.

Bill C-27, addressing dangerous and repeat violent offenders, as originally introduced, is included in this bill, but with some further amendments, which I will elaborate on shortly.

The tackling violent crime act respects the parliamentary process and includes the bills as amended by committee or as passed by the House of Commons, and in the same state that they were when Parliament was prorogued. As a result, these reforms are familiar, or should be familiar, to all members of this House, and so I would call on all hon. members to quickly pass the tackling violent crime act.

Indeed, many hon. members have already stated that they support these reforms. There is therefore no need to further debate these reforms or for a prolonged study of the provisions that Parliament has already debated and committees have already scrutinized. It is time for us all to demonstrate our commitment to safeguarding Canadians and for safer communities, and to quickly move this bill forward.

For those who need more convincing, I would like to reiterate that the tackling violent crime act addresses a range of serious issues that put Canadians at risk: gun crimes, impaired driving, sexual offences against children and dangerous offenders.

We know that Canadians expect their government to take action and to protect them from these crimes. To do so, we need the support of all hon. members, as well as Canadians, our partners in the provinces and the territories, and law enforcement and community groups.

Time does not permit me to address each of the equally important elements of Bill C-2. I know that other members will rise to speak to the reforms that are of most concern to them. I propose to highlight a few of the issues that have been raised repeatedly with me by my constituents, and I am sure by constituents in ridings held by all hon. members, in particular, about impaired driving, the age of consent and dangerous offenders.

Alcohol and drug impaired driving have devastating effects for victims, for families and for communities. Impaired drivers are responsible for thousands of fatalities and injuries each year, not to mention billions of dollars in property damage.

Once the tackling violent crime act is the law, impaired drivers will face tough punishment, no matter which intoxicant they choose, and police and prosecutors will have the tools that they need to deal with these offences.

Although drug impaired driving has always been a crime, until recently, police have not had the same tools available to stop those who drive while impaired by drugs that they have to address alcohol impaired driving. Under this bill, they will.

The tackling violent crime act strengthens the ability of police, prosecutors and the courts to investigate, prosecute and sentence those who endanger the safety of other Canadians through alcohol or drug impaired driving. I know that all hon. members recognize the pressing need to ensure the safety of our streets, highways, communities and our schools. By giving police the tools they need to combat impaired driving, we are doing that.

These reforms were applauded by the stakeholders and supported in the House of Commons. I am sure every member of Parliament in the House has received correspondence urging them to support the bill. There should be no impediments to making progress on this part of the tackling violent crime act.

The act also reintroduces the reforms to raise the age at which young people can consent to sexual activity from 14 to 16 years of age. The bill takes away the ability, and let us be clear on what the bill does, of adult sexual predators to rely on claims that their young victims consented.

Again, these reforms were welcomed by child advocates and supported in the House as part of former Bill C-22, so there is no need for further debate. We can move ahead.

It is worth spending a few moments to focus on the dangerous and high risk offender provisions of former Bill C-27. Some of these provisions have been modified and, therefore, hon. members may want to scrutinize these aspects more than the other reforms included in the tackling violent crime act.

The dangerous offender reforms in Bill C-2 respond to the concerns highlighted in the debates and before the justice committee, and by provincial attorneys general. I am sure that all hon. members will agree that these modifications are welcomed.

As members will recall, former Bill C-27 was tabled in the House last October. That bill included dramatic enhancements to the sentencing and management of the very worst of the worst, those offenders who repeatedly commit violent and sexual crimes and who require special attention, because it has become clear that the regular criminal sentencing regime simply cannot effectively manage the small but violent and dangerous group of offenders.

The tackling violent crime act includes all of the original amendments to the Criminal Code from the former Bill C-27, as well as two important changes which will go further in protecting Canadians from dangerous offenders.

First, let me provide an overview of the provisions brought forward into the House under Bill C-27. It includes the requirement in dangerous offender hearings that an offender be presumed to meet the dangerous offender criteria upon a third conviction for a primary designated offence. In other words, an offence that is on the list of the 12 most violent or sexual offences that typically trigger dangerous offender designations.

Second, the bill would also place a requirement on crown prosecutors to inform the court that they had fully considered whether to pursue a dangerous offender application. This is to prevent these applications from falling through the cracks. This would occur in cases where an offender had been convicted for a third time of a relatively serious sexual or violent offence.

The declaration is intended to ensure more consistent use of the dangerous offender sentence by the Crown in all jurisdictions. Although the Crown must indicate whether it has considered bringing a dangerous offender application, we are not dictating to it that it must do so. We are not attempting to arbitrarily fetter the discretion of the Crown or of the court. Rather, we are providing a way to make sure that the Crown turns its mind to the issue of a dangerous offender application.

Third, Bill C-2 would also bring forward the very significant reforms to the section 810.1 and 810.2 peace bond provisions that enable any person to apply to a court to ask for stringent conditions to be imposed against individuals who are felt to pose a threat of sexual or violent offending in the community.

We have all heard the horror stories from one end of the country to the other of someone who is known to be a threat to commit a sexual or violent offence against an innocent member of the community. There is often great frustration among Canadians at the perceived inability for government, for officials, for police, to act to protect the community from a subsequent violent or sexual offence.

Specifically, we are doubling the duration of peace bonds from one year to two years. We are also providing specific authority for the court to impose conditions regarding curfews, electronic monitoring, treatment requirements and other prohibitions as well as making it very clear that the court may impose any conditions it feels are necessary to ensure public safety.

Since the tabling of the former Bill C-27 last October, provincial attorneys general have raised concerns about violent offenders who are found to be dangerous offenders, but are not receiving indeterminate sentences. This is due to a finding that they could be managed under the long term offender designation.

The long term offender sentencing option currently in the Criminal Code allows a court to sentence an individual to a regular sentence of imprisonment, but add up to 10 years of intensive community supervision to the sentence.

Based on the interpretation of the lower courts of the 2003 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Johnson, many individuals who fully meet the designation of a dangerous offender have nonetheless been given long term offender designation instead. The Crown has been unable to convince the sentencing court that the offenders could not be managed under the less severe sentence option.

The big concern is that some of these individuals may not in fact be suitable for community supervision sentences. Yet, until they commit another violent sentence, their status as a dangerous offender cannot be reviewed by a court. I should mention, and it should be obvious, until they commit another violent offence, then it is too late for the community, for innocent victims and for families.

Given the concerns expressed since former Bill C-27 was tabled, the government has been examining the scope of this problem and developing potential solutions. It is clear that a large proportion of the individuals who meet the dangerous offender criteria, but have been given a less severe sentence, have demonstrated that they simply refuse to cooperate. The majority eventually breach one or more of the conditions of their long term supervision order. This is a clear indicator that the original sentence was based on a flawed presumption that the offender was manageable. As such, there is a real need to revisit the original sentence in order to stop the reoffending right then and there before another tragedy occurs.

The tackling violent crime act addresses this problem and includes new provisions that were not included in the former bill.

First, the tackling violent crime act makes it clear that from now on if offenders meet the dangerous offender criteria, they will always be designated as a dangerous offender first, and that designation is for life. The court must then determine the appropriate sentence, either an indeterminate sentence or a determinate sentence, with or without the long term offender supervision order. Critical to this scheme is that from now on the court must impose an indeterminate sentence unless it is satisfied that the offenders can be managed under a less severe sentence.

Second, in cases where dangerous offenders are able to satisfy the court that they can be managed under the lesser sentence and are subsequently charged and convicted with a breach of a long term supervision order, they can be brought back to the court for a new sentencing hearing. At the new hearing, dangerous offenders will have to satisfy the court once again that they can still be managed under the lesser sentence. If not, the indeterminate sentence must be imposed.

The government believes that the impact of these new reforms will be significant. Because of the clarification to the sentencing provisions, fewer offenders will escape the dangerous offender designation. In addition, for the few offenders who are declared to be dangerous offenders, but given a long term offender sentence, they will know that if they do not abide by the term of their supervision orders once released, they will be returned to court for a new sentencing hearing and an indeterminate sentence will be the likely outcome.

It will not take a second sexual assault or a second violent offence to bring the offender back for a new dangerous offender sentence. This new provision would be available, for example, even if the violation were simply that the offender failed to return to his residence before curfew or consumed alcohol or drugs in violation of a long term offender supervision order.

Our government remains committed to ensuring that all Canadians live in safe and secure communities. The tackling violent crime act will protect Canadians. It is fulfilling our commitments to Canadians. The government is committed to taking action, acting on behalf of the safety of all Canadians. I urge all members to support the tackling violent crime act.

Resumption of debate on Address in Reply

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I find it interesting. The NDP supported Bill C-10, an act to establish escalator clauses for minimum mandatory penalties. The NDP supported it and agreed with escalator clauses. That is in the omnibus bill. The NDP supported Bill C-22, an act to increase the age of protection. That is in the omnibus bill. The NDP supported Bill C-32, the impaired driving act. That is in the omnibus bill. The NDP supported Bill C-35, which is in the omnibus bill--

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise and speak here today. This is my first opportunity to participate in a debate in this new session.

I will be splitting my time with the member for Nipissing—Timiskaming.

I read the throne speech with a great deal of interest. I think many people in this Chamber were waiting to hear what the government had to say. We found it quite interesting that the government dealt with justice. What is interesting is that the government says that it will immediately tackle violent crime and that it is the only party in the House that looks at getting tough on crime.

I have listened to the Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice and to his parliamentary secretary talk about how the opposition parties obstructed the Conservative criminal justice agenda in the last Parliament. I find it quite amusing but I am dismayed to think that any Canadian listening to the Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice or any of those Conservatives elected to the House of Commons and some of the ones over in the Senate would actually believe that the opposition parties tried to obstruct the criminal justice agenda of the Conservative Party.

I would like to present a few facts before this House.

The Conservative government tabled 13 justice bills in the House of Commons from its first throne speech in 2006 following the 2006 election. When the Prime Minister prorogued the House this past summer, of those 13 bills, Her Majesty's official opposition, the Liberal Party of Canada, under the leadership of the hon. member for Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, supported, unconditionally, 10 of those 13 justice bills put forward by the Conservatives. It goes even further.

On October 26, 2006, the official opposition House leader, along with the then Liberal justice critic who is the member for London West and who is now the chair of the national Liberal caucus justice committee, made a formal public offer to the Conservative government to put our votes behind the Conservative votes in order to fast track the adoption at all stages of several of the government's bills. One of those bills included the age of consent legislation.

Had the Conservative government, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice and the Conservative members of Parliament accepted the Liberal offer on October 26, 2006 to fast track Bill C-22, the age of protection would have been 16 years.

The Conservatives refused to take us up on it. Not only did they refuse to take us up on it, they allowed Bill C-22 to sit on the order paper for 130 days after they first tabled it in the House. When did they finally table their motion to move second reading debate? They tabled it on October 30, 2006, four days after the Liberals made an offer to fast track that bill. It finally put a fire under their bushel and they finally tabled a motion to move it for debate at second reading. Once the debate at second reading was finished, it took 142 days before that Conservative government moved the vote at second reading of Bill C-22.

I would like to know whether the Minister of Justice, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, or the Prime Minister of Canada have explained to Canadians why the age of consent today is still 14, when it could have been 16 as of October 26, 2006. But that is not enough. They wanted to use that bill as a hammer against the opposition parties to try and paint the opposition parties in the minds of Canadians as being soft on crime and not caring about our children, as being willing to have our children preyed upon. They continued to delay that bill, so much so that the Liberals in March 2007 offered again to fast track that bill. Did the Conservatives take us up on it? No, they did not.

We then in desperation tabled an opposition motion that would have had Bill C-22, which raised the age of consent from 14 to 16, adopted at all stages. What was the response of the Conservative government which claims that it is interested in the safety of Canadians, in the safety of our children? The Conservatives obstructed our opposition motion. They used an arcane procedure in order to deem it unreceivable. They blocked speedy passage of their own bill. It is unconscionable.

Let us look at Bill C-32, the impaired driving act. That bill was brought in originally by the member for Mount Royal when he was the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada under the previous Liberal government. We went to an election. Unfortunately, the NDP colluded with the Conservatives, defeated the Liberal government and now we have the NDP gift to Canadians, a Conservative government.

The government finally re-tabled Bill C-32. When did the Conservatives do it? Did they do it at their first opportunity after the election when Parliament came back at the beginning of February 2006? No, they only tabled it again in the House on November 21, 2006, some 10 months later. Then they let it sit on the order paper for 77 days. They did not move second reading until February 6, 2007.

That was another bill which the Liberals offered to fast track. We saw it just sitting on the order paper. Anyone who knows anything about the procedural rules of the House of Commons knows that only the government can move its legislation from one stage to another. The opposition cannot do it. If the government does not move debate at second reading, it does not happen.

When the government finally moved debate at second reading, it was debated for a very brief period in the House. All the opposition parties were in agreement to get the bill into committee quickly. The bill went into committee. It only sat in committee for 20 days, and during those 20 days there was the Easter vacation. The committee sent the bill back to the House. It spent one day in the House at report stage and third reading and that is it. That is the bill we wanted to see law.

For reverse onus, it is the same darn thing. We offered twice to fast track the bill. We tried to fast track it by way of an opposition day motion. The Conservatives blocked their own bill.

When the Conservatives appear on camera, when they hold press conferences, when they send out householders and when they target members of the opposition, in particular Liberal members, whether they be Liberals in Manitoba, in Nova Scotia or out in B.C., and say that the Liberals are soft on crime, it is nonsense.

The Conservatives blocked their own agenda, an agenda which was supported by the Liberals. If the age of consent is not 16 today, it is the fault of the Conservative government. It is the fault of every single Conservative member sitting there--

[Monte Solberg, Conservative, Minister of Human Resources and Social Development]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today and engage in the debate on the Speech from the Throne.

Today I rise wearing a number of hats. I am here today as the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development Canada. I am here as a member of Parliament for Medicine Hat. Also, when we talk about issues of crime and law and order, I think it is appropriate to mention that I am here as a husband and a father, because this is an issue that I think we all feel very acutely and personally.

It is a pleasure, though, to talk today about what was in the Speech from the Throne, first of all wearing my hat as the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development. Yesterday and in the Speech from the Throne read by the Governor General on Tuesday, the Prime Minister talked about the need for the country to finally and forever get serious about the issue of tackling crime and making our communities safer. I would argue that in order to do this an “all of government” approach is required.

I think the Prime Minister has signalled his intention to do exactly that. It was not very long ago in Winnipeg that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health talked about a national anti-drug strategy designed to steer young people away from drugs but also to ensure that those people who are addicted get the help they need.

I feel that in my portfolio we do a number of things, and I am proud of this, that are designed especially to help young people so that they do not get drawn into a life of crime, which is an easy temptation in neighbourhoods that have broken down and where families are not stable. To that end, we provide a lot of programming aimed at helping youth and in fact targeting youth who in many cases are most likely to get drawn into that kind of situation. We do that through the youth employment strategy.

We have also launched a number of new and very important initiatives. I want to touch on them briefly. We have done things like announcing in the budget new labour market agreements which allow us to work with the provinces so that we reach out to all those individuals who are not eligible for employment insurance, such as people who have been on social assistance, and people who, for whatever reason, have not been able to get into the workforce and need a helping hand from the government. This is a very significant initiative of $3 billion over the next six years. We believe this is an important way to reach out to people who left school early, for instance, and who have struggled to find work, and to give them the helping hand they need to get employment and avoid that life.

We have also announced an apprenticeship incentive grant, which we think will help 100,000 people a year get into the trades. We have doubled the size of the aboriginal skills employment program, which benefits aboriginals around the country, but certainly in the north. I point out that unfortunately we have very high levels of crime on reserve in many parts of the country and certainly north of 60. We have very high levels of violent crime, levels at nine times the national average, for instance, in places like Nunavut.

We believe these initiatives are extraordinarily important in terms of preventing crime and reaching out to people who are vulnerable and ultimately giving them some hope. As the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, I note that these are some of the new initiatives we have undertaken.

I want to highlight one other initiative that I think is important. I see a member of the opposition across the way with whom I discussed this the other day. This initiative is the homelessness partnering strategy, which is an initiative that we put in place a number of months ago. It is designed to work at a community level, whereby we have communities leading the charge in identifying how we can best help people who find themselves homeless, knowing that the best way to start to give them the help they need is to put a roof over their heads first and, even before that, to prevent homelessness.

We think this can best be done at the community level. This new initiative brings together the federal, provincial and municipal governments and certainly the not for profit organizations that on the ground are the real experts. I am proud of that initiative. I am looking forward to working with local groups to achieve some of the ends I have just discussed.

If I may, I will now change hats and, as a member of Parliament from the riding of Medicine Hat, talk about an issue that is vitally important to Canadians. I come from a rural riding not unlike those of many members in the House. It is a riding chiefly peopled by a lot of middle class Canadians who enjoy relative prosperity, but of course there is a range of incomes in the riding. Nevertheless, despite the fact that these people seem to have a pretty good situation in general, when I tour the riding and go to town hall meetings, as I did this fall, many people raise the issue of crime. They are deeply concerned about crime.

I always argue that I do not think there is a people in the world fairer than Canadians; they are fair to a fault. They believe in fairness. By extension, I believe they also feel very strongly that there must be justice in the country. I think very often they believe that we do not have a very just justice system in Canada today. I want to talk about that for a moment.

As I mentioned, I think we live in a pretty good part of the world, but when one talks to people, whether they are young people who very often themselves are the victims of youth crime, or older people who very often are afraid of the chaos they sometimes find on the streets of their communities in the form of property crime or very aggressive panhandling, or people who are worried about the rapid rise in drug use and ultimately the crime that springs from that, they are concerned.

When people see stories like the one we saw recently regarding a young constable murdered in Hay River, or when they see some of the terrible gun violence on the streets of Toronto at Jane and Finch, they are extraordinarily concerned. They wonder why we do not do more to provide police officers and crown prosecutors with the tools they need in order to bring this problem under control.

I would be extraordinarily remiss if I did not point out that as an opposition member of Parliament I certainly spoke on these issues a number of times over the years, but there are others in this place who have done far more than I to draw attention to this. I think about a couple of members of Parliament on our side who have announced that they will soon be leaving this place. They have announced their retirements. I think of my friend from Calgary Northeast, who chairs the justice committee, and my friend, the member of Parliament for Wild Rose. They both have spoken eloquently in this place for years about the need to provide precisely those tools to crown prosecutors, the RCMP and local police forces so they can do their jobs.

Our government has made this a priority since the time we came to power. We have brought forward a number of measures to attempt to address some of the issues raised by my constituents. In fact we have introduced in this place something like 13 different pieces of legislation dealing with the issues of criminal justice. The sad fact, though, is that unfortunately at almost every turn these initiatives have been thwarted by the opposition.

I have to say that I am simply required by honesty to point out that it is not the people one might suspect who are thwarting a lot these initiatives. Sometimes we have run into problems with the Bloc and the NDP in trying to get these things through, but I can say that overwhelmingly it is the Liberals who are standing in the way of delivering measures that will make Canadians safer. Unfortunately, they do this in one of the most sneaky and underhanded ways possible.

On the one hand, they stand up in this place and talk about the need to address these problems. Then, when the cameras are off, they go into committee, gut individual pieces of legislation and try to send them, hollow, back to this place. If these pieces of legislation do pass, they go to the Senate where the Liberals sit on them to the point where of course ultimately those bills do not go forward.

As a result, we are in a new Parliament. Now we are asking for the authority of this place to go ahead and pursue some of this legislation aggressively so we can do exactly what we told Canadians we would do, which is to bring in legislation and provide tools to the police and crown prosecutors so we can make our streets safe again.

There is not a member of Parliament in this place who is not touched by this every day. I get very frustrated in regard to this issue, because I do not think there is any more important role we have than that of ensuring the protection of the citizens of our country.

The throne speech speaks about this country's commitment to peace, order and good government. I can tell the House that I am never more proud as a member of Parliament than when we do something to protect the most vulnerable in this country. That is exactly what we will be doing if we start to address some of the issues laid out in the Speech from the Throne.

I could best do that by talking a little about some of the pieces of legislation we brought forward in the past that were stymied by the opposition, in particular by the Liberals, and then talk about the need to bring them forward again in a new bill, in the tackling violent crime initiative the Prime Minister spoke of yesterday.

One of the most important pieces of legislation we offered in the last Parliament was Bill C-10. Bill C-10 would provide a mandatory minimum sentence, a mandatory minimum penalty, for firearms offences. In other words, that means there would be a minimum amount of time that someone would have to serve if found guilty of committing a crime with a firearm. It would mean that judges would no longer have the latitude of allowing someone to walk away without serving any time at all. I think that is common sense to the great majority of Canadians.

Sadly, that was never observed in many, many cases. The result is that people ultimately completely lose confidence in the justice system in this country. They start to throw up their hands and say, “What is the point?” After a while, people even quit reporting crimes.

Our Bill C-10 was designed to address some of those concerns. That bill was stalled in committee for 252 days. The bill died after a total of 414 calendar days before Parliament. In other words, we brought that bill forward, the public was with us, and the opposition spoke in favour of these types of initiatives during the election campaign, but when the rubber met the road, when members of the opposition had a chance to do something to protect Canadians, they stood in front of us and blocked our way.

They should be ashamed of that, because there is not a member across the way who does not have people coming into his or her office every week and complaining about the crime they read about, hear about or experience. They want something done, but it never happens because members of the opposition stand in the way. They stood in the way of it when they were in government for 13 years. Now it is time to start to deal with it.

Another bill we brought forward was the reverse onus on bail for firearms offences, Bill C-35. It was stalled in committee for 64 days. The bill died after a total of 211 days before Parliament.

What does this mean? What does the bill do? The bill ensures that persons accused of a gun crime have to show why they should not be kept in jail while awaiting trial. That would apply to people who are accused of using a firearm to commit certain offences, including attempted murder or discharging a firearm with a criminal intent, sexual assault with a weapon, aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, hostage taking, robbery, and extortion.

When those people are accused of those crimes, we are simply asking that they demonstrate why they should be allowed bail. The onus would be reversed. If we think about what is at stake, I do not think that is too much to ask. What is at stake is the safety of ordinary men, women and children in this country who want nothing more than to go about their lives and pursue whatever it is that pleases them.

However, again we were stymied in our attempt to bring forward this common sense legislation that was supported by the Premier of Ontario and the mayor of Toronto, jurisdictions where all too often they see the results of laws that do not adequately address the problems of crime.

Another bill that we are anxious to bring forward is Bill C-27, which deals with the issue of dangerous offenders. This bill was stalled in committee for 105 days and it died after a total of 248 days before Parliament. The bill would create a presumption of dangerousness, so that when an individual has been convicted three or more times of violent sexual crimes, it would be up to that person to prove that he should not be regarded as a dangerous offender.

I honestly do not understand why the opposition would stand in the way of what is, in my mind, very common sense legislation. If we are committed to the ideal of peace, order and good government, we must back it up with legislation and resources. I would argue that the opposition has failed us on that count, irrespective of what it says during election campaigns when it is very popular to appear to be law and order parties.

Another bill that we brought forward dealt with the age of consent, the age of protection, which was tabled in Parliament on June 22, 2006. It was endorsed by the Kids' Internet Safety Alliance and the Canadian Crime Victim Foundation. It was stalled in committee for 175 days and died after a total of 365 days before Parliament. It sought to raise the age of consent from 14 to 16, which to me is such an obvious way to protect the most vulnerable people in our society, children, but again the opposition finds all kinds of odd and strange justifications for not pursuing this.

Where is the conviction that we have an obligation as legislators to protect vulnerable people in this society? This was, I would argue, a common sense initiative that again was thwarted by the opposition.

Finally, I want to talk about Bill C-32, drug impaired driving. It was introduced into the House on November 21, 2006 and referred to the justice committee in February 2007. Despite being endorsed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Bill C-32 died after 149 days in committee and the bill died after a total of 213 days before Parliament. The bill would have given the police the tools they need to better detect and investigate drug and alcohol impaired driving and penalties for impaired driving would have been increased. Persons suspected of being impaired by a drug would be required to submit to a roadside sobriety test and, if they failed, to provide a blood or urine sample to confirm whether they had consumed a drug.

I again would remind members how often we read in the newspapers, see on TV and have people come into our offices to talk about the terrible effects of the scourge of drug and alcohol impaired driving. However, when the opposition had an opportunity to help us deal with this and make Canadians safer, it failed us at every turn.

Today I am very proud to speak in favour of the initiatives outlined in the Speech from the Throne and to speak in favour of the justice minister, the public safety minister and the Prime Minister for their unwavering stance in favour of giving police and crown prosecutors more tools. I really do believe it is our duty and our obligation as legislators to ensure we do everything in our power to protect the most vulnerable people in our society.

Justice and Human Rights

[Art Hanger, Conservative, Calgary Northeast, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 17th report of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

In accordance with the order of reference of Tuesday, February 6, 2007, the committee has considered Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, and as agreed on Tuesday, June 19, 2007, to report it with amendments.

I would like to commend the members of the committee. We sat very late yesterday to conclude this particular debate on Bill C-32 and were successful in bringing it to the House today.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Just for clarification, Mr. Ménard says this is consequential to clause 2. But clause 2 was defeated. Is this consequential to the fact that clause 2 is no longer part of Bill C-32?

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

I'd like to call the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to order.

I want to thank my colleagues as well as the witnesses for appearing on such short notice to complete our deliberation on clause-by-clause in Bill C-32. It's very much appreciated.

This morning we left off with a completion of our discussion on clause 8. Mr. Bagnell was interrupted because of the time, and I'll just turn to him for a minute or two. I understand he wants to complete his statement.

Justice

[Gary Goodyear, Conservative, Cambridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians do not want to wait any longer for mandatory sentences for gun crimes or for an increase in the age of protection for young people. They waited long enough while the opposition stalled and delayed at committee.

In fact, just this morning the member for Yukon filibustered a discussion on Bill C-32 which would increase minimum penalties for alcohol and drug impaired drivers.

Bill C-22, increasing the age of protection from 14 to 16 years, was held up at committee.

Bill C-18, the DNA identification bill, was held up at committee.

Bill C-10, the bill for mandatory sentences for gun crimes, was also held up at committee by opposition members who are so out of touch with Canadians and still prefer to coddle criminals.

The good news is these three bills have finally passed the House. The bad news is that they are down the hall at the Senate.

Will the Liberal interim leader tell his unelected senators who are preoccupied with protecting their terms to protect Canadians and pass these bills?

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Thank you.

Given that one of the witnesses here, Mr. Yost, has said that LIB-8--which would amend clause 8 by adding on after line 6 on page 13, the text that one finds on page 18 of the amendments that have been distributed--if I understood him correctly, is not really a problem. There's a minor contradiction. He said there might be a minor contradiction, but that in fact the substance of it is not a problem with Bill C-32, does not change the objective substantially of Bill C-32.

I believe this is in fact an amendment that should be supported by the members of this committee. I think it brings a little more clarity to clause 8, and as he said--I'm not putting words in his mouth, he said it himself--it does not change clause 8. It brings a little bit more clarity. It repeats information that's there, and there's one little technical thing. Now, the government may wish to propose a subamendment for the one little technical thing that Mr. Yost mentioned, but I'm amazed that the government is automatically discounting out of hand this particular amendment that's being proposed.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

You're probably aware that I have a motion to amend, LIB-8, which is still there, which also deals with clause 8 of Bill C-32.

My question on LIB-8 is whether LIB-8 would come into contradiction should the government amendment G-4 carry. Would that create a contradiction?

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

So Bill C-32 simply increases the existing minimum mandatories?

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Liberal amendment 1 would also amend clause 3, which we just amended with government amendment 2.

This would amend in order to ensure that when the drug recognition expert is carrying out the second phase of evaluation of someone's sobriety, determining whether or not the individual is impaired, in particular by drugs, a video recording of said evaluation would take place. The government in Bill C-32 already states, under subclause 3(3), proposed subsection 254(2.1), that on the road where the standardized roadside sobriety test takes place:

a peace officer may make a video recording of a performance of the physical coordination tests referred to in paragraph (2)(a).

My amendment would require, at the police station when they're undergoing the second phase of the evaluation, that the evaluation be recorded by video. And given that all or most police stations are already equipped with video equipment for interrogations, etc., it would certainly not be a hardship.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

The only reason I raise this is that in the whole discussion about the government's amendment in Bill C-32 and now the amendment 2 they're proposing, people were talking about section 256 as being the remedy and an argument for not supporting the government's amendment to clause 3. I'm pointing out that section 256 is not an argument for not supporting the government's amendment of clause 3.

That's all. Thank you.

[Hal Pruden]

As it's currently drafted in Bill C-32, the belief is that at the time they were driving they had alcohol in the body, whereas in the amendment, the officer suspects that they now have alcohol in the body and also must have the suspicion that they were driving within the previous three hours. It's different.

[Hal Pruden]

Under both versions, the original Bill C-32 and the amendment, the officer must suspect alcohol in the body. The officer, at this screening level, does not have to have reasonable belief that there was impairment. It's strictly on a suspicion of presence of alcohol. It's an extremely low threshold already.

As Bill C-32 was first drafted, it says the officer had to have the suspicion...while the person was operating the motor vehicle. The amendment will give them more time. They will be able to look back in time if the person has been taken off to hospital. That's what this is meant to accomplish.

Under the existing Criminal Code, if they've gone off to a hospital and the officer doesn't have the reasonable and probable grounds to believe they've committed the offence, they can't use that lower threshold to get a screening-level demand. That is what this is attempting to accomplish.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

I have a bit of a problem with this amendment. It seems to me that you can already do what you want and that this would only add options for abuse.

My understanding of the way you have drafted Bill C-32--and I'm not sure why you'd bring an amendment later--is that if the police suspect a person has been impaired driving, they can run them through the tests. The amendment says they just have to suspect that they have had alcohol and that they drove a car. There's a good likelihood in modern society that anyone has driven a car within the last three hours. He doesn't have to suspect he was driving the car while impaired, which was your original draft; he just has to suspect he was driving, which could force almost anyone into these tests once they've had alcohol. That doesn't seem to make sense. It seems to me that could be open for abuse. The way you have it written in the first bill, the police officer can subject a person to the test if they think they were impaired driving.

As well, I'm not sure why you added this after you drafted the bill.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

I'm going to interrupt you, because the only thing I want to assure myself of is that the “reasonable grounds”--the very first line in Bill C-32, clause 3, line 19--remains, and that you're changing as of line 20, so that it would still read “reasonable grounds to suspect”.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Under Bill C-32, as it is now presented, it reads:

If a peace officer has reasonable grounds to suspect that a person has in the preceding three hours had alcohol or a drug in their body

With the amendment you're bringing, would it still be that “a peace officer has reasonable grounds to suspect that a person has alcohol or a drug in their body”?

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

I call the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to order. The committee, of course, will be proceeding through a clause-by-clause review of Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

The committee has before it, from the Department of Justice, Mr. Hal Pruden, counsel, criminal law policy section; and Mr. Greg Yost, counsel, criminal law policy section.

We may as well get right into the clause-by-clause review. I know that some amendments arrived late. I trust that everyone has a copy.

Mr. Bagnell has a point of order or a comment to make.

Business of the House

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, I will be happy to address that in the affirmative in a moment but there is more that we should know about in terms of the business we are doing.

We will continue today with Bill C-42, the quarantine act, Bill C-58, the railway transportation bill and Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act (non-registration of firearms that are neither prohibited nor restricted).

Tonight we have the emergency debate pursuant to Standing Order 52 that the Speaker has determined should proceed.

On Friday we will call Bill C-33, the income tax bill and Bill C-6, the aeronautics bill.

Next week is got the job done week when the House has completed the nation's business for this spring's session. During the got the job done week we will continue and hopefully complete the business from this week, as well as some new legislation and legislation that will be out of committee or the Senate.

The list of bills that are currently on the order paper, in addition to those I have identified for this week that I would like to see completed by the House before the summer recess are: Senate amendments to Bill C-31, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and the Public Service Employment Act.

There are also the following bills: Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts; Bill C-44, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and Bill C-53, An Act to implement the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID Convention).

Another bill includes Bill C-54, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act (accountability with respect to loans).

By the end of next week, Canadians expect that the Senate will have completed its consideration of budget Bill C-52 without any amendments so that they can relax for the summer with the knowledge that $4.3 billion in the 2006-07 year end measures will be in play.

If there are amendments, we will have to be here in the House to respond and protect measures that might otherwise be lost, such as a $1.5 billion for the Canada ecotrust for clean air and climate change; $600 million for patient wait times guarantees; $400 million for the Canada infoway; $100 million for the CANARIE project to maintain the research broadband network linking Canadian universities and research hospitals; $200 million for protection of endangered spaces; and much more.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Chairman, I'm not opposed to the motion. I would like to understand it more. Is our colleague questioning the role of the government's priorities committee, the legislation committee, the Privy Council or, like all of us no doubt, the composition of Cabinet? I would like to know which decision-making centre he's attacking more.

Second, I believe I understood that, on our return in September, we will still have to discuss Bill C-27. We still have to debate five bills, if my count is correct. I'm not opposed to this motion, if we can do the work in two or three meetings. I'm never very much in favour of the idea of adding meetings because, obviously, there's a limit to what we can productively do in committee. Perhaps we'll have completed the consideration of Bill C-32. At least that will be done. I wouldn't be surprised if the government continued its strategy of striking other legislative committees.

Perhaps the mover could tell us what decision-making centre he's attacking. If, in his mind, that can be done in one or two meetings, I'm not opposed to the motion.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Would Bill C-32 give you the tools you need to be able to take that side of this issue to the next level, in terms of being able to feel more comfortable and also to feel you have the tools within a piece of legislation that allow you to proceed on a more regular basis with individuals you believe are impaired based on their intake of a drug?

[Cpl Evan Graham]

No, I don't. I think Bill C-32 will make the roads safer for the vast majority of people.

If it goes to court, will it be deemed to be a violation of their rights? Probably, but one that I hope would be acceptable, just the same as a breath test is. Because really all we're doing with the drug evaluation is paralleling the evidence that we gain through a breath test, the difference being that instead of using an instrument to obtain a breath sample for the blood alcohol concentration, we're using a trained police officer to gain the evidence of drug impairment.

[Myron Thompson, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

—a little later getting there than that, but they rushed this guy off to the hospital. Although his injuries were not fatal, he was injured, and they wanted to get him to the hospital.

In my office I have a number of people who have responded to me about their fear of Bill C-32 being so intrusive on the rights of individuals. Do you feel this bill is intrusive?

[Myron Thompson, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thanks for being here.

I have an age-old problem in regard to all of this thing. I'll give you a true story, and I'd like you to respond to how it's different now and how Bill C-32 would make a difference to this particular scenario.

Caroline Bergeson was sitting on a two-lane highway, signalling to turn left. She had her signal lights on; unfortunately, she also had her wheels turned to go left. She was rear-ended by another vehicle, which knocked her in front of a gravel truck, which...I don't have to tell you the outcome of that collision.

The volunteer fire department, which is in a small rural community where this happened, was on the scene, waiting for the ambulances to appear. The driver of the second vehicle that hit Caroline was slightly injured, and they, the volunteer fire department rescue truck, drove him into the closest hospital.

A couple or three days later, the parents of Caroline were informed that after testing and checking of the body, there was no impairment whatsoever, no drugs, no alcohol in Caroline, so that would give them some peace of mind that she didn't have them. That wasn't a problem in terms of what had happened. The parents asked, “What about the driver of the second vehicle?” Testing was never done.

Today, would testing be automatic? Would testing be required of the second driver?

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

I'd like to call the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to order. It is Thursday, June 14, 2007.

The committee is continuing its examination of Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

Appearing before the committee as a witness is Corporal Evan Graham, national coordinator, drug evaluation and classification program, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Thank you for attending again, sir.

From the Canadian Society of Forensic Science, we have Ms. Marthe Dalpé-Scott, co-chair of drugs and driving committee. I understand you are replacing Ms. Treacy.

[Brian Hodgson]

Thank you.

First of all, yes, the alcohol test committee is supportive of Bill C-32. Our only concern is that specific change in regard to the interval between successive breath tests.

I want to make it clear that my colleague Louise and I are only discussing the aspect of alcohol detection, which is a much simpler process than it is for other types of drugs. The technology that exists, has existed, and will exist is well tuned and adapted to measuring alcohol either at the roadside for screening purposes by use of a screening device or to confirm the blood alcohol concentration by means of an approved instrument. It's a very straightforward process. It's one that has to have strict protocols.

On testing drugs, I'm going to have to leave that to my colleague Ms. Treacy in terms of the testing at the roadside, because it's a completely different aspect.

If my colleague Louise has anything to add, perhaps she'd like to comment.

[Mitchell MacLeod]

No, that's not the way the criminal justice section sees it. Indeed, in my deep contemplation of moments ago, I was taking a couple of notes. What Ms. Treacy had spoken about was some testing that, let's say, is suggestive of a central nervous system stimulant, and then there's corroborative testing of the urine, and in that testing of the urine it shows there's cocaine in the urine. I think the conclusion the court is going to be asked to draw, or that people are going to be asked to draw, is that the detection of the cocaine in the urine is somehow corroborative that a central nervous system stimulant, and specifically cocaine, was impairing that person's ability to drive a motor vehicle.

We see that type of logic generating an unbelievable amount of litigation. It would be our view that you cannot necessarily draw the conclusion that the presence of cocaine in the urine is corroborative of either the fact that the person was under the influence of cocaine as the central nervous stimulant—it might have been a different central nervous system stimulant—or indeed that a central nervous system stimulant was the precursor to the symptoms that the drug recognition expert found. I think you're going to have court challenges at every step of that process, arguing about what symptoms are indicative of what drugs, about what the differential diagnosis is. If a person is exhibiting symptoms A, B, and C, yes, it could be a central nervous system stimulant. What else could it be?

Those aspects of it, in the view of the criminal justice section, are just part of what we see as a set of circumstances in Bill C-32 that are going to generate an unbelievable amount of litigation, and attendant costs, both in terms of resources and in terms of the time the cases are tied up in the system.

[Mitchell MacLeod, Executive Member, National Criminal Justice Section, Canadian Bar Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Having a first name that's a common last name often results in my being referred to as Mr. Mitchell. For the record, I'll say that actually MacLeod is my last name.

I would echo Ms. Thomson's comments with regard to both appreciating the opportunity to share our perspective here today with this committee on this very important issue, as well as indicating that our written submission, which has been provided to you, does encompass a broad range of perspectives from lawyers who not only occupy different roles in terms of being either crown attorneys or defence counsel but also encompass practitioners from across the country who operate in urban and rural environments and in public and private practices.

I sit as a provincial branch chair on the executive of our criminal justice section, and I can well attest to the lively debate and discussion that goes on amongst our group in coming to conclusions and recommendations that we present in our written submission to you. Indeed, I can say personally that in the ten-plus years I've had a substantial criminal law practice, I have operated and currently operate as both a defence lawyer and as a prosecutor. On some occasions I have stood on both sides of the courtroom on the same day.

I'd like to preface our main commentary by reiterating the common ground that I believe everyone in this room shares, and that is that the best interests of our society and of our citizens are served in reducing the incidence of impaired driving.

No numbers or statistics that we may see bandied about on this important issue will do really any justice to the value of a human life that might be saved if you, as a committee or our government, are successful in employing legislative changes or changes in policy that reduce the incidence, the frequency, of impaired driving on our highways.

We may represent a group of lawyers from across Canada, but we're all citizens, we're all members of the community, and no one would stand in the way of something as obviously beneficial to our society as a reduction in the amount of impaired driving and the tragedies that can often result from it.

However, and as you'll see from our submissions, the measures we seek to employ to accomplish that goal must not just seem to be things that would reduce impaired driving or look like they might do so; they should and must demonstrably do so. These measures should and must be rationally and factually connected to the results we desire. They should and must be measures that respect and balance the fundamental rights of all citizens that are enshrined in our charter. They must not confuse a perhaps understandable desire for retribution or for an increase in conviction rates. It must not confuse those concepts with a reduction in impaired driving rates.

The position specifically is outlined in our fairly substantial written materials, and I don't propose to utilize our remaining time in going through each of those in any particular detail. I would like to highlight, though, a few of our points, and perhaps points that haven't been touched on by other witnesses here this morning.

In relation to an overall perspective, it's our position that each of the proposed amendments or sections in Bill C-32 invite a substantial amount of charter scrutiny, and as a result invite substantial and perhaps in some instances even a paralyzing amount of litigation. To anyone who might suggest that the criminal justice section's concerns about these proposals show perhaps a defence counsel bias, I can certainly say that in its current form these amendments are a defence lawyer's dream, at least from a trial volume perspective.

As a lawyer whose practice encompasses the defence of impaired driving cases, I can certainly say from a purely professional and self-interested perspective that I can see in these proposals many months, if not years, of substantial litigation in the pages of Bill C-32 as it currently exists. However, the public interest prevails in the Canadian Bar Association's perspective on these issues, and the criminal justice section perspective in particular. Thus, in our conclusion, we state that every effort should be made to try to implement measures that might reduce the incidence of impaired driving to avoid encouraging or causing a torrent of litigation and the negative impact that would have on the administration of justice generally through the vastly increased demands that litigation would place on our criminal courts across the country.

The increased demands tie up resources, funds, and time that can be devoted, in our view, to measures that more materially deter impaired drivers. Those are measures that keep them off the roads in the first place. Those are the measures that will ultimately most directly save lives. Those measures are accomplished through enforcement. It is our view that the perceived risk of getting caught trumps any perceived risk or reward in terms of what might happen after someone is caught. It is that perceived risk of detection, of getting caught, that ultimately will best serve the interest of reducing the frequency of impaired driving in this country.

On the issue of drug recognition experts, the use of roadside testing and later testing, and as well on the issue of eliminating or curtailing evidence to the contrary defences, I'll touch on just one part of our submission in that regard. In our view, those items should be non-starters, essentially without mandatory audiovisual recording of the events that are related to those measures. An audiovisual recording should be a condition precedent to any contemplated enshrinement of these provisions in the Criminal Code.

The ability to record these things is already widely distributed. In our view, it's not so much a technological challenge as it is a commitment to devote appropriate resources to setting up frameworks for audiovisual recording of the activities of roadside testing, drug recognition experts involved at later testing, and items related to eliminating or curtailing evidence of the contrary defences. A commitment to complete audiovisual recording of those items should be mandatory, in our view.

By their very nature, the activities of drug recognition experts, regardless of how well trained they are, involve significant subjectivity, and they cry out, in our view, for audiovisual recording. In our view, the availability of an audiovisual record of the activity of drug recognition experts, roadside testing, and later testing would significantly deter many from perhaps rolling the dice and taking their chances at trial. I can say from personal experience with my own clients that there's nothing like seeing themselves on the big screen to bring home the reality of the situation to a client.

In our view, the availability of an audiovisual record might help reduce the anticipated deluge of litigation on these subjective drug recognition experts' testing. Indeed, if the types of testing that these drug recognition experts undertake are as accurate and legitimized through training to the extent that we have heard from certain witnesses, then certainly an audiovisual record of the process would only serve to confirm that fact and offer assurances to the public and to the profession in that regard.

With regard to audiovisual recording and the elimination or curtailing of evidence to the contrary defences—the so-called two-beer or bolus drinking defences—the provisions in Bill C-32 shift the onus to accused persons to produce evidence that tends to show that the instrument or machine, or the operator of that instrument or machine, is in error. The provisions additionally limit greatly what types of evidence an accused person can adduce in support of the position that the machine is wrong or in error or that the operator is incorrect or in error. This, in our view, makes the defence in that situation virtually moot absent the availability of an independent audiovisual record of the process. An accused person is hardly going to be in a position many weeks or months after the fact to call any evidence that tends to call into question either the operation of the machine or the activities of the operator, unless there is an independent record of what the machine did and how the operator operated it. In our respectful view, that requires more than just a checklist that the operator may have filled out or checked off and more than just a slip of paper that the machine may generate in its own self-testing mode that says, “I've tested myself, and I'm working fine, thank you very much”.

There is widespread availability of the technology at police stations and detachments to do this. Where that capability doesn't exist, it's our view that there should be a commitment to make it available. In order for there to be any meaningful defence available to an accused person to call evidence that tends to show these things, we have to allow for an after-the-fact, independent appraisal of what occurred at the station with the operator and with the instrument or machine.

Last, I'd like to touch briefly on the portion of our submission on the proposed new offences that involve offences of, in the vernacular, “over 80”, causing death or bodily harm or refusal when an accused person knows or ought to have known that he or she had caused an accident that resulted in severe bodily harm or death.

We see those provisions as significantly problematic. It's the view of the criminal justice section that to equate the maximum penalties—life in prison for offences that involve actual proof of impaired driving versus, simply, evidence that the person has a reading of over 80 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood or has refused to provide a sample—with moral blameworthiness in those circumstances is problematic and certainly invites significant charter challenge. We would suggest that it is not the reading of one's blood alcohol that “causes” death or bodily harm or causes the accident that causes death or bodily harm; it's the impaired ability to operate the motor vehicle that is the causal factor in those circumstances. And as we've pointed out in our submission, the virtually universal recognition that impairment of one's ability to drive occurs at readings of 100 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood really negates the necessity or efficacy that one might suggest would be achieved by adding an offence of over 80—again I put it in quotation marks—“causing” death or bodily harm.

Even more problematic, in our view, is the addition of an offence of refusal to provide a sample wherein death or bodily harm is involved. As pointed out in our paper, any time you import an objective test in those circumstances, which requires proof that the person knew or ought to have known that death or bodily harm resulted, that is problematic in the extreme. At the time, a person might refuse to provide a sample wherein death or bodily harm has resulted. That's obviously a time when a serious accident has taken place and persons who are asked for a sample may be injured or suffering from shock. That obviously may foreseeably impact on what they know or ought to have known in the circumstances, and it raises significant problems of proof.

Indeed, looking at it a little further, whether a person at the time they're asked to provide a sample, which obviously is in a time period that is close in time to when this accident would have taken place...there's a fair question to be asked whether they're even in a position to assess whether their operation of a motor vehicle “caused” an accident as opposed to simply that they were involved in an accident. Those are two different situations, two different sets of criteria involved.

I thank you again for the opportunity to present a few of the aspects that are raised in our written submission. As you know, our written submission goes into further technical detail regarding case law and other aspects of the legislation that the criminal justice section finds problematic.

It is certainly a worthy societal goal. There's nothing in our submission, nor in my presentation here today, in which we wish to suggest that a reduction of the incidence of impaired driving is not a worthy endeavour. By the same token, we would suggest that these provisions overall do not provide a rationally connected set of circumstances in which the ultimate goal—a reduction in the amount of impaired driving on our highways—can reasonably be expected to be achieved.

I'll end my comments there and look forward to any questions you may have.

[Tamra Thomson]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members.

The Canadian Bar Association appreciates the opportunity to speak to you today on Bill C-32. We're a national association of 37,000 lawyers across Canada. Our mandate includes improvement of the law and improvement in the administration of justice. It's in that optic that we have evaluated Bill C-32.

Our written submission represents that analysis of the bill. It was prepared by our criminal justice section. I think our criminal justice section is unique in Canada, in that its members comprise both defence counsel and crown counsel, so they bring that balance of views to their analysis of the bill.

I'm going to ask Mr. Mitchell, who is a member of the executive of the section, to present some of the highlights of the analysis of the bill.

[Dr. Douglas Beirness, Manager, Research and Policy, Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse]

Mr. Chairman, committee members, I am the manager of research and policy at the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, also referred to as CCSA. I'm a behavioural scientist, and over the past 24 years my research has focused almost exclusively on impaired driving issues. With me today is Monsieur Jacques LeCavalier, former CEO of CCSA and a current associate and senior advisor. We appreciate the opportunity to meet with you today to share our views on the issue of drugs and driving in Canada as you consider Bill C-32.

CCSA is Canada's national non-governmental organization established in 1988 by an act of Parliament to provide national leadership and evidence-informed analysis and advice on substance use and abuse issues in Canada. Accordingly, the issue of drugs and driving is of great interest to our organization, and we believe we're well positioned to contribute meaningfully to the discussion.

My colleagues and I at CCSA believe impaired driving is an area of serious concern for Canada. We've addressed the issue in a number of publications, copies of which have been provided to the clerk. We've also agreed to work with the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators and Transport Canada to facilitate the goals and objectives of the strategy to reduce impaired driving. Collectively, our work reflects our level of interest and expertise in the area of drugs and driving.

In general, we at CCSA support the overall purpose and intent of the proposed legislation, particularly the requirement for drivers who are suspected of driving while impaired by drugs and/or alcohol to submit to physical coordination tests, such as the standardized field sobriety test, to submit to an evaluation of drug influence conducted by an officer trained in these techniques, such as the drug evaluation and classification program, also known as the DRE program, and to provide a bodily fluid sample for analysis. These provisions help to create a process comparable to that currently used for alcohol-impaired driving. However, there are a number of important considerations regarding Bill C-32 that we would like to bring to the committee's attention.

Our work on the issue illustrates the extent of the known risks posed by the impairing effects of drugs in traffic. At the same time, our work illustrates that relative to the knowledge about alcohol and driving, the knowledge base about drugs and driving is quite limited. To a large extent, this is because drugs and driving is a far more complex issue than alcohol. These complexities have hindered progress in the field, rendering tenuous any attempt at unequivocal statements about the magnitude of the problem of drugs and driving. As such, there's a dire need for credible scientific research to shed light on the true nature and magnitude of the problem of drugs and driving in Canada.

A difficulty that has persistently plagued research in this field is the detection and measurement of impairing substances in drivers. Whereas the presence and quantity of alcohol can be easily and reliably determined through breath analysis, no valid and consistently reliable comparable device currently exists to test drivers for other substances. Technological innovations using oral fluid samples hold promise for a device that will reliably detect the presence of certain substances, but practical devices may be many years away. Moreover, unlike alcohol where agreed upon levels of blood alcohol content consistent with impairment exist, such levels have never been established for other substances.

The alcohol crash relative risk curve, presented in a classic study by Professor Borkenstein back in the early 1960s, has yet to be established for other drugs. Hence, it's critical that tests to determine the extent of driver impairment accompany the collection and testing of bodily fluids for the presence of psychoactive substances.

My colleagues and I at CCSA have been working with the RCMP on an evaluation of the implementation of the DRE program here in Canada. Both Monsieur LeCavalier and I have taken the DRE course and we are very familiar with how this program operates.

You have previously heard from other witnesses, including Corporal Graham of the RCMP, that the DRE program is a systematic and standardized protocol to assess suspected impaired drivers for signs and symptoms associated with impairment by psychoactive substances. As part of our project we've had the opportunity to review the scientific evidence on the accuracy of the DRE program and have concluded that the ability of trained officers to identify the drug category responsible for the observed signs and symptoms in suspected impaired drivers is very good indeed, with measures of accuracy typically exceeding 85%. False negatives were not uncommon, but false positives were relatively rare.

A paper reporting the results of our study has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal, Traffic Injury Prevention. A copy has been provided to the clerk.

We've also examined drug evaluations of suspected drug-impaired drivers, conducted by Canadian officers trained in the DRE protocol in Canada. The findings demonstrated that the judgment of the evaluating officer concerning the category of drug responsible for the observed impairment matched the drug category in the toxicology analysis in 98% of cases. Again, a draft copy has been provided to the clerk.

In an ongoing study, we're investigating the reliability of the DRE protocol; that is the degree to which different officers are able to agree on the drug category involved for a given individual. To do this study we provided a randomly selected group of certified DREs with evaluation test results from 23 actual cases. The information provided included only the results of the test performed during the original DRE evaluation. Missing were the report of the arresting officer about driving impairment, the evaluating officer's narrative during the evaluation, and any admissions of drug use by the suspect. Using this limited set of information, our preliminary analysis showed that DREs were able to agree on the drug category involved approximately 75% of the time. Given that our experts were not able to observe the suspect first-hand, and only limited information was provided, we consider the results to be very good. In addition to demonstrating the reliability of the evaluations, the findings attest to the overall validity of the objective data collected as part of a DRE evaluation.

As positive as your research findings are, it is also evident that the DRE protocol is not perfect. The data indicate that the accuracy of the DRE procedure varies according to the class of drug. Some drug types are simply more difficult to detect than others. The use of more than one drug and the use of alcohol in combination with other substances can mask some symptoms and exacerbate others, leading to a mis-specification of drug category. In such cases, there is no question that the suspect is impaired. It's merely a question as to which class of substance is responsible for the observed impairment. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the DRE protocol is the best procedure available to assess drug-induced impairment. Further research and evaluation is clearly necessary to better understand the role of drugs and road safety and how best to identify and deal with those who engage in this behaviour.

The DRE protocol is an evolving process. Further research and development of the DRE protocol will ultimately lead to improvements in the extent to which these procedures can be used to detect some drug classes. Our own research continues, and we're currently using existing evaluations to identify sets of key variables in the evaluation to help officers identify specific drug categories.

We also believe there's a necessity to focus on the issue of impairment, and it's fundamental to the overall intent and purpose of the legislation. The mere presence of a drug or a drug metabolite is not sufficient to demonstrate the driver's ability was impaired. The proposed legislation outlines a process whereby the investigating officer must establish reasonable and probable grounds of impairment of the ability to operate a vehicle safely before making a demand for a bodily fluid sample. This process eliminates fears raised through the media about the possibility of criminal impairment charges being laid as a result of a positive drug test that may not be linked to actual or recent drug use. The police must first establish that the driver's ability was impaired.

It is also our belief that the legislation should maintain a focus on public safety, by controlling drug-impaired driving, and should not be used as a means of drug control. In this context, we believe that the proposed subsection 253.1(1), which makes it an offence to have a controlled substance in the vehicle, is inconsistent with the concept of impaired driving. Simply being in the possession of a drug in a vehicle does not equate with driver impairment. In addition, this particular proposed subsection specifies controlled substance as specified in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, CDSA, some of which have never been shown to cause impairment—for example, anabolic steroids. We recommend that offences related to the possession of illegal substances be tackled through the CDSA.

In addition, to further ensure that the focus of the legislation is on impairment, there is a need to define a drug. To this end, we propose the definition of a drug used by the DRE program. They say a drug is any substance that, when taken into the human body, can impair the ability of the person to operate a vehicle safely.

Although there's sufficient evidence of the dangers of drug-impaired driving to warrant the measures introduced by this legislation, the evidence is also very clear that the combination of alcohol and drugs, even in small amounts, creates a level of impairment and risk greater than that associated with either substance alone.

In recognition of this, we would like to propose that impairment due to a combination of alcohol and drugs, or a combination of two or more drugs, be treated as exacerbating circumstances in sentencing, similar to subsection 255(1), which currently considers blood alcohol concentrations in excess of 160 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood to be aggravating circumstances in alcohol-impaired driving offences.

Undoubtedly you have already recognized that Bill C-32 will require officers trained in both field impairment testing and DRE. There are currently 2,427 officers trained in the SFST and 153 certified DRE officers, with 97 officers in the process of certification across Canada. From personal experience, we can attest to the fact that the DRE training is demanding and intensive. It requires commitment, ongoing study, and practice. If this legislation is to have a beneficial impact on drug-impaired driving in Canada, there needs to be an ongoing commitment to the training of police officers in these techniques as well as to the continued development and evaluation of these techniques.

The introduction of this legislation and the training programs necessary to support it are bold steps needed to address a persistent and what we believe is a growing problem. But as you consider this legislation, it's important to recognize that enforcement is only one component of an overall strategy to deal with drug-impaired driving. There's a need to include prevention, adjudication, and rehabilitation as integral components of a broader strategy.

An effective overall strategy will also require coordination and cooperation with the provinces and territories that share responsibility for dealing with impaired driving. Provincial and territorial agencies should be encouraged to examine their own programs for alcohol-impaired drivers, such as administrative licence suspension, short-term suspensions, interlock programs, and rehabilitation programs, and ensure that appropriate options are available for drug-impaired drivers as well. In the absence of these changes, drivers will quickly begin to perceive drug-impaired driving as a less severe offence than alcohol-impaired driving, and this is clearly unacceptable.

As a final note, we'd like to recommend that due consideration be afforded to the need for a comprehensive evaluation of the legislation and the introduction of the DRE program. Evaluation is more than a simple process to determine the success or failure of a program. Evaluation serves to inform policy-makers such as yourselves as to where improvements may be needed to maximize the effectiveness of a program and where efficiencies can be introduced. In the area of drug-impaired driving, a commitment to ongoing monitoring and evaluation is critical.

In closing, we appreciate the opportunity to present our views on drugs and driving in Canada to the committee. Thank you for your interest. We look forward to your questions.

[Shirley Treacy]

All right.

Good morning. My name is Shirley Treacy. As I indicated, I am the current chair of the drugs and driving committee of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science.

The drugs and driving committee is an advisory committee to the Department of Justice on drug-impaired driving matters. I am a forensic toxicologist with more than 20 years of experience in analytical lab work as well as court testimony. I am the section manager for toxicology services for the RCMP forensic laboratory in Winnipeg and I am the former national operational support manager for toxicology services for the RCMP forensic laboratory. I'm also trained in standardized field sobriety testing and in the drug recognition, evaluation, and classification program.

The drugs and driving committee of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science has appeared twice before, in both 1999 and 2005, when similar drug-impaired driving legislation was introduced. Now, as on these previous occasions, the Canadian Society of Forensic Science drugs and driving committee wholeheartedly supports the legislation contained in Bill C-32.

The role of drugs in causing drug impairment as well as injury and fatal motor vehicle accidents in Canada and throughout the rest of the world is well documented in the scientific literature. The brief that was provided as part of this lists a number of those references.

Currently there are two offences in the Criminal Code that relate to impaired driving. One of them is in paragraph 253(b), which has to do with the illegal per se law, the “over 80” charge as it relates to alcohol. Here the police can demand that a person blow into a screening device at the roadside when they suspect alcohol in the body. If the person fails that screening device, the police then have reasonable and probable grounds to demand a breath sample for an evidentiary device—a breathalyzer, an Intoxilyzer, a DataMaster—and these readings can be used as evidence in court.

In the case of injury or if the person is unable to provide a breath sample, police can make a demand for a sample of blood, which is then collected by a medical practitioner and analyzed by the forensic laboratory for the presence of alcohol.

The second offence is in paragraph 253(a) of the Criminal Code, which has to do with driving impaired by alcohol or a drug, so in fact there is already a provision in the Criminal Code for drug-impaired driving. However, it is not as effective as it could be, since the police officer must provide evidence of both impaired driving behaviour as well as the presence of the drug causing impairment. You need both of those things.

Currently the second piece of information—the presence of a drug causing impairment—can only be determined through the driver's voluntarily participating in roadside sobriety testing, voluntarily giving a statement as to his drug consumption or voluntarily providing a bodily fluid sample for drug analysis. Most often this would be blood or urine. Note that I am emphasizing that these are all voluntary, and therefore few are compelled to comply.

Unlike the situation with regard to alcohol, there is no per se law for drugs, and there is no simple comprehensive roadside testing available to prove the presence of drug in a suspected drug-impaired driver. Available existing roadside screening tests conducted on urine or saliva are limited to the possible detection of just a few classes of drugs. These tests are presumptive only, non-specific, and do not measure impairment.

The drugs and driving committee does not support roadside testing for drugs by police officers. We feel that all drug testing, both screening and confirmation, should be conducted in a forensic laboratory by skilled analysts.

A drug-impaired driving case can only be proven by the totality of the following: one, observed and documented altered driving behaviour that alerts the police; two, roadside sobriety and drug recognition testing; and three, the demand for the collection of a bodily fluid. This bodily fluid sample would then be analyzed for the presence of drugs in a forensic laboratory.

Bill C-32 will give the police the authority to demand that the person perform the roadside sobriety test and drug recognition test, if appropriate, as well as to demand the collection of a bodily fluid. With these three things in place, these proposed legislative changes would safeguard and exclude those drivers who use prescribed medication correctly for therapeutic uses. Ethical use of drugs prescribed by a physician and dispensed and monitored by a pharmacist should not lead to impairment.

It is important to note that the mere presence of a drug in the driver, whether it be a prescription, a non-prescription, or an illicit drug, would not lead to a charge of impaired driving, since his or her driving would not have alerted police. Please remember that not all drugs will cause impairment, nor will they affect one's ability to safely operate a motor vehicle.

In the United States, the issue of drug-impaired drivers has led to the establishment of the drug recognition evaluation or DRE program in most states. The DRE program was adopted in 1988 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, and is managed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. It represents a structured 12-step procedure for assessing suspected impaired individuals and allows for the detection and documentation of symptoms of drug use and the effects.

The DRE program is based on the scientific fact that each family of drugs has its own set of clinical indicators. There are seven classes. They look at things like pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, muscle tone, and examination of the eyes. These can be learned, and tests can then be administered to look at the set of clinical indicators. This then allows the DRE-trained officer to identify a particular family or families of drugs causing impairment.

In addition, part of the DRE protocol is to have the individual complete a number of divided attention tasks to check for a deterioration in the ability to perform these tasks. Because driving is a complex task, it requires persons to divide their attention to do both physical and mental functions at the same time. Persons under the influence of drugs or alcohol will have difficulty in dividing their attention. In fact, they have a tendency to focus on one task, while ignoring others. For example, a person might concentrate on maintaining speed but would have trouble or be negligent in monitoring a lane position. Any deterioration in the ability to perform the divided attention tasks will be documented as part of the DRE protocol. This is used to assess whether or not a person is impaired.

The DRE approach also establishes the necessary probative cause for the collection of a biological sample for toxicological testing. If and when the DRE-trained officer identifies a family of drugs as causing impairment, the DRE can then demand a bodily fluid sample to test for the presence of the drug.

At this point, collection of the bodily fluid, which is usually urine, is the last step. It's step 12 of 12 steps. The urine sample is collected and then analyzed for the presence of drugs by a forensic laboratory.

The toxicologist's main role in this type of impaired driving investigation, and by that I mean where a DRE evaluation is completed, is to corroborate the finding of the DRE-trained officer. Therefore, if the DRE finding is not supported by the drug analysis, the toxicologist cannot corroborate the DRE finding and the case will not proceed to trial.

This process is outlined in reference 7, which is entitled “The Drug-Impaired Driver: The Drug Recognition Expert Response”.

At present there are 46 U.S. states that use this process to detect and prosecute drug-impaired drivers. This program has been scientifically validated both in the laboratory and at the roadside. Since the proposed legislation will detect the abuse of both pharmaceutical and illicit drugs, it's application is not restricted to illicit drugs.

In addition to the impairment caused by alcohol and other recreational drugs, there are many other medical conditions that can cause driving impairment, such as, for example, things like uncontrolled diabetes, epilepsy, and stroke. The DRE procedures are designed to help police officers identify medical disorders that can cause impairment. As a result, the DRE-trained officer would seek medical assistance for this person rather than incarceration.

Thank you for your attention.

[Brian Hodgson, Chair, Alcohol Test Committee, Canadian Society of Forensic Science]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ladies and gentlemen, I sent a letter to the chair of the committee, Mr. Hanger, on May 24. I hope it's been distributed in both French and English. It sets out our views and our concerns with respect to one particular aspect of Bill C-32, and that's the change of the interval between successive breath tests, reducing it from 15 minutes down to three minutes.

Just as a preliminary background, I should indicate that the alcohol test committee is a special committee of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science. This committee was established way back in 1967 at the time when the first legislation was being introduced, the “over 80” legislation. The committee deals specifically with issues related to alcohol testing.

The committee is responsible for creating protocols for breath-testing programs across Canada, developing performance standards, evaluating breath-testing equipment, and establishing training standards for police officers using this equipment. In addition, the committee is the principal scientific advisor to the Department of Justice on matters relating to breath alcohol testing. I would add that any new instrument or device that's meant for police use here in Canada under the Criminal Code must be approved by the Minister of Justice, who will do so only upon the recommendation of our committee.

The committee standards for evaluating instruments are found at the website for the society, www.csfs.ca. The committee has a very rigorous protocol for evaluating instruments and devices for accuracy, precision, reliability, and specificity.

In regard to the current Bill C-32, the committee has a concern about reducing the interval between successive breath tests from 15 down to three minutes. The alcohol test committee recommends retaining the 15-minute interval between successive breath alcohol tests. This procedure produces two readings that are independent of each other but close enough in time to achieve acceptable reproducibility. The courts can be assured that the subject's blood alcohol concentration is truly what it is when two independent tests reveal the same conclusion within the acceptable boundaries of variability.

An interval of only three minutes, as proposed by Bill C-32, produces two readings that are interrelated or, in scientific terms, are duplicates of each other. Thus an external factor, such as mouth alcohol, that may contaminate the first sample can also affect the second sample, since it is taken so soon after the first sample.

Although some approved instruments have a built-in mouth alcohol detection system, these systems are not foolproof. They may be able to detect high concentrations of mouth alcohol, but low residual amounts may go undetected. Thus a mandatory 15-minute pre-test waiting period is required before the first test. But Bill C-32 contains no such provision.

The current 15-minute interval is ample time for any potential mouth alcohol to dissipate. If the first sample is contaminated by residual alcohol, this residue will be gone completely 15 minutes later when the second sample is taken.

Some researchers have argued recently that better agreement can be achieved between successive tests if they are taken close together, such as three minutes apart. They argue that a longer time period, such as 15 minutes, can result in wider discrepancies between readings, because alcohol is being eliminated, thereby changing the blood alcohol concentration, leading to a discrepancy greater than normally permitted and necessitating a third sample from the subject.

However, the amount eliminated during the 15 minutes is forensically insignificant and is not likely to be a major factor when a third sample is required.

Indeed, this research has demonstrated that the larger variable by far in duplicate testing lies with the quality of the breath samples provided by the subject. Over 80% of the variability can be attributed to the quality of the breath sample, which is called the “biological” or “sampling” component.

On a practical level, very little will be gained by reducing the interval to three minutes.

For example, in my own personal experience, in the last five and a half years I have examined over 600 files—621 to be exact—for the City of Ottawa Crown Attorney's office. I found that only 10 of those cases, which is less than 2% of the total, involved three or more readings. A shorter time interval might have alleviated the need for a third reading. I stress that it might have, since it was not at all certain that the discrepancy could be attributed to the time interval and not to the major variable of biological or sampling problems with the subjects themselves.

Finally, touching on the other change proposed in Bill C-32, under the category of “evidence to the contrary”, as you know, Bill C-32 proposes to eliminate the so-called two-beer defence. An accused person will stand and testify that he or she only had three bottles or four bottles of beer over the course of a period of time. If by calculation the blood alcohol concentration is under 80, he or she is therefore not in violation of the Criminal Code. We suggest that the 15-minute interval offers a more rigorous determination of a person's blood alcohol concentration when confronted with questions under the “evidence to the contrary” provisions of section 258 of the code.

Two independent tests, both confirming that the blood alcohol concentration is over 80 milligrams per 100 millilitres, offer more reassurance to the courts than two closely linked duplicate or interrelated readings when the validity of the test procedure is being challenged and defence counsel allege that the blood alcohol concentration may be under 80 either at the time of the testing or even back at the time of the offence.

I want to add that I realize the two-beer defence causes a lot of consternation, because it's the opinion of an accused person versus what instruments say in terms of the blood alcohol concentration. The committee is supportive of the new changes to Bill C-32 in that regard because the recollection of a subject is completely unscientific. It's the subjective recall of a person as to what he or she may think he or she drank during the evening in question.

Things came to a head in the Supreme Court of Canada decision Regina v. Boucher in which the emphasis was apparently placed on what the evidence is from the accused person. In my viewpoint, the Supreme Court almost ignored the readings from the approved instrument. To my mind, it is an unscientific approach to matters and, from our viewpoint, it's untenable.

We welcome the changes in terms of the “evidence to the contrary” aspect. But it doesn't necessarily solve anything because the new creation of evidence to the contrary will now shift focus on to the instruments, the way they operate, and the way they are operated by personnel.

Mr. Chairman, I brought an approved screening device here today, called the Alcotest 7410 GLC, which is widely used here in Canada. I also brought one of the approved instruments used here in Canada, the Intoxilyzer 5000C, which is used here in Ontario and in some other parts of Canada. I also brought some brochures on that instrument, plus another instrument called the BAC DataMaster C, which is used here in Canada. I've also brought brochures on two new instruments that are currently before the minister awaiting approval. Those are the current generation instruments.

These instruments are all automated instruments. They require operator involvement. But when strict protocols are followed and the instrument is working properly as per the recommended procedures, then the tests obtained, especially when they're 15 minutes apart, provide conclusive proof of the person's blood alcohol concentration at the time of testing. Of course, it raises the question of what the blood alcohol concentration was at the time of the offence, but that becomes another issue.

Finally, in terms of the current situation in the courts with the two-beer defence, from our viewpoint that is a legal issue, it's not a scientific one, because the recollection of a person who obviously is going to have an interest in what he or she can remember is not scientific.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

I call the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to order on Tuesday, June 12, 2007. This committee is deliberating on Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

Our witnesses today are the Canadian Society of Forensic Science, Mr. Brian Hodgson, Louise Dehaut, and Shirley Treacy, chair of the drugs and driving committee; the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, Mr. Douglas Beirness and Jacques LeCavalier; and the Canadian Bar Association, Mitchell MacLeod and Tamra Thomson.

I'm going to start, as they appear in the order of our agenda, with the Canadian Society of Forensic Science. Who will be presenting?

Mr. Hodgson, the floor is yours.

Extension of Sitting Hours

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, I move:

That, pursuant to Standing Order 27(1), commencing on Wednesday June 13, 2007, and concluding on June 21, 2007, the House shall continue to sit until 10 p.m.

He said: Mr. Speaker, this is a motion that can be made one day a year, not on Christmas Day or Ground Hog Day, but this day, the 10th sitting day before June 23. It is a motion that can be made to allow the House to sit late into the evening.

I know that many members, when they look at that portion of the calendar and they see possible extension of sitting hours, they think that means we get to leave early for summer vacation, but that is not what it means. What it means is that under the Standing Orders of the House we can potentially sit and work late to get as much of the people's business done as possible because there are very important priorities for Canadians.

I will bear my soul here and say that it was not always my intention to move this motion. It was my hope that it would not be necessary. I was hoping that we would be making good progress.

For example, Bill C-52 in particular, the budget implementation bill was a bill which we believed we had an understanding with the other parties; in fact it had been shaken on by the member for St. Catharines, the member of the Liberal Party for Scarborough and others that it would be over to the Senate by June 6. Somewhere along the way the Liberal Party sought to treat it a little bit differently and as a result we are still debating it here almost a week later than the date we thought it would be over at the Senate. As a result of course we have lost considerable time to deal with other priorities for Canadians.

I want to talk about what those other priorities for Canadians might be, but first I want to focus on that number one priority which is Bill C-52, the budget implementation bill. As we have heard from many people in the House today, if that bill does not pass by the time the House rises for the summer, if that bill has not been dealt with, there are a number of financial priorities on issues that are very important to Canadians that will be lost, because it is a bill that reaches back to the previous fiscal year to spend funds. Those funds have to be allocated. The bill has to be passed and receive royal assent in order for those funds to be available in that fashion. If not, they are lost.

Some of those examples are ones which we have heard about today. The one that is at the top of my personal list is the $620 million in the budget for the patient wait times guarantee trust. This is money that is allocated to assist provinces in addressing what is one of our number one priorities—actually one of our top five priorities; I should put it that way—from the last election. That priority is to achieve a patient wait times guarantee, to help people get the kind of health care they need on a basis that is reasonable, that is practical, that is clinically sound.

For too long we saw patient wait times under the previous government actually double in length. We have this much vaunted Canadian health care system that we all purport to believe in, but if we really believe in it, we have to see that it works. An important part of it working is that Canadians should receive the health care that they need on a timely basis. That is what the $612 million is specifically aimed at.

The provinces are very anxious to receive these funds. It means a great deal for a lot of provinces. In my own province of Ontario that means $200 million plus of real money that Ontario needs for its health care system. The same thing, together with other elements, will mean for the province of Nova Scotia for health care $639 million including the transfer there. There is similar money throughout the country.

We are talking of significant funds. There are other elements in the budget. Much of that transfer will not be lost, as I said, because it is in the main budget funds, but the patient wait times guarantee money, that $612 million, is money that will be lost if we do not deal with that on a timely basis.

Another one that is very important is the $1.5 billion for the clean air and climate change trust. That is to help the provinces implement their plans to reduce greenhouse gases. It is very important.

On January 4 of this year, the Prime Minister addressed Canadians and identified what our priorities would be in government this year. One of those major priorities was to take real action on the environment. We have just seen that at the G-8 summit. In the summit declaration Canada's approach is an approach that is drastically different than it was for 13 years under the previous government when greenhouse gas emissions rose dramatically regardless of the commitments it took on. Now we have a national plan that results in real reductions, an actual plan that does that in both the short and medium term but also very importantly in the long term.

It is that approach by the Canadian government that was hailed as an example not just by world leaders, by other G-8 leaders, but by journalists from around the world, by special interest groups. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, issued a statement heralding Canada's approach as a model. The reason it is held out as a model and an example is it is an approach that can be used regardless of how lousy one's track record may be. This is important for a lot of the major emitters that had not been part of the arrangements up until now or did not have obligations under Kyoto to implement, major emitters like China, India, Brazil and the United States, to get them to the table and realize that if we are going to take on the challenges of addressing greenhouse gas emissions and turning around the risk of climate change and what it can potentially do to our world, we are going to have to take action in the long term. That is the approach of Canada that is being held as a model.

An important critical component of that approach is to engage and involve the provinces and ensure that they have in their hands the resources they need to be able to deliver. A big part of that is that $1.5 billion of ecotrust money, the clean air and climate change trust money. I underline that if we do not get Bill C-52 passed in time, that money will be lost.

This is where the delay and obstruction that the Liberal Party in particular has been conducting has been very harmful to the interests of Canadians who care about the environment, and in fact even those who do not care about the environment, because even if people do not care about it, it does affect them. It is important for all Canadians that they have that healthy environment.

Another example of the money that could be lost if Bill C-52 is not approved, if the Liberal obstruction is successful, is the $400 million for the Canada Health Infoway project. This is state of the art technology so that people can have better health care, taking advantage of technology to improve our health care system. This is something that is very important for the provinces to be able to deliver on the health care for Canadians, for their residents. Again if the Liberals are successful in their delay and obstruction plan this is something that will be lost if the bill is not dealt with and does not receive royal assent in the near future.

There is another one that is of particular of interest to me because it does affect residents in my part of Ontario. In fact the announcement was made in York region where I live and where my constituency is. That is the $225 million to protect endangered spaces, working in conjunction with groups like the Nature Conservancy of Canada to acquire sensitive lands that otherwise might be lost to development, or if not to acquire them, to put in place the kinds of conservation easements to ensure that they will be protected in their natural state for the foreseeable future, for as long as our legal regime remains in place, which is basically for as long as life continues as we know it. That money is very important but that money and the potential to protect those endangered lands will be lost if we cannot get the budget implementation bill passed in the appropriate time.

I also want to talk about the $30 million going to the Rick Hansen Foundation. Rick Hansen is the man in motion, a great Canadian who rolled his wheelchair around the world. He is a very strong personality and a great activist for his cause of spinal cord research. He suffered an injury but he showed that it did not hold him back and he did his around the world tour. I think it was in 1984 when he started his tour, which was an inspiration to all of us. The ongoing work of the foundation from the money he raised then is important. There is $30 million that we would like to see dedicated to that foundation. That $30 million would be lost if the Liberals have their way and they delay and obstruct this bill past the deadline we are dealing with.

For all of those reasons, the budget implementation bill is very important, not just because we want to see it passed, and that is a good reason, but there are actual, real consequences with a ticking clock, because of the fact that a significant amount of the funds are anchored in the previous fiscal year before March 31. That means we have to pass it before the books are closed. Basically we have to get royal assent. We have to get it all the way through before the folks here on Parliament Hill go home to their ridings for the summer. In order to do that, we want to see the potential to deal with this bill for as long as we need to.

I might add that we had hoped to be debating many other bills but the Liberals have chosen to delay this budget implementation bill in every way possible and for as long as they can, as we have seen in the House today and as we saw last Friday and so on. We have tried other measures to speed things along but they have stepped in to block them every time.

The other important bill that we need to deal with is Bill C-23, a Criminal Code amendment. Our justice agenda is very important, and Bill C-23 is a bill to update the Criminal Code provisions. It has come back to the House from committee and it is now at report stage. We would like to deal with that quickly but we will need some time in the House.

Similarly, we are expecting to see Bill C-11 on transport come back from the Senate with amendments. We will need to see whether this House agrees with those amendments or not. Bill C-11 is an important bill that has been around a long time, as members can see by the number, and we have been waiting for about a year to deal with it.

We also have Bill C-31, the election integrity bill. It is in the Senate and the Senate has indicated a desire to make some amendments to the bill. We and, I think, all parties would like to see that bill in this place, or at least three of the parties in the House would. The bill was amended at committee and we, as the government, accepted the amendments proposed by the Liberals and the Bloc.

Unfortunately, the Liberals in the Senate had a very different view of how the bill should work from the Liberals in the House of Commons. The Liberals in the Senate are actually getting rid of the House of Commons Liberal amendment on how to deal with the lists and the disclosure of information to political parties. They actually changed it to a position that was identical to what the Conservatives had originally proposed at committee.

As a result of the Liberals in the Senate deciding that they do not agree with the Liberals in the House of Commons, it means that we as the House of Commons need to deal with that bill one more time once the Senate has dealt with it.

We are waiting for that little ping-pong game between the Liberals in the Senate and the Liberals in the House of Commons to come to an end. When it does end, hopefully we can achieve a resolution on which we can all agree to ensure that future elections will proceed with a greater degree of integrity and probity, something that is very important to all parties and all members of this House.

Another bill that has come back after a long stay at committee is Bill C-42, the Quarantine Act, a very important bill on health matters and something we would like to deal with.

I know of one bill that the opposition House leader, the member for Wascana, has been very generous in showing a willingness to fast track and deal with very quickly and we are hoping to have it at report stage in the House very soon. I think we are in a position where we can do that very soon. I know other parties want some level of scrutiny so the very generous offer of the opposition House leader was one that we took up, but not everybody did. We can seek to get it passed through as many stages as possible in the House as quickly as possible. The bill I am talking about is the one dealing with Olympic symbols. I would like to see it dealt with on the House of Commons side and then go to the Senate.

That is an important bill for the folks who are putting together the 2010 Olympic Games in Whistler and Vancouver. It is important because it deals with copyright, trademarks and the like. We all know how challenging it is to put on these kind of games in this day and age and the ability to protect copyrights, to deal with merchandise and to generate that revenue to support the athletes, the games and the legacy venues that will be constructed as a result of that is important to the people who are involved, whether it be the athletes, the organizers or the people in those communities who will benefit from the legacies.

We are also waiting on other bills, such as Bill C-51, the Nunavik Inuit land claims, and Bill C-59 on video piracy. Bill C-59 was just introduced but the newspapers are saying that it is an important bill because it would create some meaningful consequences for people who engage in the illegal video taping of major films with the ultimate objective of putting them on the black market to sell them illegally without the copyright rights to it. That is something that has been hurting the film industry.

In places like Vancouver and Toronto, in fact all across the country, the film industry has become very important, but those places in particular. It is important that Canada maintains its credibility within that industry and that we support our artists and the people who give value to that intellectual property and that we show leadership as a country in protecting it.

In the future, as we move away from manufactured goods and products to the kinds of services that have more to do with intellectual property, we need to be seen as real leaders in that regard. As I said, media reports are suggesting that all parties actually support Bill C-59, which is why we would like to move it quickly.

Another bill that we recently introduced would support the Red Cross/Red Crescent in the adoption of a new symbol. We need to do that here in Canada through legislation because of a charter that exists. The bill would create an additional non-denominational symbol, which is the Red Crystal, that can be used through ratification of a treaty. If the Red Crescent symbol or the Red Cross symbol creates some discomfort with the local population, the Red Cross/Red Crescent Society would be able to use the Red Crystal symbol as an alternate symbol, which is why as a country we need to recognize and ratify that it would have all the protections under the Geneva convention so that anyone would respect it. However, there would be consequences if people misused the symbol in trying to conduct an offensive military operation. The symbol would need to be used for the purpose intended, which is to protect and save lives in difficult scenes around the world.

All of the bills I have spoken about are on the House calendar. Some are in front of us and we would like to deal with them but others are still at committee.

I did not even speak to the first nations land management, which is a bill that was launched in the Senate.

We would like to see the passage of some bills that are still in committee and which we would like to see back from committee. We thought some would come back a little bit sooner, such as Bill C-6, the amendments to the Aeronautics Act. The committee has been doing clause by clause on Bill C-6 for almost a month now. I am glad to see that the committee is being that attentive but it is a bill that is important and we would like to see it.

The bill that I hope the committee deals with soon is Bill C-32 on impaired driving. I have spoken about the importance of justice and making our streets and communities safer. It was one of the five cornerstone priorities of the Conservatives when we ran in the last election. It was restated on January 4 by the Prime Minister as another priority.

I should acknowledge that we have had some good progress on getting some of those justice bills through the House but it was not easy. Some of them, like Bill C-10 dealing with mandatory penalties for gun crimes, stayed at committee. If one were to listen to politicians speak, one would think there is a consensus on the importance of mandatory penalties for gun crimes. Even the Liberal Party in the last election had that as one of its key elements in its platform.

However, when it came to committee, things were a little bit different. The Liberal Party actually gutted the meaningful parts of the legislation and it held up the legislation at committee for 252 days. Fortunately, that time is past and, thanks to the support of the New Democratic Party, we were able to put some teeth back into that legislation and make it meaningful. The legislation now contains some meaningful mandatory penalties for those gang members and crooks who want to terrorize our communities with guns and commit violent acts. They will face real consequences. When they commit an offence like that they will go to jail. There will be no more “get out of jail free” card and no more house arrest as a solution. They will actually serve real jail time for some of those offences. Where there already were mandatory penalties, they will be tougher and stronger mandatory penalities so that we can take real action.

I know these are important justice issues for Canadians, and that the gun legislation is a part of it, but the other bill that we are waiting for from committee is Bill C-32 on impaired driving. It is very easy to deal with impaired driving on alcohol right now because we have breathalyzers and standards. However, a much more difficult element is driving impaired through the use of other illegal substances, such as controlled or narcotic substances, or, in simple terms, drugs. People who use and abuse drugs and then proceed to drive a vehicle are just as impaired, if not more impaired, as someone who has consumed excessive alcohol. The consequences in terms of the risk to other drivers on the road are just as great. It can change the lives of a family if someone were to die or become injured. The lives of a family could be absolutely shattered when an accident occurs because of that kind of behaviour.

Business of the House

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, today we will be continuing with the business of supply.

Tomorrow we hope to conclude third reading of Bill C-52. In answer to the question on priorities, I would point out that Bill C-52, the budget implement bill, is the number one priority of this government. We can talk about other priorities after we see an indication that it will be heading for royal assent. If we do not have it, it will result in the loss of $4.3 billion in 2006-07 year end measures which include: $1.5 billion for the Canada ecotrust for the provinces; $600 million for patient wait times guarantees; $400 million for Canada Health Infoway; $200 million for protection of endangered species; $30 million for the Great Bear rain forest; $600 million for labour market agreements for the provinces; $30 million for the Rick Hansen Foundation; $100 million in aid for Afghanistan; $100 million to Genome Canada; and so on. It is a long list of important priorities financing that will be lost if the bill is not passed by the end of this session in June. That is obviously our number one priority.

Next week will be getting things done for all of us week when we consider a number of bills that are in their final stages of the legislative process.

The following bills will be placed under Government Orders for debate: Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, which the Senate reported with amendments and which is now back before the House to receive the approval of the members, and Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (criminal procedure, language of the accused, sentencing and other amendments).

We are awaiting the Senate's report with amendments on Bill C-31, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and the Public Service Employment Act.

Bill C-33, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act, including amendments in relation to foreign investment entities and non-resident trusts, and to provide for the bijural expression of the provisions of that Act, Bill C-42, An Act to amend the Quarantine Act and Bill C-47, An Act respecting the protection of marks related to the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games and protection against certain misleading business associations and making a related amendment to the Trade-marks Act, will probably be passed by the House at third reading.

Discussions have taken place with the opposition parties, and there may be consent to fast-track some or all of the following bills: Bill C-59, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (unauthorized recording of a movie), Bill S-6, An Act to amend the First Nations Land Management Act and Bill C-51, An Act to give effect to the Nunavik Inuit Land Claims Agreement and to make a consequential amendment to another Act.

There is also a possibility of quick passage of a new bill entitled “An act to amend the Geneva Conventions Act, an act to incorporate the Canadian Red Cross Society and the Trademarks Act”, which appears on today's notice paper.

There are a number of other bills I am still hoping we could get included in getting things done for all of us week, provided that they get reported back from committee, in particular, Bill C-6 aeronautics; Bill C-27 dangerous offenders; Bill C-32 impaired driving; and Bill C-44, the bill to grant first nations people the human rights that every other Canadian enjoys. First nations people expect the House to get things done for them as well, so I urge the aboriginal affairs committee to stop delaying Bill C-44 and report it back to the House early next week. It is a priority for this government.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Period. But under the Criminal Code, it says very clearly—let me read it:

Where a peace officer believes on reasonable and probable grounds that a person is committing, or at any time within the preceding three hours has committed, as a result of the consumption of alcohol, an offence under section 253, the peace officer may, by demand made to that person forthwith or as soon as practicable, require that person to provide then or as soon thereafter as is practicable

--and then it goes on about breath samples, etc.

Bill C-32 is amending that section, and it's amending it by saying:

If a peace officer has reasonable grounds to suspect that a person has in the preceding three hours had alcohol or a drug in their body while they were operating a motor vehicle...the peace officer may, by demand, require the person to comply with paragraph (a), in the case of a drug, or with either or both of paragraphs (a) and (b), in the case of alcohol

The reasonable and probable grounds in the Criminal Code were linked to the fact that the person had committed, was committing, is committing, or at any time in the previous three hours committed an offence under section 253. In Bill C-32 we've removed the connection between the reasonable grounds—

Our courts have clearly defined all of the criteria for “reasonable grounds”, depending on the circumstances that meet the test of reasonable grounds. We've removed the connection with committing an offence under section 253. That's a glaring problem.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Thank you.

My colleagues here have covered some of the issues I had some concerns about, including the lack of connection between impairment and possession of an illegal substance in the vehicle. But I do have one issue, and it is under clause 3 of Bill C-32, in proposed subsection 254(2), which says:

If a peace officer has reasonable grounds to suspect that a person has in the preceding three hours had alcohol or a drug in their body while they were operating—the peace officer may, by demand, require the person to comply with

When we look at the actual Criminal Code and the section that is being amended by Bill C-32, there's a clear link between the officer having to have

reasonable and probable grounds that a person is committing, or at any time within the preceding three hours has committed—an offence under section 253

The reasonable ground that the officer has to have is that the individual actually may be impaired.

Under Bill C-32, the peace officer no longer has to have reasonable grounds to believe the driver has committed an offence under section 253, which is the offence of impairment. The officer merely has to have reasonable grounds to believe that the person, in the preceding three hours, had alcohol or drugs in their body. That's a real problem. Do you not see that as being a problem, Mr. Solomon?

I would prefer to see that, under clause 3 of Bill C-32, in proposed subsection 254(3), we add in the reasonable ground that an offence was committed under section 253. That would then allow the officer to conduct the breathalyzer test, the breath test, the road sobriety test, whatever. That would then trigger all of the other mechanisms the officer has to confirm or inform his reasonable grounds that the driver was impaired. Right now, nowhere in that subsection do we talk about having committed an offence under section 253. We find that in the Criminal Code, but we don't find it here.

[Kirk Tousaw, Chair, Drug Policy Committee, B.C. Civil Liberties Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of committee. My name is Kirk Tousaw, and I'm from the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. The association is the oldest and most active defender of civil liberties in the country, and we thank you for the opportunity to make some remarks on Bill C-32.

Like my colleague Mr. Brayford, I feel compelled to begin my presentation by saying that the association—as I think is the case for all persons who will testify before this committee—opposes impaired driving for any reason. All too often, persons who speak out against pieces of legislation like Bill C-32 are unfairly characterized as not caring about impaired driving, but that's not the case. We oppose impaired driving. But what the association also opposes is the imposition of new and intrusive laws that will diminish civil liberties, particularly when those laws are not necessary to and will not achieve legislative goals. We believe Bill C-32 is such a piece of legislation.

There are roughly five components to this bill: the increased penalties for impaired driving, including fairly significant increases in mandatory minimum sentences and fines; a new mandatory and highly invasive drug testing process; the creation of the new offence of driving while in possession of a drug; the creation of new offences related to causing injuries while impaired and refusing to provide breath or bodily samples to police after being involved in an accident, whether or not there's an issue of impairment; and restrictions on the right of the accused person to call evidence in his or her defence.

I'm going to focus my remarks on the new offences and the drug testing procedures. I will briefly speak about the evidentiary restrictions related to blood alcohol concentration tests, and there are really three points I'd like to make.

My first point is similar to what Mr. Brayford indicated. These restrictions are based on what I believe to be the faulty assumption that the blood alcohol test is infallible. Two, the evidentiary restrictions are undue restrictions on the charter right to full answer in defence. They will certainly be challenged. They will, in my view, almost certainly be found to violate the charter. And three, I'll just comment on what Mr. Solomon said particularly about British Columbia, where I'm from, and police being reluctant to lay impaired driving charges. He characterized that as a case of police response being frustrated with the process. I don't know if that's true or not, but police are often frustrated by the fact that defendants mount defences and sometimes are acquitted, although I should say they're rarely acquitted.

But another potential reason for why impaired charges are not laid in this country is that impaired driving charges are one of the very few offences in our Criminal Code that carry the imposition of mandatory minimum sentences, and the police are sensitive to and cognizant of this fact.

With respect to the “driving while in possession” offence, the first and primary concern is that, frankly, this offence has nothing whatsoever to do with impaired driving. It appears to be an end-run around the provisions of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that already make it illegal to possess drugs.

As the members of this committee I'm sure are aware, the burden of the drug laws in this country fall disproportionately on persons with lower incomes. This law might be the first step in the other direction, in that it will disproportionately impact people who have the means to have a car. But I don't think that's the direction we want to go with respect to creating new offences when the activity in question—possession of a drug—is already illegal.

On the idea that because you possess a drug in your car you ought to be punishable both by a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment and the imposition of mandatory driving prohibitions, there's simply no connection. There's no connection between taking away somebody's ability to drive—and quite likely their ability to earn a living and be a productive member of society—and the fact that they may have had a small amount of marijuana in their car or their friend may have had a small amount of marijuana in their pocket and the driver knew it. It's just not related to impaired driving.

The purpose of this bill is purportedly to address the situation involving impaired driving, not the fact that people often use automobiles to go and purchase drugs. When you have a situation in this country in which almost half the population has used cannabis, marijuana, and some 15% to 20% of the country uses marijuana on a regular basis, I think it can be clearly demonstrated that the impact of this law is going to be disproportionate in terms of the seriousness of the activity targeted.

I should also say that this came up when this committee was discussing Bill C-16, the prior incarnation of the “drug-impaired” legislation put forward by the previous government. That legislation did not include this new offence of driving while in possession, although it was added in committee by member Vic Toews. At the time, Ms. Kane, senior counsel from the justice department, essentially said there's going to be a charter problem with this because the ends of the legislation are not connected to the new offence at all.

The fact that you have some drugs in your car does not mean you're driving while impaired. I will also suggest that of the number of people in this country who use marijuana, for instance, the vast majority of them are responsible citizens who are not driving while impaired, although they may use their vehicles to obtain the drug. It's just like how you will drive to the liquor store to buy beer. That doesn't mean you're going to drink the beer in the parking lot of the liquor store and then drive home while impaired. So this shouldn't be in the bill at all.

With respect to the proposed drug testing procedure, there are a significant number of concerns that the Civil Liberties Association has and that I urge this committee to consider. First, the proposed legislation is quite fuzzy on the concept of reasonable grounds. What are the reasonable grounds that are going to be utilized by police officers to perform the standardized field sobriety tests on the side of the road? What are the reasonable grounds that are going to be used to demand that the driver come to the station for the interview and for testing by a drug recognition expert? What then are the grounds that are going to be used to demand, under threat of criminal punishment, that citizens of this country provide blood, saliva, and urine samples? These are highly intrusive procedures.

This is a country that cares very deeply about privacy, and there is a significant privacy concern with respect to those things that are within your body. The process for getting these samples is, in itself, quite invasive. It's humiliating and can be quite degrading. For instance, if you're asked to provide a urine sample, in order to ensure that the sample is true and accurate you'll have to be observed giving the sample. That's a degrading experience. Some people are afraid of needles. To get a blood sample, you have to stick a needle into somebody's body and withdraw the blood. This is going to be a very humiliating experience for people who are subjected to it.

Another problem is that the process set out in the legislation is cumbersome and time-consuming. You have to remember that from the moment you're stopped by the police, you've been detained by the police. Your liberty has been restricted. And we now are talking about a three- or four-step process that will take a significant period of time to complete. Throughout that entire period of time, the individual has been detained.

Worse, the results of both the DRE evaluation and the bodily sample testing are, frankly, of little evidentiary value to the ultimate question of impairment. The DRE process has a veneer of scientific credibility behind it, but at the end of the day, it's observational on the part of police.

One study, a study done in Oregon by Smith, suggests that the average error rate for DRE testing is about 21%. The legislative summary attached to this bill suggests that error rates are anywhere from 10% to 25%. To put it another way, we have a situation in which, of every hundred people who are forced to come to the police station to be subjected to DRE testing, twenty will end up falsely accused and will then be forced into either committing a criminal offence by refusing to give a urine or blood sample or being put through the invasive procedure of giving that urine or blood sample. That's twenty out of a hundred persons who have to go through this experience but who may well not be under the influence of any drug at all. There's an error rate, and there's an error rate because DRE testing is simply not foolproof.

Worse yet, the invasive process, the forced taking of blood, urine, and of saliva, yields information of very little value to the ultimate question. The legislative summary is clear. As Mr. Solomon pointed out, there's simply no way in the science to link the presence of drugs in one's system to impairment. In legal terms, the information gleaned from the blood or urine test is irrelevant to the ultimate issue of impairment.

Frankly, I'm not sure the judges are going to be permitting this evidence to come in, because it's not relevant evidence. Absent reliable scientific links between drug use and actual impairment, it is inappropriate to conduct invasive searches of one's bodily fluids and to impose the accompanying detention that is necessary to effectuate the tests. It's simply inappropriate.

There is no doubt that impaired driving is unacceptable. The legislative summary suggests that 97% of all motor vehicle fatalities and 98% of all motor vehicle injuries are not related to drugs. The Senate report on marijuana, also cited in the legislative summary, concluded that for cannabis, which has been said to be the most widely used illegal drug and the most widely used drug second to alcohol, “The visual recognition method used by police officers has yielded satisfactory results”. In other words, we already train the police to observe people's levels of impairment and to make decisions at the side of the road on whether to charge the person with impaired driving or to take some other action such as imposing a 24-hour driving suspension.

This law has been characterized as a tool in the toolbox for police, but I think it's akin to using a hammer to pound in thumbtacks. We have a procedure in this country for charging people who are driving while impaired by drugs. As Mr. Solomon pointed out, we've had that for a number of years. It exists, it is used, and it can continue to be used. Police do that regularly. The invasive testing contemplated by Bill C-32 simply adds a false veneer of scientific credibility to the individual officer's subjective determinations.

I can certainly say more about each of these points, but the final objection to Bill C-32 is more philosophical than practical. Laws should be promulgated in this country in order to achieve results, not, frankly, so that government can be seen to be achieving results. First, the money that's required to implement this new law has been cut by the present government, with $4.2 million taken away from drug recognition training for police officers.

It appears that the provinces are being expected to bear the financial burden of implementing this new procedure, a process that will undoubtedly take several years and cost several millions of dollars. I would suggest to this committee that this money is better spent on activities that have been shown in the past to make a significant dent in the problem. We have achieved some great successes in this country in reducing both drunk driving and other dangerous behaviours through the use of education.

The assumption that increased penalties in the criminal law or the new criminal scheme is going to deter the behaviour is an assumption that bears some scrutiny, because I think it's one without merit. The way to stop this activity—and it is reducing—is through educational programs. It's through teaching people that this is a dangerous activity. Mothers Against Drunk Driving has been instrumental in doing just that, both in this country and in the United States. The television commercials have had an enormous impact.

Having defended these cases both here and in the United States for a number of years, I can tell you that people are doing this less. And they're not doing it less because of the law; they're doing it less because it's wrong. They know it's wrong because people can be hurt, and they've been taught that. But they're not doing it less because we're increasing penalties or because we're going to take blood or urine samples from them at the side of the road or in the station.

I would urge this committee to think long and hard about going forward with a law that dramatically restricts civil liberties, that's highly invasive of privacy, and that frankly isn't going to achieve the legislative goals that I think everyone in this room would like to see achieved.

Thank you.

[Robert Solomon, Director, Legal Policy, Mothers Against Drunk Driving]

Thank you.

I am appearing before you on behalf of Mothers Against Drunk Driving in my capacity as its national director of legal policy. I have been a professor in the faculty of law at the University of Western Ontario since 1972, and I am so old I even taught my learned friend here in his first year of law school. I have authored or co-authored numerous articles, studies, and government reports on alcohol and drug law. My research in recent years has focused on impaired driving and the reform of federal and provincial legislation.

I would like to introduce Mrs. Margaret Miller, the incoming president of MADD Canada. Her son, Bruce Miller, a 26-year-old police officer in Nova Scotia, was killed by a young drunk driver whose blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit for driving. Officer Miller had made a point of speaking out in his community to young people about the dangers of impaired driving. We are fortunate that Margaret has chosen to continue her son's important work and has agreed to represent our organization throughout Canada.

First, I want to briefly address the need for Bill C-32. Despite the progress we've made in terms of impaired driving between 1980 and the mid-1990s, impaired driving in Canada remains by far the largest single criminal cause of death in this country. Impaired driving claims almost twice as many lives per year as all types of homicide combined, and tragically, impaired driving takes a disproportionate toll among young Canadians. Those between the ages of 16 and 25 represent 13.7% of the population but 32% of the traffic fatalities in this country.

When you look at Canada's record in terms of impaired driving relative to the rest of the world, we lag far behind other comparable democracies. A 2001 Transport Canada study indicated that Canada had the highest rate of impairment among fatally injured drivers of eight OECD countries. Similarly, a 2000 international study indicated that Canada ranked second worst of 15 nations. The simple fact is that our federal impaired driving law is not effective and efficient relative to those in other jurisdictions around the world.

MADD Canada regards Bill C-32 as a major step forward in addressing many of the weaknesses in Canada's existing federal impaired driving law.

Given the time available, I am going to limit my oral presentation to the drug-impaired driving provisions and the narrowing of the Carter, or two-drink, defence and the last drink, or bolus drinking, defence.

I will be submitting a written brief at a later date to address some of Bill C-32's other important reform provisions.

I'm going to turn now to drug-impaired driving and the magnitude of the drug-impaired driving problem. There is ample reason to believe that drug-impaired driving is a matter of considerable concern and a growing problem. A series of national surveys indicate that driving after drug use is commonplace and that the rate of driving after cannabis use is increasing, particularly among the young.

Numerous provincial and regional studies report equally troubling patterns of drug use and driving, particularly in regard to cannabis. For example, a Quebec study of fatally injured drivers between 1999 and 2001 indicated that 22.6% were positive for only alcohol, 17% were positive for only drugs, and 12.4% were positive for both. The most common drugs, other than alcohol, were cannabis, benzodiazepines, cocaine, and then opiates.

Similarly, a 2005 study in Nova Scotia found that 15% of grade 10 to 12 students in Atlantic Canada reported driving under the influence of cannabis, whereas only 11% reported driving under the influence of alcohol. Thus, in this study, the number of young people driving under the influence of cannabis and drugs exceeded the number driving under the influence of alcohol. Students who drove under the influence of cannabis were twice as likely as cannabis-free students to report being in a collision.

The adverse effects of cannabis and other drugs on driving performance have been well documented. While the exact causal role of various drugs in crashes requires more research, it is clear that drug use constitutes a major traffic safety problem.

For example, a Canada-wide study in 2004 estimated that drug use alone or in combination with alcohol contributed to approximately 368 traffic fatalities, 21,702 traffic injuries, and 71,000 property damage only collisions.

These statistics are particularly important for young people. Why? It is because this constituency has the highest rates of illicit drug use and fatal crashes per kilometre driven. These facts underscore the importance of moving on Bill C-32.

I'm going to turn to the proposed impaired driving provisions.

Given that Canada's first prohibition against driving under the influence of drugs was in 1925, it is an understatement to suggest that giving the police powers to enforce this law are long overdue. It's been an offence for 82 years, and we have yet to give the police the powers they need to enforce this law in an efficient and effective manner.

Although there are some provisions of the existing Criminal Code that can, in very limited circumstances, be used to enforce drug-impaired driving, they apply in rare circumstances. As a result, currently those who drive under the influence of drugs are largely immune to criminal charges.

Bill C-32 provides a strong framework for drug-impaired driving enforcement by laying out the basis for the drug recognition expert testing, DRE. The DRE evaluation is a twelve-part process that involves physical observations to check for the presence of seven classes of drugs, an interview with the suspect, physical sobriety testing to determine impairment—and it's important to understand that it is those components of the DRE that establish impairment—a summary report, and a confirmatory test of urine, saliva, or blood to confirm the presence of the class of drugs identified in the report.

The bodily sample test isn't a test of impairment. It confirms the presence of the drug. The other aspects of the DRE—the divided attention test, the physical coordination testing—establish the impairment. There has been a lot of confusion in the media.

The DRE program has been used throughout the United States since the early 1980s. Today it is also widely used in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, and Sweden.

The constitutionality of DRE testing and the admissibility of DRE-related testimony have withstood numerous challenges in the American courts. Early studies carried out in the United States by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, which is probably the world's leading traffic safety organization, showed that when DRE officers concluded that a subject had a drug in his or her possession, the toxicology results revealed that the suspicion was correct 94% of the time. Recent studies have confirmed these results, concluding that the overall accuracy rate in recognizing drug presence was nearly identical to that of the early studies.

Justice Canada is to be commended on the proposed drug-impaired driving provisions, because they provide a far simpler, stronger, and more constitutionally sound enforcement framework than that set out in its 2003 “Drug-Impaired Driving: Consultation Document”.

I now want to turn to alcohol-impaired driving and the Carter and last drink defences. The Canadian courts have interpreted the Criminal Code in a manner that results in the evidentiary breath and blood test results being thrown out based solely on the accused's unsubstantiated denial of impairment. In the absence of the test results, the charge of driving with a blood alcohol level above 0.08 is invariably dropped or the accused is acquitted.

I'm going to briefly outline the defences.

The Carter, or two-drink, defence is based on the accused's testimony or claim that he or she consumed only a small amount of alcohol prior to the alleged offence. A defence toxicologist is then called to confirm that if the accused had in fact consumed such a small quantity of alcohol, his or her BAC would not have exceeded 0.08.

Since the toxicologist's testimony is based solely on the accused's self-reported consumption, it adds nothing to the credibility of the accused's consumption testimony. If the court accepts the accused's consumption evidence, then the breath or blood evidence is completely disregarded, even if the evidentiary tests were administered properly by a trained and certified officer and were consistent with the results of the roadside screening tests and were supported by the arresting officer's observations and other evidence that the accused was visibly intoxicated.

It is simply assumed, based on the accused's self-serving and often unsubstantiated claim or testimony, that the evidentiary test results were somehow wrong and must be rejected without any direct proof that a testing error occurred.

The last drink defence is based on the accused's testimony that he or she consumed a very large quantity of alcohol—a practice known as bolus drinking—immediately before driving. It is then contended that very little of this alcohol had been absorbed into the driver's bloodstream by the time he or she was stopped by the police. Thus, the accused argues that his or her BAC was below the legal limit when driving but only rose above the limit in the interval between being stopped and the evidentiary breath or blood testing.

The last drink defence is rarely compatible with accepted principles of toxicology or typical patterns of alcohol consumption. I doubt that very many people sit in a bar for seven hours, have milk and cookies, and then 20 minutes before the bar closes drink a large quantity of alcohol and get immediately stopped by the police. But that's the only basis upon which this defence is plausible.

While the defence is theoretically plausible in rare cases, it begins to lack an air of reality at BACs much above 0.1%. Again, if the last drink defence is accepted, then the evidentiary breath or blood tests are thrown out and the accused is acquitted.

The current federal legislation and the courts' interpretations of it have created insurmountable barriers to efficient and effective prosecution. National and provincial surveys have documented police officers' growing frustration with these loopholes and their increased reluctance to lay impaired driving charges. Officers, when surveyed, indicate that they will frequently or sometimes not lay criminal charges even if they are convinced that the individual is impaired.

In British Columbia, 50% of the police refuse to lay criminal charges even if they are convinced that the accused is impaired. Why? Because the process is so frustrating and these loopholes render their efforts of no force.

This sense of frustration that the police have helps explain the falling rates of impaired driving charges in Canada. For example, in 2003, the statistics indicated that Canada's charge rate for impaired offences per 100,000 licensed drivers was 39% of what it is in the United States.

These defences help to bring about the de facto decriminalization of impaired driving in this country because the law is so inefficient and so ineffective. These defences do not exist in any other jurisdiction, and they bring the administration of justice in Canada into deserved disrepute.

Indeed, some Canadian defence counsel boast openly about their ability to get virtually any impaired driver acquitted. For example, in a newspaper article entitled, “How Big Bucks Can Beat .08”, one Saskatoon lawyer bragged about having never lost more than one of his 50 impaired driving trials per year, while another claimed to have achieved a string of 28 consecutive acquittals.

I had my students check some of the websites of defence counsel, and they have testimonials on their websites from impaired drivers who said, “My blood alcohol was way over the limit; I thought I was done like dinner, but I spoke to my lawyer and he told me he could get me acquitted on a technicality, and he did”. Do you think anyone, any lawyer, would allow testimonials for any other offence, testimonials such as, “I committed seven sexual assaults; I thought I was done like dinner, but my lawyer told me I could get off on a technicality, and I did”?

We would not allow this defence to operate in this way for any other offence. Surely the victims of impaired driving are no less deserving of protection and respect than victims of other violent crimes.

Bill C-32 will significantly narrow the Carter and last drink defence and help ensure that the 0.08 offence is enforced and prosecuted as Parliament intended. The proposed amendments would also bring Canada's 0.08 offence into line with the law in other comparable democracies. MADD Canada strenuously supports these changes.

In conclusion, MADD Canada strongly supports Bill C-32. We hope the committee will move quickly to endorse the legislation.

Although we addressed only drug-impaired driving and the Carter and last drink defences in our presentation, we will be submitting a written brief endorsing the other important amendments in Bill C-32.

In closing, I would like to thank you on behalf of my colleague, Mrs. Margaret Miller, for this opportunity to appear before you on this important issue.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

I'd like to call the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to order on Thursday, June 7, 2007. Our agenda deals with Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

We have a good list of witnesses before us this morning.

We have Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Ms. Margaret Miller, the national president. Welcome. We have Mr. Robert Solomon, director, legal policy. Welcome to the committee, sir.

We have the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, Mr. Mark Brayford, vice-chair. Welcome, sir.

Finally, we have the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, Mr. Kirk Tousaw, chair of the drug policy committee.

Welcome all to the committee.

I understand, Mr. Solomon, you will be presenting for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Sir, you have the floor.

[Prof. Line Beauchesne, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, As an Individual]

Good morning. Thank you for your invitation.

In any piece of legislation, before being able to say how relevant the measures being proposed actually are, one first needs to consider the goal being pursued and look at the problems to be resolved. In this case, the purported goal is to improve road safety by preventing people who are impaired from driving a vehicle, as they may pose a danger to themselves or to others. However, a bill hoping to attain that objective must successfully resolve the following issues.

The first major issue, which was raised during parliamentary debates, is that thus far, activity has, for all intents and purposes, focussed on alcohol, in terms of both prevention and our legal system, even though there are many other factors that can give rise to impaired driving, be they fatigue, medication or other reasons.

The second issue relates to repeat offenders, who seem to be relatively unaffected by prevention campaigns. Repeat offenders are few in number, but are responsible for the vast majority of accidents. According to the research, these repeat offenders are clearly dependent on drugs, the main drug being alcohol, for most of them. Alcohol is a drug, even though that seems to be somewhat forgotten in some of the debate.

This bill must make it possible to determine all the causes of impaired driving and to better target repeat offenders. However, it succeeds in neither case.

What are the issues clearly indicating that this bill misses the target, which is to improve road safety by preventing impaired driving?

The first issue is that the bill is practically unenforceable from a financial standpoint. In fact, a number of parliamentarians have pointed to that specific problem and the debate on Bill C-16 — the predecessor to Bill C-32 — clearly demonstrated that. The resources that will be needed to implement this bill across the country are in the millions of dollars. Even the addition of 1 000 police officers, as one parliamentarian has suggested, would in no way resolve the problem in rural areas. The process created here is cumbersome and practically unenforceable.

As well, enforcing this legislation will be costly. In a general sense, there is the cost of training DREs and police officers. However, the regular renewal of portable detection equipment, validation of laboratory drug tests and judicial procedures are also extremely costly. We are talking here about a middle class that will defend itself. There is a whole maze of possibilities. We already know what the alcohol-related side of this costs in terms of legal proceedings. This opens a whole new window of opportunity that will create very costly legal tangles.

The second issue, as was already mentioned, is that traces of drugs in the body are not clear proof that a person was impaired. They simply indicate that this individual used drugs. If, for example, a person used marijuana Friday evening and, on the following Friday, is given a drug test, the test will not be about determining whether that person was impaired because of marijuana. The test would only tell us that in the days or weeks prior to that, the individual in question had used marijuana.

The kind of equipment that authorities claim to be able to use is relatively discriminatory. It has been proven scientifically that it cannot be said that a person is impaired simply because traces of drugs have been detected in that individual's body.

The third issue is that enforcement of this legislation is likely to be extremely discriminatory. As Mr. Therien pointed out, there are 22,000 different types of medication and a whole range of drugs. It is quite clear that the portable equipment used nowadays focusses on certain types of drugs that are used by certain kinds of people.

In that respect, one may wonder whether the real objective is to catch people who use illegal drugs, or to include all the possible causes of impaired driving, whatever drug has been used. During the debate on Bill C-16, some pointed out that if medication were involved, that person would be referred to a physician or to someone other than the police.

The message of prevention that this bill sends is that there are good and bad reasons to drive while impaired. Let me give you an example.

Supposing an individual worked an unexpected shift and has not slept for 30 hours. That person is practically asleep, but still decides to his or her car and ends up killing someone. Are we going to say that it was okay for that individual to have killed someone, simply because he or she had worked too many hours? I don't think that's the kind of message we are trying to convey. We may also be talking about someone 79 years old, who is told by his daughter that his medication puts him to sleep and that he really should not drive a car, but who decides to drive his car anyway, and ends up killing someone. Are we going to tell such individuals that they have the right to kill someone, simply because they are elderly and they decided to drive their car?

The message of prevention that this bill sends is not clear at all. In fact, it seems to be more about the fight against illicit drugs than it does about preventing impaired driving. The millions of dollars that will be invested for no purpose in this bill are millions of dollars that could be invested in prevention.

So, what should be done to improve the current situation as regards impaired driving and move in a different direction in relation to the two issues that I have raised?

It is quite clear that prevention should focus on broadening advertising aimed at specific client groups, so as to include medications considered to impair the ability to drive. Indeed, France has done a great deal of work in that area. Be it on television or through other means, we have to stop saying that alcohol is the only thing that results in impairment, and encourage people to drive only when they are fit to drive.

We are not talking about reinventing the wheel here. I am not referring to sobriety tests, because the issue is not only about having used specific drugs; we are also talking about roadside reflex tests that are videotaped, tests which would now be mandatory. Those tests would make it possible to determine whether an individual is able to drive. Whatever the reason, if that person is not able to drive, he or she would be taken off the road.

We do not need to know whether such individuals use drugs, whether they were tired, whether they were going home or whether they were coming out of a bar. They were tested and filmed and proven not to have the necessary reflexes to drive properly. We are not only seeking people who use drugs through this exercise. The important thing is to remember that we need to take people off the road who are driving impaired.

One of the basic concepts in criminology is that an enforcement mechanism that is simpler and is used more often — and people have the sense that it is being enforced — is preferable to a complex and costly mechanism that is rarely enforced, and which gives people the feeling that they will not get caught because the authorities will hesitate to move in that direction. They have the feeling they will not be targeted because this is only aimed at people who use illegal drugs.

It is much easier to train police officers to carry out a basic reflex test — which involves asking people to walk in a straight line or lift their legs, while being filmed, than it is to train DREs, at a cost of many millions of dollars, whose job it will be to determine, using an extremely complex procedure, whether people seem to have used drugs.

France has done more in a year and a half to reduce speeds on the highway by installing cameras that regularly take pictures of drivers. Highway accidents have decreased by a quarter or a third. I will soon be receiving all the details with respect to the assessments that have been carried out. This particular program involves demerit points and fines, which have a much greater impact than if 300,000 additional police officers had been assigned to patrol the roads in France.

As a result, the more complex the procedures, the less likely it is that they will be enforced and that they will be highly discriminatory.

As regards the second issue—that is, repeat offenders—studies show that the vast majority of them have an alcohol dependency problem. People like them could have their licences taken away. However, what is needed is a much better organized national register to keep track of them, so that their licences can be taken away as long as there are not adequate guarantees that their problem has been resolved. The real issue here is treatment.

When you read the testimony of highway accident victims, you realize that they often lacked support following their accident. So, perhaps we should be spending more of these millions of dollars on support for highway traffic accident victims.

In closing, I would just like to say that it is time to give police officers the means they require to ensure more effective prevention of impaired driving, whatever the cause. Police action will be successful if the procedure is simpler and includes demerit points, higher insurance premiums and a proper offences registry. Such measures, which are far less costly than those presented here, would also allow for the introduction of a series of additional measures aimed at prevention and at assisting highway traffic accident victims.

Unfortunately, this bill does not move in that direction and even risks reducing police effectiveness in this area, at the expense of the many individuals who are victims of traffic accidents.

Thank you.

[Emile Therien, Past President, Canada Safety Council]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to acknowledge Diane Diotte and her staff for facilitating our appearance here today. Thank you very much.

We have brief remarks, and I think all of you have received our submission.

Canadians are very concerned about young drivers impaired by alcohol or drugs and older drivers impaired by prescription medications. The Canada Safety Council considers the issue of drug-impaired driving to be a very high priority, and we agree that government action is needed. It is imperative.

The former and current governments proposed the amendments in Bill C-32 to strengthen the enforcement of drug-impaired driving offences in response to this high level of public concern. Criminal legislation must be airtight, because unlike provincial traffic regulations, the accused is innocent unless proven guilty. A very high level of proof is required because for the accused the stakes are very high. Anyone convicted of a criminal offence will carry that record for life. The chances are therefore very high that such legislation will be challenged and loopholes found.

Drug-impaired driving is a very complex issue. Until the enormous problems identified in the Canada Safety Council's submissions are resolved, criminal legislation is premature. That is why we urge the government to put Bill C-32 on hold, until it can meet the rigorous requirements of a criminal court. There are other ways to respond to this serious problem, and we have recommended that these be pursued. The council agrees that immediate precautionary measures are in order, but the priority must be to protect the public from drug-impaired drivers, rather than simply impose criminal sanctions after the fact.

This committee is no doubt aware of Canada's strategy to reduce impaired driving, which is known by the acronym STRID. That strategy started in 1991 and has the full support of all provinces and territories, as well as Transport Canada. Justice Canada must not take unilateral action on impaired driving.

Canada's impaired driving laws are among the strictest in the world. Combined with leadership from STRID, this has led to significant progress in the fight against impaired driving. Between 1995 and 2000, road fatalities involving a driver who had been drinking went down by one third. That said, impaired driving remains a safety problem of the highest priority in this country.

In 2004, the latest year for which comprehensive statistics are available, road crashes involving a driver who had been drinking killed 815 people. Consistently about half of all impaired driving fatalities are the impaired drivers themselves—very definitely not innocent victims.

The absence of national statistics on motor vehicle fatalities or crashes involving drug impairment should be of concern. Good laws are not driven by feelings and opinion polls, but are based on hard facts, credible statistics, and solid research.

l expect that you have all looked at our submission, so l would like to review some of our recommendations.

It should be obvious that we believe Bill C-32 is premature, and we strongly recommend that it be put on hold for the necessary groundwork to be completed. Indeed, the government's priority should be to provide resources, and these include adequate funding to ensure that future legislation has a solid scientific basis and technological support, to identify drugs that can impair driving ability, and to establish defensible impairment levels for each drug and specify the measurement methods.

We have pointed out that more and more impaired driving cases are being pleaded outside the Criminal Code. The government must consider the reasons behind this trend before proceeding with further criminal legislation.

Administrative licence suspensions have proven effective in the fight against impaired driving. Under traffic codes, most Canadian jurisdictions impose 12- to 24-hour suspensions on drivers whose blood alcohol concentration is below the criminal limit. These suspensions remove potentially dangerous drivers from the road. They provide a stern and effective warning, without the punitive lifetime consequences of a criminal record and a costly criminal court case.

The Canada Safety Council has encouraged provincial and territorial governments to impose administrative licence suspensions on drivers who show impairment by substances other than alcohol. That is why we recommend that federal resources should redirect moneys earmarked for the implementation of this bill to help provinces and territories deal with drug-impaired driving under their traffic codes.

One of our key recommendations is that Justice Canada should collaborate with STRID to coordinate any amendments to the Criminal Code with respect to drug-impaired driving. I stress that it could be counterproductive for Justice Canada to enact impaired driving legislation that interferes with the national strategy and counters measures now in place.

Proponents of Bill C-32 say a driver impaired by cannabis poses as much of a risk as a driver who is above the legal limit with alcohol. First of all, the bill is not restricted to cannabis. On top of that, there is no scientific basis to establish impairment by cannabis, or for that matter, any drug.

It should also be noted that the evidence clearly shows alcohol carries a higher risk than cannabis. The underlying problem with this illicit drug is that it is an illegal substance. The focus should be on the fact that so many Canadians are using it at all. Its negative health and safety effects extend far beyond impairment while driving. A national strategy is needed to reduce cannabis use, with an emphasis on youth and habitual users. In our opinion, this is far more urgent than criminal legislation on drug-impaired driving at this time.

It may be counter-intuitive, but there is little evidence that drivers who have used cannabis on its own are more likely to cause crashes than drug-free drivers. It does negatively impact driving ability, although in very different ways from alcohol. THC, the active component in cannabis, can be detected in the body for up to four weeks, but its impairing effects do not last. Relatively few road fatalities test positive for THC alone. Most often it is found in combination with alcohol, a combination that drastically increases crash risk.

Roadside breathalyzers allow police to detect and measure the presence of alcohol. At present there is, unfortunately, no reliable, non-intrusive roadside method to test for cannabis. Even if such a test were available, a defensible limit must be set at which a cannabis-using driver is criminally impaired. Before criminal legislation can be implemented, defensible criteria must be set for THC impairment, alone and also in combination with alcohol, and the government must approve detection tools for use by trained police officers. This process alone could take years, but without it the law will not be enforceable.

l'd like to move on to medications, which are also covered in Bill C-32.

Canadians over age 65 take an average of nine medications daily, including prescription, over-the-counter, and herbal. Medications can have a positive or negative effect on driving ability. Some people, such as epileptics, may not be able to drive at all without medication. Physicians prescribe benzodiazepines to combat anxiety and insomnia among seniors. They can have side effects such as drowsiness, impaired motor function, and confusion, and have been implicated in many collisions.

Seniors taking certain painkillers may experience sedation and mild impairment. Even over-the-counter drugs can reduce driving ability. Antihistamines can cause drowsiness and poor concentration. Tranquilizers or cold remedies such as cold tablets, cough syrup, and sleeping pills can reduce driving ability. Combinations of medications can also produce unexpected side effects and bad reactions. Combining alcohol with medications is very risky, especially for seniors. With age, tolerance for alcohol decreases steadily, and the body does process it less efficiently.

Currently about 22,000 human drugs are available in this country. To identify those that can impair driving—alone or in combination with other substances—and then set defensible criteria for each and approve measurement tools just poses a huge challenge.

With Canada's aging population, legal medications present a health and safety issue that extends beyond driving and must be addressed. The council views this as a very important health and safety issue, but not a criminal issue.

Other strategies, some of which are already in place, would be far more effective and appropriate than using the Criminal Code to prevent driving under the influence of potentially impairing medications. We have therefore recommended that the federal government develop and fund a strategy, including public education, to address concerns associated with impairment by medication. Justice Canada must assess the rationale for and potential consequences of using the Criminal Code as a legislative tool to address medication-related impairment. This issue, in our view, is a better fit with Health Canada's mandate.

To a lesser extent, illegal use of prescription medications such as those with psychotropic properties, as well as the use of illicit drugs such as cocaine, are factors in impaired driving. Targeting cannabis could turn users to other, even more harmful substances.

In summary, we know politicians are under pressure to do something about the perceived increase in drug-impaired driving. However, the proposed criminal legislation is likely to be ineffective, and even counterproductive. We urge you not to risk failure. Address the problem in collaboration with the appropriate agencies outside the Criminal Code at this time.

Thank you very much.

[Nicole Dufour, Lawyer, Research and Legislation Service, Barreau du Québec]

Good morning. As you say, I am responsible for coordinating the work of the Criminal Law Committee of the Quebec Bar. That Committee is made up equally of members who are defence lawyers and Crown attorneys. Academia is also represented on the Committee. With me today is Mr. Belleau, who will answer questions, as appropriate.

To begin with, I would like to summarize the Quebec Bar's position on Bill C-32. What we can say, right from the start, is that we agree with the goal being pursued through this bill, which is to establish rules to ensure effective action against impaired driving under the influence of drugs. However, we do have some concerns that we would like to make you aware of.

This bill creates a new offence—that is, the operation or the fact of having the care or control of a motor vehicle while in possession of a controlled substance, within the meaning of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The Quebec Bar believes that there is no rational link between the intent of the bill and the offence of possession. In the absence of a breach of the driver's obligation, there should be no such offence. The offence of possession is, in fact, already provided for under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Furthermore, the penalties that are suggested for a first conviction on the new offence, which is an order prohibiting the offender from operating a motor vehicle for a period of at least a year, with no access to mitigation measures, appears to us to be unduly harsh, considering the absence of a logical connection between the offence of possession of a controlled substance and the prohibition to operate a motor vehicle.

We agree with changes that would allow a peace officer to make a video recording of a performance of the physical coordination tests. However, we would like there to be an obligation, on the part of peace officers, to systematically make such video recordings, in order that the best possible evidence be available. This would probably limit the nature and scope of legal debate on these issues.

With respect to sentencing, the Quebec Bar advocates the free exercise of judicial discretion by the court in order to ensure that punishment is just, by balancing the relevant principles. In that respect, the Quebec Bar cannot support the changes proposed in the bill with respect to the minimum fine for a first offence and the minimum prison term for a subsequent offence.

The effects of imposing a minimum fine will vary based on the financial circumstances of the accused. The Quebec Bar is concerned about the negative repercussions of such a penalty on the offender's family. Indeed, imposing a prison term of no less than 90 days for a third offence would mean that the sentence could not be served intermittently. That could have unfortunate consequences, such as the loss of employment, for example, and would clearly affect other members of the accused's family.

The bill also provides that, in the absence of evidence tending to show both that the approved instrument malfunctioned or was used incorrectly, or that, when the analysis was performed, the concentration of alcohol in the accused's blood would not have exceeded 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood, evidence corresponding to the results of the analysis will constitute conclusive proof of the accused's blood alcohol level at the time the offence was alleged to have been committed.

The Quebec Bar is concerned about this double requirement of evidence and its consequences. We believe that conclusive proof as to the malfunction or improper use of the equipment should suffice to reject the test results. Otherwise, we believe this provision is likely to violate the presumption of innocence.

The bill also proposes to make it impossible to adduce direct evidence of a blood alcohol level of less than 0.08 with a view to challenging the instrument results. We are concerned that this could lead to wrongful convictions. As an illustration, we would cite the example of an accused who, after failing such a test, decided on his own to go to a health clinic for the purposes of determining, through a blood test, what his blood alcohol level was. If the results of that test showed the level to be under the limit, that person would not have an opportunity to adduce that direct evidence if he or she had been unable to prove that the instrument malfunctioned or was operated improperly.

The Quebec Bar is also concerned about the difficulties an accused could encounter when attempting to demonstrate that the instrument malfunctioned or was used incorrectly. What exactly would he or she have access to?

Those are our comments.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

I'd like to call the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to order. This being Tuesday, June 5, 2007, the orders of the day, as noted, bring about the discussion on Bill C-32, an act to amend the Criminal Code on impaired driving and to make consequential amendments to other acts.

We have a number of witnesses appearing before the committee. I will just go down the list. We will begin with the Barreau du Québec and Mr. Louis Belleau, who is the president of the committee on criminal law of the Barreau du Québec, and Nicole Dufour, a lawyer with research and legislation services. From the Canada Safety Council, we have Mr. Raynald Marchand, general manager of programs; Emile Therien, past president; Ethel Archard, consultant. As an individual, we have Line Beauchesne, associate professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa. From the Criminal Lawyers' Association, we have Paul Burstein, director; and Jonathan Rosenthal, representative.

Welcome, all.

I will begin with the Barreau du Québec, please.

Is it Mr. Belleau?

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, with regard to the last point, we have already addressed that.

However, with regard to the balance of Thursday's statement, I am pleased to respond that today and tomorrow we will continue with Bill C-55, the expanded voting opportunities bill; Bill C-14, the adoption bill; Bill C-57, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act; and Bill C-45, the fisheries act.

In the last Thursday statement, we indicated that we were hoping to have this week as “enhancing the quality of the life of first nations people week” but this was cancelled by the opposition parties when they did not release Bill C-44 from committee, the bill that would give the first nations protection under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Not only is it being held up now but, as early as this morning in this House, the opposition obstructed our efforts to get the bill dealt with forthwith so that first nations people could have the human rights that every other Canadian enjoys. We know that if all parties would agree to proceed with that, as we saw when we sought unanimous consent, it could proceed, but some would prefer to obstruct it.

Next week will be welcome back from committee week, when we welcome business that has been at committee, including some that has been stalled there for some time. We will deal with Bill C-52, the budget implementation bill, which will begin report stage on Monday and, hopefully, we can get third reading wrapped up by Tuesday.

Following the budget bill, we will call for report stage and third reading of Bill C-35, bail reform. After that, we will call Bill C-23, the Criminal Code amendments. I hardly remember when Bill C-23 was sent to the committee by this House. That took place long before I was even House leader 228 days ago.

Thursday, June 7, shall be the last allotted day. There are a number of other bills that we would like to include in our welcome back from committee week. I still hope we can see Bill C-44, the amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act, to which I just referred; Bill C-6, the amendments to the Aeronautics Act; Bill C-27 dealing with dangerous offenders; Bill C-32 dealing with impaired driving; and Bill C-33 dealing with foreign investment, if the opposition parties will release those from committee.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have just a quick question. I don't know if you can answer it for me, Mr. Yost, but Bill C-32 and its predecessor, Bill C-16, have been in the public domain for a while now. I'm assuming there's generally widespread support, at least among the law enforcement community and parliamentarians.

Can you tell us who is not supportive of this initiative and the approach they're taking?

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much for your presentation, Minister.

I have just a couple of questions. One concerns--and I don't know what the term is in English--l'expert en reconnaissance des drogues. I'd like to know how many police officers across Canada have already been certified as such experts and how many more will be required in order to ensure that Bill C-32, when it becomes the law, will actually be implemented, and there is no excuse.

Given that le test de sobriété normalisés for drug impairment is already being used in Canada in several jurisdictions, has it been contested before the courts for its constitutionality; and if it has, what has been the result of that?

I'd also like to know the success rate of the test and the rate of conviction as compared to alcohol, if you have those statistics. If those statistics are not available, then that is a request we would make to the centre in future, to try to get that breakdown.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome, Minister. I would appreciate it if you could focus strictly on the bill at hand, because so far, you have not said much about it. That is, after all, why you are here today.

When police officers, peace officers have reasonable grounds to believe that an individual is driving while drug-impaired, they will have new ways of assessing that individual. The legislative summaries refer to standardized field sobriety tests and drug recognition experts. These are two seemingly different processes, the second of which calls for training which would involve provincial areas of jurisdiction.

How will this new bill C-32 provide for the assessment of drug-impaired individuals? Why does the Criminal Code not contain numerical tests? There's no reference to set indices, but rather to reasonable grounds.

How will this play out in actual fact? Let's say, for instance, that I am on highway 20 and a police officer has reason to believe that I am driving while impaired by a drug. I want to understand what these expressions "standardized field sobriety test" and "drug recognition experts" mean.

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. As you indicated, I'm here with Greg Yost from the criminal law policy section and Corporal Evan Graham from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I just want to make sure you know that he's not here for my protection; he's here for your edification. I want to make that clear at the outset.

I'm pleased to appear before you again as you begin consideration of Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

I note that the bill received the support of all parties in the House, but that a number of members have expressed various concerns and look forward to the standing committee's hearings during which experts should be able to respond to their questions.

I want to reiterate that the government is open to consideration of any amendments that are consistent with the scope and principle of this bill and that you consider would strengthen the bill.

As you know, the bill deals with three components: drug impaired driving, defences to a charge of driving with blood alcohol content exceeding 80 milligrams, and amendments that respond to various problems in the Criminal Code's impaired driving provisions.

With respect to drug impaired driving, I should indicate that the provisions of Bill C-32 are almost identical to Bill C-16 as it was amended by the standing committee in the last Parliament. It will provide the legislative framework for the drug recognition expert or the DRE program.

Canada is actually behind some countries, including the United States, in this particular field. Since 1984, for instance, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the United States has supported a drug recognition expert training program, which was initially developed by the Los Angeles, California, police department. DRE training has been validated through both laboratory and field studies conducted by Johns Hopkins University.

In 1987, the highway safety committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police was requested by the NHTSA to participate in the development of a national expansion of drug recognition experts, as well as to oversee certifying of the DREs. It took until 1992 for all the work to be done on the first set of IACP standards to be adopted. Those standards have been revised over the years based on the advice of medical and other experts.

In Canada, DRE-certified officers only use DRE where a suspect voluntarily participates in the testing. Once our legislation authorizing police to make DRE demands is in place, we expect Canada to continue to look to the IACP process to ensure we are always using the most up-to-date, scientifically validated practices and procedures.

Of course my officials and I are not the experts on the pharmacology of various drugs, their effects on the ability of a person to drive, or how long the drug lingers in the body, but we will endeavour to respond to any questions that members have. I'm pleased to have a couple of experts with me.

I would point out that we have been guided by the advice of the drugs and driving committee of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science. In 1999, when it was examining the impaired driving provisions, it suggested that there was a need to have legislative demands to perform sobriety tests and DRE evaluations.

Some members of this committee are likely familiar with the DRE program from previous hearings. Therefore, I will outline just the main steps.

First, the officer must suspect the presence of a drug in the body before demanding sobriety tests. That suspicion could be based on a number of factors, including the smell of marijuana or physical symptoms such as eyes that do not react normally to light. This is similar to the suspicion of alcohol in the body based on the smell of alcohol or watery eyes, which is the requirement for a demand for a breath test on a screening device at roadside.

Second, it is only if the driver has failed the roadside sobriety test that the officer can demand further tests at the police station. That the driver is unable to walk a straight line or stand on one foot and hold the other six inches off the ground--the usual tests--the officer now has reasonable grounds to believe that the impairment may be caused by a drug or a combination of drugs and alcohol. This is similar to the officer who has reasonable grounds to believe that the person is impaired by alcohol can take the person to the station for a breath test, the result of which can be used in court.

I believe that members will agree that a person who can't perform the simple roadside sobriety tests should not be driving. If the impairment is caused by alcohol or a drug, the person's impairment is a criminal act. The person has voluntarily consumed a substance that reduces his or her ability to drive.

If the impairment is caused by a medical condition, the person will be sent for medical attention. It is then a matter for provincial driver licensing authorities.

The DRE-trained officer will examine the person and have the person perform certain prescribed tests, including, for example, eye examinations in different lighting, muscle tone, blood pressure, and pulse. Before the DRE expert can demand that a bodily substance be analyzed for the presence of a drug, the expert will have formed the opinion that the person's ability is impaired by a family of drugs or a combination of drugs and alcohol.

Third, the analysis of a bodily sample will either confirm or refute the presence of the drug that the DRE has identified as causing the impairment. This is a check on the officer's identification of the involvement of a specific drug family.

Ultimately the court will have before it evidence of erratic driving or behaviour, failure to complete simple physical coordination tests, a DRE report on the physical symptoms observed that lead to the conclusion the impairment is caused by a family of drugs, and proof by analysis that the person had the drugs in his or her body. It's my understanding that the courts in Canada have found that sufficient evidence to found a conviction in cases where the DRE has proceeded with the voluntary participation of a driver. What Bill C-32 will do is compel the person to participate in the physical coordination tests and in the DRE process.

I now turn to the current use of evidence to the contrary in the courts. I note that during the debate at second reading, reforms we are proposing received strong support. In particular, Mr. Comartin, who has studied this issue quite extensively and has seen the consequences of impaired driving, has said a number of times that the way the two-beer defence has been used is almost a “scandal”.

I agree with him. A two-beer defence is a scandal. It may have had merit in an era when breath test instruments used a needle that had to be read by a technician and the results written down. But with modern electronic instruments that have built-in operability checks and that print out the results, these reasons to accept a two-beer defence no longer apply. The two-beer defence makes all the care that goes into testing and approving instruments, and training operators to use them, close to a waste of time.

One question that was raised was whether it was appropriate for the Criminal Code to restrict the kind of evidence that can be brought forward. I can tell you that Parliament has done so in the past--for example, in the rape shield provisions that restrict the cross-examination of a victim of sexual assault regarding past sexual conduct. It is altogether appropriate, therefore, for Parliament to limit the evidence to the contrary to evidence that has scientific merit. The accused will still be able to bring evidence of consumption, but unless there is evidence either that the approved instrument was malfunctioning or was not operating properly, the evidence of consumption will only be relevant if it is compatible both with the BAC recorded on the instrument and also with the person being under 80 milligrams at the time of driving--for example, because the person had a drink after the driving and before the testing.

I would like to refer to a few other particularly notable reforms proposed by Bill C-32. The bill proposes to increase the current penalties in several ways. I think the higher minimum of $1,000 for a first offence, up from the current $600, reflects the seriousness of the crime. We also propose to come down harder on the repeat impaired driver by increasing the mandatory terms of imprisonment, including raising from 90 to 120 days the minimum for a third-time offender.

We do not believe it is appropriate--and I trust the committee will agree--for a person who has two previous convictions to be able to seek to serve the sentence on an intermittent basis, as they now do. Moreover, we are proposing that the maximum term of imprisonment, if the prosecution proceeds summarily, be increased from six to 18 months.

Our provincial colleagues tell us that there are currently many cases where they will ask for more than six months of imprisonment. They have to proceed by indictment, a more serious and more expensive procedure, even though they know they will not be seeking more than 18 months. Eighteen months' maximum on a summary conviction is the same as that provided for a number of offences, including uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm, assault causing bodily harm, sexual assault, and forcible confinement. So the government believes that the threat of harm caused by the impaired driver merits the same maximum punishment on summary convictions as those offences.

In addition, the bill proposes creating new offences of being over 80 milligrams or refusing to provide a breath sample and causing bodily harm or death. These new offences reflect the general approach of the Criminal Code to treat impaired...or being over 80 milligrams and refusal in the same manner.

Currently the Criminal Code only has the offence of impaired driving causing bodily harm or death. In an accident situation, there may be no direct evidence of the person's driving. The symptoms ordinarily used to indicate impairment, such as being unsteady on one's feet, may be attributed to the effects of the accident. There is, therefore, an incentive for the person involved in an accident not to provide a breath sample, and because the certificate establishing BAC can be crucial evidence to establish that the person's ability to drive was in fact impaired....

I believe Bill C-32 is a balanced legislation that will greatly assist the police, prosecutors, and the courts in dealing with impaired drivers. I urge the committee to deal with it expeditiously.

Mr. Chairman, that concludes my remarks. I'd be pleased to answer any questions that the committee may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

I would like to call the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to order on Wednesday, May 30, 2007. The orders for today are centred around Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

Appearing before the committee is the Minister of Justice, the Honourable Rob Nicholson, and one departmental support individual, Greg Yost, counsel, criminal law policy section. From the RCMP we have Evan Graham, national coordinator, drug evaluation and classification program. Thank you for being here, Minister and gentlemen.

Please proceed, Minister.

Justice

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, I share the hon. member's concerns. As part of this government's crime fighting agenda, we have introduced Bill C-32 to better crack down on impaired driving in our country. We are giving police the tools they need to better detect drug impaired drivers. We are increasing the penalties for drug impairment.

This is one part of the government's crime fighting initiative, but I want to assure Canadians we are just getting started.

Criminal Code

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I stand today to speak in support of Bill C-343, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (motor vehicle theft), and I thank the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle for bringing this important bill forward.

It is clear from reading Bill C-343 that this proposed legislation is directed at combating the high rate of auto theft in Canada. Reducing the rate of auto theft would make Canadian streets safer and would target a major source of profits for criminal organizations.

The bill would amend the Criminal Code to create a distinct offence with enhanced penalties for the theft of a motor vehicle. The bill provides that the sentence for a first offence would be a minimum punishment of a fine of $1,000 or a minimum prison term of three months, or both. A second offence would result in a mandatory minimum fine of $5,000 or a minimum prison term of six months, or both. A third and subsequent offence would result in a minimum fine of $10,000 and a minimum term of two years imprisonment with a maximum of ten years.

The auto theft rate in Canada must be reduced. Statistics Canada reports that more than 160,000 cars were stolen in 2005, which is up from 130,000 in 2003. The Insurance Bureau of Canada estimates that motor vehicle theft costs Canadians over $1 billion a year in insurance costs, health care, court, policing and out of pocket expenses such as deductibles.

While the financial cost of auto theft is a serious concern, an even greater concern is the dangerous driving that often results from the commission of the offence of stealing a car. Dangerous driving can and does result in serious injury and death to innocent Canadians. Such was the case of the tragic death of Theresa McEvoy, a Nova Scotian educator and mother of three children. She was killed on October 14, 2004 when her car was struck by a youth driving a stolen vehicle. Just recently in Regina a young girl was killed when the minivan in which she was driving was struck by a stolen car whose driver was evading the police.

In my own province of Manitoba, the city of Winnipeg has become the auto theft capital of Canada. Manitoba's auto theft rate jumped over 10% in the last two years, despite a $22 million program to put in ignition immobilizers in as many vehicles as possible. In 2006, Manitoba recorded 9,449 vehicle thefts, up from 8,957 in 2005, but still down from the record 10,638 in 2004, one of the worst years ever for car theft, which placed Manitoba on top among provinces for auto theft.

This epidemic often leads to the destruction of vehicles and serious injuries to law-abiding motorists and pedestrians when the stolen vehicles are used as weapons or taken for dangerous joyrides.

Just last month a group of kids in Winnipeg stole vehicles and then targeted joggers, clipping them with their car mirrors. It is these kind of criminals that we need to get off our streets.

There is also a trend in Canada where auto theft is shifting away from random acts of crime toward organized criminal activity. Experts link the recovery rate of stolen cars to the degree of organized crime involvement. The recovery rate for stolen cars is on the decline. For example, in Toronto, over 90% of stolen cars used to be found and returned. Now that rate is less than 70%. In Quebec, less than 50% of stolen cars are recovered.

Out of close to the 170,000 automobiles stolen every year, police and insurance experts estimate that about 20,000 of these cars are shipped abroad to destinations such as eastern Europe, West Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Vehicle theft rings are insidious organizations that the government is determined to fight. They tend to be complex organizations made up of brokers who hire middlemen who, in turn, hire thieves to steal the cars. Typically, the thieves are young people who are instructed to steal the vehicle and deliver it to a set location. At this point, the vehicle is normally chopped and dismantled for parts or re-VINed, where the vehicle identification number is altered, or the car is exported.

Another serious issue is the role of young offenders in motor vehicle theft. Almost 40% of those charged for stealing a motor vehicle are between the ages of 12 and 17. Oftentimes cars are stolen for joyriding but, increasingly, organized crime is recruiting youth to their operations. Youths are required to steal the cars and deliver them to a middleman, while the criminals at the upper levels of the organization are protected from the risk of getting caught by the law.

Canadians know that our government is committed to getting tough on crime. We have introduced a number of pieces of legislation that aim to crack down on serious criminal offences.

Bill C-10 was introduced to increase the mandatory minimum penalty for serious offences involving firearms for gang related offences. For offences committed with a restricted or prohibited firearm, such as a handgun, there are mandatory minimum penalties of five years on a first offence and seven years for a second or subsequent offence.

The government has proven its commitment to combat dangerous driving through Bill C-19, which created five new offences to combat street racing and also provided for mandatory minimum periods of driving prohibitions. I am pleased that the House supported the bill and, indeed, that it received royal assent on December 14, 2006.

Another step that the government has taken to make our roads and highways safer is with Bill C-32. In 2003, alcohol and/or drugs were involved in 1,257 fatalities, 47,181 injuries and 161,299 property-damage-only crashes involving 245,174 vehicles. The total financial and social costs of these losses are estimated to be as high as $10.95 billion.

The bill would significantly increase fines and minimum jail terms for driving while impaired. It also would make it easier to investigate and prosecute impaired driving cases. The bill also deals with those who drive while on drugs, authorizing police to demand roadside physical sobriety tests and bodily substance samples at the police station.

The government has shown its commitment to crime prevention in the 2007 budget in which $64 million over two years were set aside to establish a new national anti-drug strategy to crack down on gangs, grow ops and crystal meth labs, prevent illicit drug use and treat illicit drug dependency. In addition, $14 million over two years have been set aside to combat the criminal use of firearms.

Under the current law, a person who steals a motor vehicle is normally charged with theft over $5,000. Bill C-343 would create a separate, distinct offence for motor vehicle theft.

Another compelling reason for the creation of a distinct offence is that it would make the criminal justice system more efficient. Currently, a prosecutor is often unaware of whether an offender is a career car thief. Normally the offender is simply charged with theft over $5,000 and there is no indication on the record as to the type of property that was stolen. The creation of a distinct offence would help to give the courts a clearer picture of the nature of the offender for bail hearings or when it comes time to handing down a sentence.

I support Bill C-343 and urge hon. members to send the bill to committee so it can be reviewed in greater detail.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to express my support for Bill C-343, introduced by the hon. member for Regina—Qu'Appelle.

The government agrees that there is a pressing need to reduce the high rate of vehicles stolen every day in this country. This bill, by creating a distinct offence for motor vehicle theft, aims to do just that.

It is true that there are many offences in the Criminal Code that already address motor vehicle theft, such as theft, fraud, joyriding, possession of property obtained by crime, and flight from a peace officer. However, this bill will create a distinct offence, with penalties in the form of mandatory minimum sentences.

The sentence for a first offence will be a minimum fine of $1,000 or a minimum term of imprisonment of three months, or both. A second offence would result in a mandatory minimum fine of $5,000 or a minimum prison term of six months, or both. A third and subsequent offence would result in a minimum fine of $10,000 and a minimum term of imprisonment of two years, up to a maximum term of 10 years.

I am aware that not all members will agree on the penalty that a distinct Criminal Code offence for motor vehicle theft should have. However, I am certain that most members can agree on the utility of creating such an offence. Accordingly, the bill should be sent to the appropriate committee for review on its merits, including the proposed penalties.

I would like to note that the idea of a distinct offence for motor vehicle theft was supported by the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre on March 20, 2007, when he introduced Motion No. 295 calling for, among other things, an amendment to the Criminal Code to include auto theft as a distinct, stand-alone offence. Clearly this is an issue that cuts across party lines and is one that most members of the House can support.

Winnipeg holds the dubious distinction of being the car theft capital of Canada. For example, in Winnipeg, the auto theft rate in 2005 was 1,712 thefts per 100,000 population, whereas in Toronto there were 306 thefts reported per 100,000 population.

It is clear that the rate of auto theft in Canada is simply unacceptable. In 2001, the per capita rate of auto theft was 26% higher in Canada than it was in the United States. In the 1999 international crime victimization survey, Canada ranked fifth highest for a risk of car theft, with 1.6% of the population being a victim of car theft. Overall since 2001, the auto theft rate has remained roughly the same.

While in recent years auto theft rates have held steady at unacceptably high rates, the number of stolen vehicles that are recovered has been on the decline. It used to be that over 90% of stolen cars were recovered. Today, that rate has fallen to 70% nationwide, with recovery rates varying by city. In large cities in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia, organized crime groups are believed to be more active in thefts, thanks in part to readily accessible ports that allow cars to be shipped out of the country quickly and with relative ease.

Out of the approximately 170,000 automobiles stolen every year, police and insurance experts estimate that about 20,000 of these cars are shipped abroad to destinations such as Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Stealing and reselling a vehicle is an extremely lucrative way for organized criminals to make money.

Let us take, for example, the scenario when a new luxury SUV is stolen. It is valued at $65,000 on the lot. It would cost an organized criminal around $1,000 to pay a youth to steal the car and approximately $1,500 to have the car “re-VINned” if it is being sold in Canada, or if it is exported to another jurisdiction, around $3,000 for shipping and handling. The automobile would likely be sold for around $45,000, resulting in a profit of nearly $40,000 per car.

Clearly the rewards for motor vehicle theft are enormous. There is a great incentive for young future career criminals to get involved in motor vehicle theft rings.

The involvement of youth in motor vehicle theft is a serious problem. Almost 40% of those charged with stealing motor vehicles are between the ages of 12 and 17 years. While vehicles are often stolen by youth for joyriding, it is also frequently the case that youth are enticed by organized criminals to steal an automobile and deliver it to a predetermined location all for a set fee. This involvement in organized crime unfortunately often has the effect of cementing criminal behaviour in young offenders. This influence on Canada's at risk youth is another tragic aspect of motor vehicle theft.

Not all of the news is bad though. Advances in technology, such as alarm systems, steering wheel locks, and GPS tracking units are making it harder to steal motor vehicles. However, as technology advances so do the skills that professional car thieves use to defeat these technologies.

So while the smash and grab method employed by most joy riders will no longer work on newer cars outfitted with sophisticated anti-theft devices, the new career car thief will ultimately find ways to outfox these devices.

It has already been mentioned that auto theft costs Canadians more than a billion dollars a year in insurance costs, medical costs, legal costs, police costs, and costs to the victims, such as insurance deductibles.

However, what about the costs that are impossible to calculate? I am referring to the human toll that motor vehicle theft has on our society. All too often when a car is stolen, the offender will drive erratically or at a high speed and not always because of police pursuit. Each year motor vehicle theft results in over 30 deaths and over 50 people being seriously injured a year in Canada.

Recently, a 10 year old girl in Regina was killed after a driver of a stolen pickup truck smashed into the minivan she was travelling in while he was attempting to escape the police.

As a society we do not tolerate impaired driving and our laws should treat this type of dangerous driving with the same seriousness. It is time that we reaffirm our commitment to making Canada's roads and highways safer.

I am proud that the government is taking a number of measures to tackle crime in Canada. We have introduced a number of pieces of legislation that deal with serious criminal offences.

Bill C-10 was introduced to ensure that criminals who use guns in the commission of an offence or if an offence is gang related receive a very serious sentence with escalating mandatory minimum penalties for first and subsequent offences.

As well, the government also introduced Bill C-35 which seeks to protect the public from gun crime by amending the bail provisions in the Criminal Code. The proposed amendments would reverse the onus to the accused to prove why he or she should not be denied bail when the accused is charged with a serious offence committed with a firearm or charged with smuggling or trafficking firearms.

The government is serious about making our roads and highways safer. We introduced Bill C-19 which created five new offences to combat street racing. It also gets these dangerous drivers off the road by providing mandatory minimum periods of driving prohibition. I am pleased that this bill received royal assent on December 14, 2006.

Another step the government has taken to make our roads and highways safe is with Bill C-32 which aims to significantly increase fines and minimum jail terms for driving while impaired. This bill tackles driving while under the influence of both alcohol and drugs. Although it is already a crime to drive while impaired by drugs, currently police officers have to rely on symptoms of impairment to driving behaviour for an impaired driving investigation. There is no authority in the Criminal Code to demand physical sobriety tests or bodily fluid samples.

Bill C-32 would authorize the police to demand roadside testing and a drug recognition expert evaluation at the police station, and if this evaluation shows impairment, the police will be authorized to demand a sample of bodily fluid to identify that the impairment was caused by an illegal drug. Refusal to comply with these demands would be a criminal offence punishable by the same penalties for refusing to submit to an alcohol breath test.

The government is also committed to crime prevention. The 2007 budget allocates $64 million over two years to establish a national anti-drug strategy to crack down on gangs, grow ops and meth labs, prevent elicit drug use and illicit drug dependency. As well, the government has set aside $14 million over two years to combat the criminal use of firearms.

The hon. member for Regina—Qu'Appelle has brought forward a very important issue for the House to consider. I urge all hon. members to vote to send this bill to committee for further review.

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I'm pleased to be back in front of you.

I'm pleased to see Mr. Rick Dykstra, one of my colleagues from the Niagara Peninsula and now a member of this committee. It's nice to see him here. I know of his dedication to justice issues, and I appreciate that.

Mr. Chairman, I've learned over the years that any time you get up to speak, if you're going to start recognizing people in a crowd, then you should have the names written down in advance so that you don't miss anyone. I missed someone yesterday. I was at the National Victims of Crime Awareness Week symposium in Ottawa, and when I got up to introduce the first federal ombudsman for victims of crime, I recognized my colleagues Stockwell Day, Dean Allison, and Laurie Hawn. I didn't see Ms. Jennings in the audience, and I apologize to her for that.

I actually noticed you, Ms. Jennings, as I was walking off the podium, when I saw you in the second or third row. That's not something I would do; I would certainly acknowledge all my colleagues in the House of Commons. In future, I'll revert to my usual procedure, which is to write down the names of the people I'm going to acknowledge—or not do it at all.

In any case, I'm glad to see you here, and I'm glad you were at the meeting yesterday.

It is a pleasure for me to meet with the members of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to discuss the main estimates for the Department of Justice.

And I'm pleased to have my colleagues joining me here today—and you have introduced them, Mr. Chairman.

You would know, Mr. Chairman, as well that not only am I Minister of Justice and Attorney General, but my portfolio also includes the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Minister of Justice, of course, is also responsible for the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, created last December by the Federal Accountability Act to enshrine in legislation the notion of prosecutorial independence.

I'll speak more about that in a moment, but first of all, I want to say that the work of the Department of Justice focuses on ensuring that Canada is a just and law-abiding society, with an accessible, efficient, and fair system of justice, providing high-quality legal services and counsel to the government and to client departments and agencies, and promoting respect for the rule of law.

Within this broad context, the department has a specific priority to develop legislation and policy that address crime more effectively and increase the confidence of Canadians in the judicial system. Ultimately this will promote safer communities for all Canadians and have a very real impact on their lives.

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased with the progress that our government has made on the priorities of Canadians, particularly in the realm of tackling crime. My predecessor, Minister Toews, was placed in charge of an ambitious legislative agenda. I have now taken on the challenge of that agenda and will continue to work diligently to guide the legislation through the House and of course will work with this committee.

One overarching priority has guided our government's work over the past 14 months, and that is safer communities for all Canadians. Part of that priority is tackling crime. From the beginning of our mandate, we have been committed to stronger laws that deal with gangs, guns, and drugs; ensuring serious consequences for serious crimes; and ensuring that our communities are safe from crime. That commitment has not wavered.

We also believe that Canada's justice system must adapt to the needs of the 21st century so that it can remain in step with changes in technology and an increasingly sophisticated population. In these endeavours, I've been working closely with my colleague, the Minister of Public Safety, Stockwell Day, to deliver on that promise to tackle crime.

We have introduced legislation on a number of fronts. For example, Bill C-35 proposes to shift the onus to the person accused of serious gun crimes to explain why they should not be denied bail. And Bill C-18 intends to strengthen our national DNA data bank and help our police forces identify the guilty and exonerate the innocent.

I am pleased to say that with the support of all parties in the House we brought into force Bill Bill C-19, which creates new offences that target street racing specifically. These new offences recognize street racing for what it is, a reckless and dangerous act that too often kills. With our new legislation, people who treat our public streets as race tracks will be dealt with more seriously.

We also passed legislation, introduced by my colleague, the Minister of Finance, the Honourable Jim Flaherty, to strengthen the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act. These changes will help ensure that Canada continues to be a global leader in combatting organized crime and terrorist financing.

We are also committed to better meet the needs of victims of crime in areas where the federal government is responsible. Our government has listened and responded to victims of crime, giving them the respect they deserve. We have established the Office of the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime. Just yesterday, I was pleased to name Steve Sullivan as the first federal ombudsman. This office will be an independent resource for victims who have concerns about areas for which the federal government is responsible, including the federal correction system. Mr. Sullivan will work at arm's length from the government so that victims will be more confident that their views are being heard.

We also recently provided $52 million in funding over the next four years to boost programs, services, and funding for victims of crime, including: enhancing financial assistance to victims to travel to sentencing hearings to deliver victim impact statements, as well as to National Parole Board hearings; increasing funding for services in the north, where rates of victimization are much higher than in the rest of Canada; and providing limited emergency financial assistance for Canadians who become victims of serious violent crimes while abroad.

However, Mr. Chairman, the government also recognizes that it is equally important to prevent criminal behaviour before it has a chance to take root. We are addressing the root causes of crime by supporting community programs with effective social programs and sound economic policies.

In support of these goals, Budget 2007 commits $64 million over the next two years to create a national anti-drug strategy. This investment builds on ongoing annual funding for current programs and initiatives. This government is determined to sever these links by implementing a coherent, comprehensive national strategy against drugs. Although some details of the strategy remain to be worked out, I can say that it will focus on preventing drug use, treating drug addiction, and combatting drug production and distribution. Together, these three action plans will form an integrated, focused, and balanced approach to reducing the supply and demand for illicit drugs as well as the crime associated with them, leading to healthier individuals and safer communities. The strategy will address all illegal drugs, including marijuana, and will include a national awareness campaigned aimed at young people.

To succeed over the long term, I believe we must educate young people about the real risks associated with drug use, such as the dangers to mental and physical health, potential legal consequences, and impacts on career and travel options. It will also spur communities into action and engage local leaders in preventing the harm caused by illegal drugs.

Our government is also providing $20 million over two years to support community-based programs that provide youth at risk with positive opportunities and help them make good choices. And we will continue to work with the provinces, municipalities, police, and community leaders in areas threatened by gun and gang violence to support programs that reach out to young people.

We've also continued the drug treatment court program, which is an important initiative of the Department of Justice. In conjunction with Health Canada, my department has been instrumental in expanding the concept of drug treatment courts beyond the initial pilot program in Toronto to several communities across Canada. Our government supports the use of drug treatment courts because they help reduce criminal behaviour and drug use while holding offenders accountable for their actions.

We've also made changes to improve and strengthen the justice system. Last November, my predecessor implemented changes to the judicial advisory committees. These changes have broadened the base of stakeholders who will contribute to their discussion and assessment of competence and excellence required for federally appointed judges.

More specifically, we've included members of the law enforcement community, a community no less implicated in the administration of justice than lawyers and judges. These new members contribute another perspective on the competent and qualified individuals recommended to me for appointment to the bench. And we have moved expeditiously to fill vacancies in federal and provincial courts. To date, we have appointed 84 federal judges. I think this is an impressive record, given that the coming into force of Bill C-17 on December 14, 2006, provided federally appointed judges with new options for electing supernumerary status, which created even more vacancies. However, I must emphasize that we will not sacrifice the quality of our appointments in the interest of speed. These appointments will continue to be based on merit and legal excellence.

Additionally, in the interests of accountability we have created the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and have now begun the process of selecting a permanent director. Candidates will be assessed by a committee, with representation from each political party, the senior public service, and the legal profession. As Attorney General, I will make a choice from among three candidates, and that choice will be referred for approval to a committee of Parliament.

By establishing this office as an entity separate from the Department of Justice, our government has it made absolutely clear that criminal prosecutions are independent from political influence.

At this point, I must clear up two misconceptions.

First of all, this action does not suggest that the government believes federal prosecutors were unduly influenced in the past. As my predecessor Minister Toews has said:

We are not here to correct a problem that has already occurred; we are here to prevent problems from arising in the future.

Second, it's simply incorrect to state, as has been reported, that creating this office has cost the taxpayers an additional $98 million. The truth is this figure represents the budget of the former Federal Prosecution Service, which was a division of the Department of Justice. After the transfer, the budget for the department decreased.

The key driver in creating this office is to be as cost neutral as possible. It is in fact an investment that will benefit Canadians and increase their confidence in the justice system.

Mr. Chairman, although our government has been making great strides in improving our justice system, there is still a great deal left to accomplish.

There are still nine bills in Parliament for which I am responsible as Minister of Justice and which I am committed to bringing into force.

We introduced Bill C-9 to restrict the use of conditional sentences to ensure that people who commit serious crimes will serve their time behind bars, not in the community.

We introduced Bill C-10 to impose escalating mandatory minimum penalties for serious gun-related crimes. This legislation outlines clear consequences for gun crimes: prison sentences that are in keeping with the gravity of the offence.

As I mentioned, Bill C-10 seeks to increase the minimum penalty for gun crimes. This matter will soon be discussed in Parliament, and I hope that bill will be restored to the way it was prior to being amended.

Our legislative priorities also include Bill C-27, which will ensure tougher sentences and more effective management of dangerous offenders, including imposing stricter conditions on repeat offenders to keep such criminals from offending again. Bill C-27 responds to concerns that repeat and violent sexual predators are not being properly sentenced or managed once released into the community by strengthening the dangerous offender provisions and sections 810.1 and 810.2, the peace bond provisions, of the Criminal Code. No one will be automatically designated a dangerous offender upon third conviction, and that's another misconception, Mr. Chairman, that I would like to clear up. Crown prosecutors may or may not elect to seek dangerous offender status. In those cases where the Crown elects to proceed, the offender will be given the opportunity to explain why they should not be designated as dangerous, and judges will determine whether the offender should be designated as a dangerous offender.

We are also working to strengthen the laws against alcohol-impaired and drug-impaired driving. Bill C-32 will ensure that drug-impaired drivers face similar testing to that which drunk drivers now face. It will give police better tools to detect and investigate drug- and alcohol-impaired driving, and it will increase penalties.

Bill C-22, which this committee recently considered and supported, will better protect youth against adult sexual predators, including against such predators on the Internet, by raising the age of sexual consent from 14 years to 16 years. I believe there is a broad consensus among Canadians that raising the age of protection is the right thing to do. We know it is strongly supported by many who work with youth or advocate on their behalf. I know there's a great deal of support across different levels of government, and indeed across the political spectrum.

This law would also bring Canada in line with many other developed countries throughout the world. It's time to get serious in dealing with the crimes of adult sexual predators and it's time to take a realistic and respectful approach to protecting our young people.

Beyond the legislative agenda is our role as the lead department on the national anti-drug strategy, as announced in Budget 2007. The Department of Justice has traditionally had a role in supporting the development of drug policy, and until recently played an integral part in the prosecution of drug offences. It also has responsibility for the youth justice policy development, including the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

As mentioned previously, along with preventing illicit drug use and treating dependency, this strategy will also crack down on gangs and combat illicit drug production such as grow-ops and methamphetamine labs.

I will work hard to ensure that the government's tackling crime agenda progresses through Parliament in my role as justice minister and Attorney General, so that we can all enjoy safer streets and more secure communities.

Mr. Chairman, our government has done more than just promise to improve Canada's system of justice to create safer communities; we have backed it up with financial resources. I am pleased to note that Budget 2007 reflects the government's commitment to building safer communities and creating a better Canada. We are cooperating on a number of initiatives.

On the new national drug strategy, which I have mentioned, we are committed to $64 million over the next two years to refocus current efforts on combatting illicit drug use and manufacturing, as well as prevention and treatment.

We renewed the aboriginal justice strategy with funding of $14.5 million over two years. This will significantly increase the number of aboriginal communities and people that have access to community justice programs. Under the strategy, aboriginal communities will take greater responsibility for the administration of justice, leading to a further reduction in crime and positive impacts at the community level.

We have allocated an additional $6 million per year to strengthen current activities on combatting the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children and to ensure that those who commit these heinous crimes are brought to justice.

In addition, for the first time in more than 10 years, the provinces and territories will have stable and predictable funding for criminal legal aid. This approach will permit jurisdictions to develop long-term strategies to support the delivery of criminal legal aid.

Budget 2007 takes important steps to prevent crime, as well as the precursors of crime, and to ensure that our corrections, intelligence, and security systems are strong.

Finally, the government recently received the House of Commons subcommittee and special Senate committee reports on the review of the Anti-terrorism Act. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of both committees for their excellent work in tackling the numerous issues they were confronted with in the course of their review.

Both committees addressed issues of great concern to the government, and we will consider these recommendations very carefully.

In closing, Mr. Chairman, I wish to thank you and your committee members for your important work. It is an honour for me to take part in this process as Canada's Minister of Justice.

However, I am acutely aware that improving Canada's system of justice is a collaborative effort. Our system is a shared responsibility with the provinces and territories, and our many programs and initiatives require collaboration with our provincial and territorial partners as well as municipalities and other government departments. Together we will continue to work to ensure that Canada's system of justice contributes to the safety and security and well-being of Canadians.

Thank you for this opportunity. I look forward to any questions or comments you may have.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to rise and speak today to Bill C-376, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

The bill proposes to create a criminal offence for having a blood alcohol concentration exceeding 50 milligrams in 100 millilitres of blood or being over 50 as it is commonly called.

I would like to take this moment to congratulate the hon. member and my colleague here from Kelowna—Lake Country for bringing this legislation forward. I know he has worked closely with Mothers Against Drunk Driving Canada on the drafting of this bill.

Combating impaired driving is a non-partisan issue. Repeatedly, all parties in the House have cooperated to amend the Criminal Code to make its provisions more effective in detecting and convicting those who drink and drive.

Indeed, the House currently has before it Bill C-32 in which the government has proposed major amendments that respond to concerns that have been expressed by law enforcement and prosecutors for many years.

I note that the justice critic of the Liberal Party, the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, supported Bill C-32. I expect that other parties will also Bill C-32.

I expect that all parties will consider carefully the presentations that will be made in committee by witnesses and we will work together to craft amendments if it becomes apparent that Bill C-32 could be improved.

If it should be the will of the House that Bill C-376 receive second reading and be referred to committee, I trust that the committee will have the same attitude toward this private member's bill.

If it is clear that this bill or this bill with amendments will be an effective tool in the fight against drinking drivers, then I am sure it will be supported. However, there are many issues that will have to be considered before a decision can be made.

It is important that we make the best use of our limited police, prosecution and court resources in this field of policing and criminal justice as we do in all other areas. We need to determine whether a Criminal Code offence for being over .05, combined with provincial administrative measures, is the best way to deal with low blood alcohol content drivers.

When Bill C-376 was tabled, Mothers Against Drunk Driving issued a press release supporting it and explained its benefits. The bill does not simply amend the code to substitute the over .08 with the over .05. Instead, it introduces new elements.

First, the new offence would be enforceable by a ticket.

Second, the penalties for the .05 offence would be less onerous than those for the .08 offence. A first conviction would be punishable by a $300 fine and a 45 day federal driving prohibition. Subsequent offences would be subject to a $600 fine and a 90 day federal driving prohibition.

Third, offenders who did not have a subsequent impaired driving conviction within two years would be deemed not to have a criminal record for the .05 offence.

As Mothers Against Drunk Driving stated in its release:

In summary, the proposed .05 BAC offence is designed to deter impaired driving without being unduly punitive or creating unacceptable burdens on the police and the courts. Moreover, the option of pleading guilty without having to go to court may discourage accused persons from needlessly challenging the charges.

Those are worthy goals, but I would ask members to also consider certain issues with respect to the proposed offence and the way it would be enforced to determine whether the goals would be achieved.

I believe that having less punitive measures for over .05 than for over .08 is appropriate. In the paper “BAC to the Future,” also on MADD's website, there is a table showing that a male who is 35 years of age is at three times the risk of a fatal crash at blood alcohol contents of .02 to .049, six times at blood alcohol contents of .05 to .079, and 11 times from .08 to .099. The risk rises exponentially with every drink thereafter. A 35-year-old male driver in the .10 to .149 blood alcohol content range is 29 times as likely to be in a fatal accident.

Proponents of criminal sanctions beginning at .05 suggest that the greatest safety gains might come not from deterring the social drinker but by convincing those drivers who have been driving at high blood alcohol contents to take one or two fewer drinks. They are still a danger to themselves and others but, if we follow the curve, they are less of a danger.

Obviously there will always be a degree of arbitrariness in setting a criminal level for blood alcohol concentration. The person who has a blood alcohol concentration of .079 is essentially at the same level of risk as the person who has a blood alcohol content of .081. However, the first has not committed a criminal offence and the second has, although the police would probably not lay a charge where the person is that marginally over.

One benefit of a new .05 offence is that these drivers would face something more serious than a brief suspension imposed at the roadside. Members would need to decide whether making over .05 a criminal offence is appropriate given that they are a greater danger than the sober driver but not as dangerous as the driver who is over .08.

If it is considered appropriate to make over .05 a criminal offence, members will need to consider the merits in the creation of a ticketing regime under the Criminal Code as is proposed in Bill C-376. The idea is innovative and the drafters have developed a detailed proposal. I suspect that when most of us hear about a ticket we think about a speeding ticket filled out at the side of the road. The police officer gives the ticket to the driver and they both go on their way. One is happy and one is not so happy. The police submit the ticket and the driver can either mail in the stipulated fine or contest the ticket. If the driver does nothing, he or she will be found guilty and the province will take measures to collect the fine.

This proposed ticket in Bill C-376 is very different. Criminal Code convictions are based on an approved instrument reading at the police station, not on the reading of a screening device used at the roadside. Failing, the screener gives the officer reasonable grounds to demand that the driver come to the station to be tested on the approved instrument.

To prove the new over .05 offence, the police would need to take the driver to the station. They also would need to fingerprint the driver so that the police information system can keep track of the convictions. Moreover, the driver would not be able to simply mail the fine in. The driver would need to attend at a court within 21 days to pay the fine and have imposed a prohibition from driving.

In these circumstances, I question whether this ticketing scheme will be used very much by the police. When they stop the driver who blows under .08 but over .05 at the roadside, will they take the driver back to the station and wait around while he consults counsel? I suspect the officer will be more likely to impose the short provincial roadside suspension in order to leave him or herself free to deal with much more dangerous drivers with high blood alcohol contents.

In summary, Bill C-376 addresses a serious concern and it should be given due consideration by this House. However, we must hear from the police, prosecutors, provincial licensing officials and all stakeholders. We must ensure that any change we make will work on the ground.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate our colleague on his private member's bill. I understand this was his first experience introducing a bill as a new member. I would like to thank him for contributing to the work of the House.

I am among those who believe that we should dedicate more time to private members' business, which gives us all the opportunity to do our work as members even though we may not always agree with what our colleagues propose.

I am disinclined to recommend that my caucus support this bill as it stands. I understand that the member wants to keep people under the influence off public roads. I agree with him that this is a very serious problem. It is our responsibility as legislators to punish those who disobey traffic laws and the Criminal Code. However, I do not think that what the member is proposing is the best way to accomplish that.

I did not have an opportunity to look into it myself, so I asked our Bloc Québécois legal researcher to check with Éduc'alcool, a very credible Quebec organization involved in campaigns to prevent alcohol abuse and alcoholism. Éduc'alcool is financed through liquor taxes paid by Quebec taxpayers. The Société des alcools du Québec, a Crown corporation, contributes to a fund that pays for such initiatives. I did not have a chance to talk to them about this, but Éduc'alcool explained to our researcher that this is not the right way to do it.

The right way is to run prevention campaigns, information campaigns, especially campaigns targeted at at-risk groups. For example, at certain times of the year, students go to parties where lots of alcohol is available, so they tend to drink a lot. It does not always occur to inveterate drinkers to leave the car and give someone else the keys when they are too drunk to drive.

In Quebec, the results were quite encouraging. Éduc'alcool and its—at times shocking—ad campaigns forced Quebeckers and others who saw the ads to be aware of the problem and ask themselves questions. One of Éduc'alcool's themes was that drinking and driving kills. When people are very drunk, their reflexes slow and if they are speeding, there can be a point of no return.

I believe that this bill is not the route we should take as legislators. Of course, there are interesting aspects to it. For example, criminal charges will not be laid. Instead, a ticket will be issued, giving rise to a summary conviction charge. If the individual does not reoffend, there can even be a sort of automatic pardon. If the person is duly identified, after a set period of time, the offence will be wiped off the individual's record.

The member's objectives are commendable, which is noble. But we have to ask ourselves whether this is the right way to go about achieving those objectives.

We have to hope that governments, regardless of their political stripe—whether they are left, right, centrist or not—will fund advertising campaigns by organizations such as Éduc'alcool. These campaigns are expensive. To reach people during prime time can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

An analysis of what has been written about the fact that Quebeckers' have adopted much safer behaviour behind the wheel shows that the Criminal Code has very clear provisions whereby blood alcohol content will be measured, violators will be prosecuted, and hardened drinkers and people who commit offences will be punished. Obviously, in cases of criminal negligence causing serious bodily harm or death, sentences can go up to life in prison.

The government is also proposing to harmonize sections 253 and 254, part a and part b, in Bill C-32. We agree with the principle of denunciation in cases where a person causes death or serious bodily harm. The sentences in the Criminal Code reflect denunciation and social disapproval, and this is as it should be.

Do we really think, however, that the segment of the population that would be picked up in going from 0.5 to 0.8 represents the people who are a danger on the public roads? When we want to check whether someone has a blood alcohol level of 0.5 or 0.8 millilitres per 100 milligrams, we find that we are looking at people who have probably had a glass and a half, or two glasses, or two and a half glasses, at a party or a reunion or a family get-together. The people who are going to be affected by this measure are not hardened drinkers or the people whom we want to deter from getting behind the wheel and get to hand over their keys because they have a problem with alcohol dependency.

That is therefore why we have serious reservations, at the same time recognizing that impaired driving is a matter of great concern. I was in the House for the debate in 1997, and I am going to take part very seriously in debate on Bill C-32, which we will be studying when it is referred. For example, we will look at the possibility of having sobriety tests for drugs. Yes, that is a problem. Yes, we are right, as legislators, to be concerned about it.

However, changing the legal limit from 0.5 to 0.8, as the bill proposes, is not the way to fix the situation. Let me repeat: in Quebec, we have had success stories. A few years ago, some of our colleagues in this House thought that the situation could be fixed by making liquor manufacturers put prescribed labels on bottles of wine or beer. Our colleague from Mississauga South proposed that bill. At one time I believed that this might have been a worthwhile approach. When we looked into it more deeply, though, and examined these questions with experts who had done studies on a regular basis, we realized that this was unfortunately not the right approach and that even though it had been adopted in some American states, it had not necessarily produced results.

I congratulate the member for his contribution to the debate. I thank him for drawing the attention of this House to an important problem. I would respectfully submit that this may not be the right approach to take, and I would propose instead that we both work to persuade the government to invest more money in awareness campaigns directed to targeted groups, particularly young people and hardened drinkers.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, if no one else wants to speak to the bill, there are some items I want to bring forth.

First, like everyone in the House, I want to do everything possible to stop impaired drivers, whether or not they are impaired by drugs, which is the emphasis of this particular bill. Of course, our party and the others, I am sure, have had this as an ultimate goal. Our party brought forward Bill C-16 in the previous Parliament to try to deal with this issue.

Following up on my last comment, the problem we were having at the time was with the detection of various drugs in the system and the discernment of the impairment due to them, and how it could be proved to the extent that we would be successful in prosecutions.

We should not let that stop us. For those reasons, we have to keep working on that technology and training. We have to keep working on the ability to convict people and to determine with regard to the various drugs what impairment is, how it can be measured, and how it can be prosecuted to make sure that needless accidents do not occur, injuring families, children and other innocent people.

I want to comment on what the previous member said. I will take a step out from this bill for a minute to comment on his remark about the lineup of justice bills in committee. I commend the justice committee members for such a heavy agenda, but I disagree with the hon. member that those bills should have been put into an omnibus bill, thus putting them all together to make it faster, because there were a number of very controversial bills, to be nice about it, bills that went against the basic mainstream of modern thought in the judicial system, a number of which we believe would increase crime in Canada, would be soft on crime and would put more trained criminals on the street. If we were to put a number of controversial bills together and people were to vote against one of them, it would kill the whole bill. In that respect, the government would not have had anything get through.

However, we are dealing with bills of such a serious nature, bills about incarcerating a larger number of Canadians and using a large number of resources for that, resources that could be used for police or prevention, bills about reducing judges' discretion and pay rate, and bills about taking away the conditional sentences that are so effective for aboriginal people and others in stopping recidivism when the old system of simple incarceration and putting people in prison to train to be better criminals is not working.

When we have a number of serious bills like these, I would not like to see them all put into one bill. I do not think people realize the magnitude of the threats to a good judicial system that were before us in Parliament. I think the government did the right thing by bringing each bill forward individually so they could be debated individually, even though it means more work for us in the justice committee in making sure that these serious proposals are dealt with seriously and at length and with a number of expert witnesses to help us in that direction.

Going back to BillC-32, although we are strongly supportive, we certainly want a serious investigation in committee, along with the long lineup of bills we do have in that committee. For one thing, we want to look at the practical tools available for the analysis of different drugs in the system. We want to look at the analysis and the effect on impairment, at the way to measure this and the way this would stand up in court in a prosecution.

A previous question by one of our colleagues brought up a good concern related to resources. That is a concern not only for this bill but for several other bills before the House at this time.

We should also ask at committee whether the attorneys general are willing to prosecute the bill and whether they have the resources. Do they think this has a high enough priority to divert resources for the training and the enforcement? This certainly will add a significant burden to a task for which they only have limited resources. That certainly has to be investigated in committee.

We want to ask those people, including the police forces and the attorneys general, what their feelings are about whether they want a bill, whether they can enforce it, whether they have the resources to do so and what can be done about it.

It would also be important to talk to the police officers who have had experience in the roadside checks and ask them about the problems they may have had on the more simple cases that we have at the moment with the tools that are now available, the ones that have been tested and proven. We should ask them how they think this system would work when it is outlined.

Another section in the bill relates to increasing the penalties for alcohol crimes and making stiffer sentences for the various levels of alcohol crimes. I certainly think we should have a discussion on that in committee.

I would say that the majority in parliamentarians are primarily against increasing minimums or even imposing minimums for many crimes because the experts have told us, quite clearly in committee, that it is not effective and that it does not work.

Maximums can be added to crimes to give a judge more discretion, a judge who understands the situation, who wants to penalize unrepentant repeat offenders and who wants to take seriously some of these crimes. I think those should be discussed in committee so we can have the type of debate we have already been having in committee about various sentences and also comparing them with other crimes and the types of sentences that are available for other crimes, the types of options, and to ensure that driving while under the influence of alcohol or under anything else that would be seen as driving impaired and threatening innocent citizens, is seen as a serious offence.

Another section in the bill, which should be discussed in committee, and I think I asked this previously of the parliamentary secretary, is the section relating to the taking of fluids and body sample tests. This would be needed to analyze the blood level for various drugs required in this bill.

Every time we come to a provision such as this in various bills, such as in the good Samaritan act, discussions take place about the volatility of the body and the privacy of a person. We need to ensure that this law is written very carefully so that people are protected but, on the other hand, that the general citizenry are protected from a person who would drive impaired and is a threat to us all.

Another section of the bill that I would like to ask questions on in committee relates to restricting the use of evidence to the contrary.

A jury or a judge can throw out any evidence if they think it is fallacious, not useful or just a decoy to detract from the real issues in the case but, nevertheless, I find it hard to understand how, in our present justice system, any evidence can be restricted. Evidence is evidence. People should be able to bring forward evidence and the judge and jury should decide on the evidence that has come forward. They can dismiss poor evidence but I do not think we can say that evidence cannot be brought before the court and then convince people that we have a fair justice system.

The bill contains many good items but a lot of areas still need to be looked at. As I said, we were looking at this and we also proposed a bill because people were being taken out of their vehicles and being charged for being under the influence of alcohol when they could have easily been under the influence of drugs and have caused the same carnage to innocent people. We have no mechanism in place to catch those people, to analyze the situation and to prosecute them successfully.

If we can refer this to committee, hopefully we can ensure that the bill will be effective in achieving the goal that I am sure everyone in the House wants, which is to make our streets safer by getting people, who would wilfully put themselves in the situation of harming both themselves and others, off the roads. They need to understand that we take this seriously and that we will put the resources into both the technology, training and the drafting of a law that will be effective in reducing this type of unnecessary carnage and accidents affecting innocent people on our highways.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Obviously, Mr. Speaker, impaired driving is a scourge in our country on the streets of all our communities.

I wonder if the member could comment more fully, however, on the coincidence of the decisions made in September by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice to table Bill C-32 on the same day that they announced cuts to the pilot program for testing or providing training for the detection of drug impaired drivers, to the sum of some $4.2 million. Only after some political pressure did they announce that eventually the government might offer a program worth $2 million for some training that has yet to be announced.

How crucial to the success of this bill is the training to detect drug impairment?

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

In fact, Mr. Speaker, Bill C-32 is proposing more tools for the police. I should say that Mothers Against Drunk Driving are in favour of this legislation, as we know, as is the president of the Canadian Professional Police Association.

However, the member asked specifically about the police officers themselves. That is extremely important. What we often find is the problem that we come up with amendments to the Criminal Code which require all kinds of different resources to be applied, but we do not follow up with providing those resources. We either do not have the court time to deal with these additional cases or we in fact do not have the manpower to be able to do it.

The federal government creates these laws and then the provincial governments have to apply and enforce them. If the provinces and territories are not given the resources, what happens is that good laws just do not work. The member is quite right.

However, more tools are provided in the bill. The police will be able to demand that a person suspected of driving while impaired by alcohol or drug participate in a sobriety test at the roadside. That is different. That is going to actually improve the job, because police will not have to go through the legal mumbo-jumbo of getting a court order for that. Also, the police will be able to demand that a person suspected of driving while impaired by a drug participate in a physical test and a bodily fluid sample test. Those things are going to happen.

Police are also not going to be hung up in court as long, simply because there is going to be some sharp limiting of the witness evidence that is available under the current law. It is going to be curbed under the proposed law.

However, the member is correct. This raises an important issue that the committee has to look at. If we expect the provinces to enforce these laws and to have people properly trained, they must have the resources to do it. It is our responsibility to make sure that the finance minister over there is going to be cognizant of the demands that we are making with regard to the policing authorities all across the country, many of which are outside the federal jurisdiction.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-32.

Drug users are frequently involved in fatal accidents, and that is a fact. Studies estimate that 3.4% of motor vehicle accident fatalities and 1.7% of injuries are the result of drug impairment. These estimated proportions more than double when dealing with impairment by a combination of alcohol and drugs. One study has indicated that more than 30% of fatal accidents in Quebec involved drugs, while another shows that 20% of fatal accidents in British Columbia involved drugs or a combination of alcohol and drugs.

A significant proportion of Canadians have also admitted to driving within a few hours of consuming drugs. Surveys have shown that 48% of Canadian drivers have taken the wheel within two hours of using cannabis, while close to 20% have taken the wheel within two hours of taking a potentially impairing drug, whether over the counter, prescription or illegal.

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health released a study that found that 20% of Ontario high school students admitted to driving a vehicle within one hour of using cannabis at least once within the preceding year. In 2002 the Nova Scotia Student Drug Use Survey also indicated about 26% of students, with a driver's licence, had driven within one hour of using cannabis over the previous year.

There is some evidence of a problem and Parliament has the responsibility to respond in an appropriate fashion when issues affect the health and well-being of the people of the country.

When I became a member of Parliament in 1993, the subject area related to drugs and alcohol played a fairly big role in my career as a parliamentarian. In fact, before I even sat one day in the House, after being elected, I did some work, knowing that the elected government had committed to a national forum on health to deal with health issues of Canadians, the number one priority issue for Canadians.

I had a great interest in being involved in that because I had spent about nine years on the board of the Mississauga Hospital, learning about our health care system, how it worked and how it affected people in the corridors of a hospital. I attained a great deal of respect for the doctors and nurses who serviced Canadians in their times of need and I wanted to be part of it.

Looking at some of the work that Parliament had done on the health files prior to my being elected, I stumbled across a report done by a subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Health and Welfare, Social Affairs, Seniors and the Status of Women entitled, “Foetal Alcohol Syndrome: A Preventable Tragedy”. I had no idea what fetal alcohol syndrome was, so I read the report. I discovered that the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy was the leading known cause of mental retardation in Canada. I saw statistics about the implications of the misuse of alcohol to impaired driving, which is an issue we are talking about today. I saw the health impacts on people, early morbidity, people dying much sooner than their expected lifespan.

It was clear to me that I wanted to know more about this. I wondered how someone who was educated, who had three children and who engaged in the community on a hospital board would not know about fetal alcohol syndrome. I wanted to get involved because I felt that if I did not know, then there probably were a lot of other Canadians who also did not know.

The issue of alcohol has been a very big item in my career and I have raised it many times. Yesterday, in reference to a report that I had encouraged from the Standing Committee on Health, the Minister of Health issued a response to it. It states that we spend a lot of time going in circles on the subject matter of alcohol and its implications not only to unborn children when consumed during pregnancy, but also the impairment issue when we operate machinery or drive automobiles.

That report has been issued by the government. I have not reviewed it as thoroughly as I would like, but it is about time that Canada took a lead role in mitigating the impact of alcohol, the poison ethanol, which is in beverage alcohol and many affects that it has on Canadians.

There is another area in which I have some relevant experience. In the first session of the 35th Parliament, as a member of the health committee I was asked to chair a subcommittee on Bill C-7, the controlled drugs and substances act, the act which Bill C-32 is proposing to amend. At that time, about a decade ago, there was a great deal of discussion about marijuana and its implications. Grow houses were not the rampant problem that they are today. Something has happened and I know what it is.

The potency of this drug, cannabis sativa, and there are two other types in its natural form, the THC content, tetrahydrocannabinol content, can be changed in the plant so that it has a higher potency. B.C. bud is one of the most sought after marijuanas because it has the highest THC content. It gives the highest buzz. It has the highest ability to impair one's ability.

Some of the questions that have been asked around here about what kind of technology there is to deal with this are really important ones. If we detect drugs in a person's system and charge the person for being impaired, how do we know that the drug is affecting the person's ability to do what the person is supposed to do? It is a very complicated issue.

When I chaired the subcommittee dealing with Bill C-7 I can recall the government's position was that there was no intention of decriminalizing marijuana. That debate continues. Even in the last couple of years that issue continues to be floated around by people.

We have to understand that the potency of any drug can be altered by those who produce or manufacture it. We have to keep ahead of that, particularly when dealing with things like designer drugs. Designer drugs are not legal drugs and they cannot be purchased over the counter, but boy can they be cranked out. We have seen the implications on our young people. It causes a big problem. This is something I feel very strongly about.

In the Bill C-7 subcommittee we also talked about harm reduction strategy. Poor people who use drugs get the drugs off the street and sometimes they get a bad batch. The thinking back then was that the government should get involved in regulating the production and distribution of safe drugs so fewer drug users would be hurt by a bad batch of drugs. The thinking back then was that we had to protect people who were breaking the law rather than find a balance. I found that a difficult bill to deal with and the changes that were proposed at the time.

It is interesting to note that this has come full circle. We are now back to the implications of drug impairment on driving. I will tell the House why this is important.

I started off my speech by reading some statistics into the record and it looks like there is a problem. Whatever has been measured and reported in some of the studies about the problems of drinking and driving or consuming drugs and driving is a lot smaller than the facts. The reason is that the police and people in the hospitals who are charged with determining the cause of death and cause of injury normally report that trauma is the cause of death of someone who has been killed by a drunk driver, who has been squished against a wall somewhere. In fact, the cause of death of that human being was an idiot drunk driver who lost control of his vehicle and killed somebody. Those are some of the issues. The reporting mechanisms that have been relied upon to provide legislators with the information they need to make good laws and wise decisions are impaired.

The police often do not take breathalyzer tests of people who were in accidents. They spend more of their time cleaning up the site to get the traffic going again and to make sure that the injured parties get into an ambulance and get taken away. It is not the job of the hospital officials. There is no coordination.

I am very concerned about the issue of impaired driving and the use of machinery and equipment when one is impaired, whether it be by alcohol or any other substance, illegal or legally prescribed, I do not care. The fact is there are substances that people can and do take that impair their ability and impact the health and well-being of ordinary Canadians.

Bill C-32 amends the Criminal Code. What is the current law? Currently section 253(a) of the Criminal Code makes it an offence to drive while one's ability to operate a vehicle is impaired by alcohol or a drug or a combination of alcohol and a drug.

While section 253(b) contains the further offence of driving while one's blood alcohol level is over the limit, no similar drug limit offence exists. This is a problem. We just do not know yet, and if one can play around with marijuana, its potency and so on, one is not sure. Consuming two joints with a low THC level could be nothing compared to consuming one joint with B.C. bud in it or something like that.

This is going to be more complicated than I think people have indicated. I want the bill to go to committee. I want the expert witnesses who come to committee to make absolutely sure that we are on the right track and that we are not making this a little more complicated and not charter proof. The charter proof issue is really important.

Although drug impaired driving is a criminal offence, police have few legally designated means of controlling that offence. They currently rely on non-quantifiable symptoms of drug impairment, such as erratic driving behaviour or the testimony of some witnesses. Drug tests are admissible as evidence in court, but only if the driver participates voluntarily. Some changes will be necessary to the current law in order to make this bill effective. I think the intent is very good. I am not yet convinced whether or not we have the means, the tools and the cooperation. It is going to take a great deal of work to make this work.

Yes, it is a challenge and it is a challenge that Parliament should take up. I am very much looking forward to the justice committee dealing with this but I also I have a problem there. I know that the justice committee is swamped with at least 8 or 10 bills. It is dealing with a whole series of bills, many of which could have been included in one omnibus bill to amend the Criminal Code for a number of offences. We could have had the same witnesses that we are having bill after bill after bill. We could have had all of them there to deal with the same items. Some of the bills are no brainers. They have the support of virtually everyone in the House. They should be passed but they have to go through the process.

We should be expediting these things. I do not know why the then justice minister had to come in with a series of bills other than for political or partisan reasons to say look at all the things the government is doing.

When we are tinkering around with the Criminal Code, let us not take up the House's time. Let us not take up the justice committee's time. Let it do its job. Let us be efficient in proposing and addressing legislation. It is more a matter of let us work smart rather than work hard. I do not think we have been working smart.

This bill is going to take some work. I do not know whether or not we are going to get the time at the justice committee with all the other obligations it has and I do not know what else is coming. For very important bills we are going to have to start dealing with legislative committees, committees that are able to work smartly on legislation and address some of the key problems, particularly as they might touch on charter issues, jurisdictional responsibilities, court challenges, the application of penalties, or whatever it might be. It is an important bill that really has to get done.

I want to quickly refer to a study which I thought was really good. The Senate did a study about a Canadian public policy on cannabis.

This issue is one which most members who have spoken to this bill and talked about driving while impaired, have talked about using marijuana and whether or not it has some impairment ability. Yes, we do know it can impair one's ability, as any drug can.

The Senate often does things that the House of Commons committees do not do when they do studies. The Senate does a lot more ad hoc studies, not in response to legislation, but rather on important issues of the day to provide a comprehensive review and summary of the state of the facts on matters which are going to affect us down the road.

This should be very helpful to the committee. I want to read into the record what the senators articulated as a public policy regime that they proposed for expressing the fundamental premise underlying their report. This is good. It is like having a mission statement to give us a road map as to where we are going with this, what is our thinking based on. It states:

In a free and democratic society, which recognizes fundamentally but not exclusively the rule of law as the source of normative rules and in which government must promote autonomy as far as possible and therefore make only sparing use of the instruments of constraint, public policy on psychoactive substances must be structured around guiding principles respecting the life, health, security and rights and freedoms that the individuals, who, naturally and legitimately, seek their own well-being and development and can recognize the presence, difference and equality of others.

It takes a little time; it has to be read two or three times, but it basically says balance. We have objectives and we have individual rights and freedoms. We have to be careful. The balance has to be right. We cannot be draconian in measures just because we know we can slap something down. It is important to understand that sometimes it is necessary to provide, whether it be the policing authorities or the courts, the tools to deal with certain issues where clearly we have not been able to get the job done.

I referred to the term tetrahydrocannabinol which is the most active component of cannabis. It is what gives the so-called buzz. I have never tried the stuff myself, never will, but I am told it is. There is a lovely glossary in the report. It says that THC is highly fat soluble, has a lengthy half life, its psychoactive effects are modulated by other active components in cannabis. In its natural state cannabis contains between .5% to 5% THC. Sophisticated cultivation methods and plant selection, especially female plants, lead to higher THC levels of concentration.

There is no question about it. As a matter of fact, when I was in university way back when, and it was probably around 1970 when I got out of there, one could smoke a field of marijuana and not get a buzz because it was so weak. It is about ten times stronger because in its natural state it is only .5% THC content.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to resume discussing Bill C-32.

First of all, I want to congratulate the Bloc Québécois justice critic, the member for Hochelaga, and the deputy critic, the member for Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, for their presentation. Both gave a very good summary of the Bloc Québécois' position on Bill C-32, which is a worthwhile initiative but which must be able to answer the questions that the public and Bloc Québécois members have about its implementation.

I will read the summary of Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts. The summary gives a good outline of the scope of the bill and the questions it will raise:

This enactment amends the Criminal Code:

(a) to create an offence of operating a motor vehicle while in possession of a controlled substance as defined in subsection 2(1) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act;

(b) to authorize specially trained peace officers to conduct tests to determine whether a person is impaired by a drug or a combination of alcohol and a drug;

(c) to authorize the taking of bodily fluids to test for the presence of alcohol or a drug;

(d) to create an offence of operating a motor vehicle with a concentration of alcohol in the blood that exceeds 80 mg of alcohol in 100 mL of blood and causing bodily harm or death to another person;

(e) to clarify what evidence a person accused of driving with a concentration of alcohol in the blood that exceeds 80 mg of alcohol in 100 mL of blood can introduce to raise a doubt that they were not committing the offence;

(f) to create an offence of refusing to provide a breath sample when the accused knows or ought to know that the accused’s operation of a motor vehicle caused an accident resulting in bodily harm to another person or death;

(g) to increase the penalties for impaired driving.

The Bloc Québécois is in favour of this initiative. Nonetheless, we have to allow enough time for the standing committee to address the questions raised by this bill.

The possession or consumption of certain substances constitutes an offence under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. However, we should not limit this to the drugs we read about in the newspaper and see on the news, we should also think about medication.

Many questions remain on the implications of using prescription medication. It is important for the standing committee to be able to ask experts all these questions.

I will remind hon. members later, because this is not the first time that Parliament or the standing committee is addressing this issue.

Since 1999, there have been many reports and questions. There is still no legislation because we have to take into account the fact that people use prescription medication and that the medication detected in their blood can resemble certain drugs. This could cause them some problems as far as criminal law is concerned.

The bill would also authorize peace officers to conduct tests at the site of the accident, incident or offence. Breathalyzer technology works and has proven its effectiveness in court. Nevertheless, it has weaknesses that make it possible to challenge the findings. We have the technology to conduct tests. Can we do the same to test for drugs? Are our equipment and tools good enough to bring adequate admissible evidence before the courts? Questions were raised during studies conducted by various committees in the 1990s, and the same is true today. I will summarize these questions later on.

The bill mentions authorizing the taking of bodily fluids to test for the presence of alcohol or a drug.

Since 1999, various committees have addressed this issue, especially with respect to admissible evidence of drug consumption, and have found that the best solution is a blood test. However, as we know, there are all sorts of constitutional challenges related to taking blood samples. Once again, the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights will have to answer a lot of questions when the time comes to study this bill.

The Bloc's position is simple. We support this bill, but we want to make sure all of the expert witnesses appear before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. We would like to see new technology for admissible evidence that is easier to use than blood sampling, as we have seen with breathalyzer devices over the years.

When this bill comes up in committee, we hope the committee will take all the time it needs to call as many expert witnesses as possible to study it, just as other committees have done. The bill was never passed because of the conclusions they reached.

I will go over a bit of the history of this. In May 1999, Parliament studied driving under the influence of drugs. When the Standing Committee on Justice submitted its report on eliminating impaired driving, it emphasized that drugs play a part in some road accidents resulting in death and the incidence of driving under the influence of drugs is underestimated because the current legislation does not give the police any easy way to detect them. That was true in 1999 and it is still true today. We have a problem here, and we need to find a way of filling this gap in the legislation.

At the time, the committee emphasized the need to adopt better methods for detecting driving under the influence of drugs and getting the evidence needed to convict offenders. The same questions arose in 1999, therefore, as those the Bloc members are raising today. These questions are based on whether we have the ability to gather the evidence needed to get convictions. It is all very well to pass bills, but if the Constitution enables people who have committed crimes to evade punishment, the legislation does not do any good. It has to stand up in the courts.

Back in 1999, the committee pointed out a number of obstacles that existed. The Criminal Code requires police to have reasonable grounds for suspecting that a person is impaired before they can administer tests. The committee emphasized that Parliament should clearly define what reasonable grounds are and whether refusal to take tests constitutes a criminal act. We are obviously talking here about reasonable grounds and criminal acts. These are the points we want to bring forward. There were questions around them in 1999, and those questions still exist today.

There is apparently no single non-invasive test to detect drugs that impair a person’s ability to drive. We are left, therefore, with the well-known invasive tests, such as the breathalyzer for people who consume alcohol. This question was asked in 1999 and the conclusion was that there was no single non-invasive test. Blood tests were considered invasive under the Constitution.

We need to pay close attention to all this and have all the necessary experts appear. This will enable us to determine whether the technology has progressed since 1999 and evidence can be gathered that can stand up in court.

In the end, it will probably be necessary to obtain a blood sample. That was the conclusion in 1999. The committee approved the assessment made by a expert in drug detection, from the DRE program, but the committee added that the provinces had the last word in terms of training in this field.

It should be clearly understood that we can go ahead and adopt laws but it is the provinces that are responsible for enforcing them, in spite of all the discussion in this House or whatever legislation we may adopt. We hope, therefore, that the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights will call representatives of the various provinces, in order to ensure that legislation adopted in the Parliament of Canada is consistent with, among other things, legislation that may be adopted by the Quebec Department of Justice.

In addition, in 1999, the committee insisted on the need to take into account the consequences of drug testing in the context of the Charter. That was an issue at that time because the proposed tests could be more invasive and require more time than the tests used to detect alcohol. That was an issue in 1999 and it is still an issue today. Is it possible to have a non-invasive test that would be as effective and as quick as the breathalyzer for detecting alcohol?

Once again, we are talking about drug testing and we are conscious that accidents are caused by drivers. The evidence makes that clear. A survey by the Traffic Injury Research Foundation, conducted in 2002, concluded that 20% of Canadian drivers had driven a car within two hours of using a drug that could impair their faculties, either an over the counter medication, a prescription drug or an illegal drug. So, there are dangers because drivers are still taking to the road without being aware that their faculties have been impaired by drugs.

The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights deserves praise for discussing Bill C-32. However, we must be able to achieve a positive result so that those who are convicted face real penalties by virtue of the bill, without being able to avoid the legal consequences because the test was not admissible in court or because the test was judged to be unconstitutional.

In 1999, the committee said there was no reliable, non-invasive, fast method of detecting drugs on the roadside. Blood tests are one of the best ways of detecting cannabis. It is impossible to tell whether it has been used recently from a urine sample. Saliva might be a method, but there are not any fast, sufficiently reliable tests on the market.

So that is what the committee recommended in 1999. The representatives of the Bloc Québécois are telling the Quebeckers who listen to us that this is important; that there are people who drive while impaired by drugs and that this is unacceptable. But we have to be able to find these people if we want to charge them under the Criminal Code, and they have to justify their actions in court. A law may be passed but, if unconstitutional tests or tests that are inadmissible in court are no more than words and end up making it possible for some people to get away without being punished, it means that, as legislators we have not asked the right questions at the right time.

Furthermore, in 2003 a working group looked at this issue and published a document titled Drug-Impaired Driving: Consultation Document. This working group was created by the Department of Justice further to the recommendations made by the committee in 1999. The working group looked at solutions and asked how to come up with effective legislation that was admissible in court.

The working group described two main solutions. The first was to establish a legal limit for drugs in a person’s system. Still, it was admitted that a zero limit might not be advisable since some drivers could have cannabis in their system or have taken prescription drugs without being impaired. The committee thought that where drugs were concerned the allowed level would have to be determined.

The second solution was to legislate on the ability of police officers to demand drug detection tests. This working group spent more time looking at reasonable grounds for demanding more extensive tests than simply breathing into a device such as a breathalyzer. These grounds were mentioned by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in 1999. So when the topic of taking samples of blood, saliva and so on comes up, so does the old topic of reasonable grounds. When such samples are demanded, they must be constitutionally and legally defensible so that they are admissible in court.

Describing more or less the same system as the one proposed in Bill C-32, the working group suggested that a trained expert police officer be able to demand a physical sobriety test, or take a sample of saliva or sweat on the roadside if there are reasonable grounds for thinking that someone is driving while impaired.

So, the standing committee proposed that experts from each unit along with all police officers be assigned directly to these problems of consumption or lack of security so they could not be contradicted when they appeared before the courts.

That is one solution proposed by the working group. Such experts, certified police officers, could administer the tests themselves. They could require a sample of body fluids—blood, urine, saliva—to confirm that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the driver had committed an offence under section 253(a) by taking a drug. The counterpart to reasonable grounds is refusal. If the individual thinks there are not reasonable grounds and refuses to provide samples, they must prove that the police did not have reasonable grounds for believing that they were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

This is why the working group proposed that the police become experts in this type of intervention. They have the skills required to appear before the court and say that they examined three, four or six persons during the operation and that they chose one for a particular reason. This officer can defend himself because he has the necessary skills. These were the recommendations made by the working group in 2003.

The concept of reasonable grounds reappears in Bill C-32. However, there is no mention of police experts. This concept comes under the provinces. The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights will have to call provincial authorities to appear in order to discover whether Quebec, for example, is in a position to implement the regulations and has the required personnel. The 2003 report by the federal Minister of Justice's committee will have to be studied to see if it is acceptable. Can the Quebec provincial police acquire the staff required? Who will pay for all of this? There are many questions. These are questions the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights can rightly raise with respect to Bill C-32.

For the benefit of Quebeckers watching, I point out that the Bloc agrees with the principle of this bill. Our question is whether, once the bill is passed, the Province of Quebec and the Quebec provincial police will be in a position to implement it. The people found guilty will thus be charged with the offences that have been put into law. In the event of doubt—do we have the necessary technology or are we incapable of defending ourselves before the courts—we will question the importance of implementing these regulations.

The 2003 Working Group also emphasized that because of Charter rights sensitivities, legislators would have to give serious consideration to current Criminal Code provisions permitting demands for evidential breath or DNA samples that have already survived legal challenges. That is what was said earlier. It is all well and good to say we want to make legislation effective, but there are examples of legal challenges when it comes to DNA tests. In major criminal cases there have been challenges with respect to DNA. We have to be able to have legislation because we understand that when we talk about drugs we do not mean alcohol. We are talking about drugs such as cannabis and other illegal drugs, but also legal drugs such as prescription medication.

We have to be able to make the distinction. Anyone convicted will have to suffer the consequences—fines and loss of driver's licence—after being found guilty of their actions. They will have to be sentenced according to law.

The situation around this legislation is quite complex. There have been major studies and statistics. In 2002, in Canada, the Traffic Injury Research Foundation conducted a survey. According to the survey, 20% of Canadian drivers had driven within two hours of taking a drug that may have affected their faculties.

We are talking about everyday medication, prescription medication or illicit drugs. This is a major problem. It was a problem in 2002 and I do not think much has changed in 2007.

People drive after using drugs for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps there is not enough publicity on the matter. Nonetheless, among other things, it is because it is still not considered a criminal offence. Our objective today is to recognize it as such.

A study by the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec found that 30% of fatal accidents in Quebec involved the use of drugs or the combination of drugs and alcohol. It is important that legislation such as this be passed, but we have to ask all the questions—

[John Maloney, Liberal, Welland, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-32, an act to amend the Criminal Code to strengthen the enforcement of drug impaired driving offences in Canada.

On November 4, 2004, the former justice minister under the Liberal government introduced Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts. This new legislation builds on Bill C-16 but includes stronger penalties than our bill had proposed.

Bill C-32, the Conservatives' proposed reforms to the Criminal Code, include increasing penalties. Drivers would be charged if in possession of illicit drugs. Drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding .08 would face a life sentence penalty in the case of causing death and a maximum 10 year sentence in the case of causing bodily harm. These provisions are in addition to existing provisions that hold an alcohol or drug impaired driving offence that causes bodily harm to be punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment and that such an offence that causes death is punishable by life imprisonment.

Impaired drivers would face higher mandatory minimum penalties. For a first offence, the fine would increase from $600 to $1000. For a second offence, sentences would increase from 14 days mandatory prison to 30 days minimum. For a third offence, prison sentences would increase from 90 days minimum to 120 days minimum. When the offence is punishable on summary conviction, the maximum term of imprisonment would increase from 6 months to 18 months.

The bill would also provide more tools for the police. Police would be able to demand that a person suspected of driving while impaired by alcohol or a drug participate in a sobriety test at the roadside and police would be able to demand that a person suspected of driving while impaired by a drug participate in physical tests and bodily fluid sample tests.

The Criminal Code currently makes it an offence to drive a motor vehicle when one's ability is impaired by alcohol or a drug, or a combination of alcohol and drugs. There is a further offence with respect to alcohol while driving while one's blood alcohol limit exceeds the legal limit of .08%.

The anomaly is that currently there is no legal drug limit. There are non-quantifiable tests such as erratic driving and witness testimony. If the driver voluntarily participates, results of a drug test are admissible but this a very rare occurrence. As a consequence, police powers for obtaining evidence of drug impaired driving are very limited.

It is urgent that Parliament address drug impaired driving. The 2002 Senate special committee report on illegal drugs, “Cannabis: Our position for Canadian Public Policy”, found that between 5% and 12% of drivers may operate a motor vehicle while under the influence of cannabis. Further, a survey by the Traffic Injury Research Foundation revealed that in 2002 almost 20% of Canadian drivers had taken the wheel less than two hours after consuming a potentially impairing drug. This included both legal and illegal drugs. These statistics and findings must be reversed.

In 1999, I chaired the justice committee when we studied the issue of impaired driving and prepared a report entitled, “Toward Eliminating Impaired Driving”. The committee was very frustrated with the appreciation that drugs play a contributing role in motor vehicle accidents but that there were no practical legal limits to test for drugs.

There is no scientific consensus on the threshold drug concentration levels in the body that cause impairment making driving hazardous. Unlike the Breathalyzer tests used for alcohol, there is no objective test to measure drug impairment. Further, there is no measurable link between drug impairment and drug quantity. In addition, traces of some drugs could remain in the body for weeks. For instance, the active ingredient in cannabis can be detected for up to four weeks, although its impairing effects do not last. Because there is no scientifically proven threshold, it is not possible to propose a legal limit.

Because there is no clear drug limit testing, a drug recognition expert, DRE, is acknowledged as a necessity.

The lack of authority for police to make a demand for drug testing was a concern that was raised in a number of credible submissions to our committee, such as the Canadian Bar Association, the Province of Ontario, the Canadian Automobile Association and others, who called for expansion of police powers to allow a demand for drug testing.

The committee had concerns about drafting such provisions. Parliament would need to provide legislative guidance on what would constitute reasonable and probable grounds to believe that the offence has occurred. Further, the power to demand bodily samples for drug testing, such as blood, would be intrusive and require consideration of potential violations of the Charter of Rights.

Notwithstanding that, the committee in recommendation 12 suggested a Criminal Code amendment to allow a judge to authorize the taking of a blood sample to test for the presence of alcohol or drugs based on reasonable and probable grounds that an impaired driving offence has been committed. The committee also recommended consultation with the provinces and territories to develop legislation aimed at better obtaining evidence against suspected drug impaired drivers.

The Department of Justice consulted extensively with the provinces and territories, following which the Liberal government introduced two identical pieces of legislation in two subsequent parliaments to deal with this problem. Indeed, the Liberal Party takes impaired driving very seriously. Unfortunately, both Bill C-32 and Bill C-16 died on the order paper when elections were called in November 2004 and 2005 respectively. The Conservatives have reintroduced very similar legislation, with stronger penalties, however.

Passage of the new Bill C-32 will be a significant step toward making roads safer and protecting the public. It will give the police the authority to demand standardized field sobriety tests at the roadside. The officer must have reasonable suspicion of alcohol or a drug in the body before making the demand. The standard test involves walking heel to toe, following with the eyes the officer's hand movement, and balancing on one leg with the other leg held in front about six inches off the ground.

These roadside tests take about 10 minutes. If the driver fails the roadside test, the officer then would have reasonable grounds to demand a breath test on an approved instrument in the case of alcohol. In the case of a drug, the officer would have reasonable grounds to demand an evaluation by an officer certified to do drug recognition expert or DRE tests back at the police station.

The purpose of the evaluation is to identify the class of drugs, if any, that is causing impairment. The evaluation further involves physical tests and checking of vital signs. This evaluation takes about 45 minutes. Following the identification of a class of drugs, the officer could then demand a sample of a bodily fluid, urine, blood or saliva, to test for the presence of a drug.

Refusal to comply with a police order to submit to a roadside sobriety test or to an evaluation at the police station, or to provide a bodily fluid sample, would constitute a criminal offence, just as it is now an offence to refuse a police order to submit to an alcohol breath test.

The idea with the drug impaired driving investigation is not to prove that a concentration of a particular drug is exceeded and that therefore the person is impaired. As previously indicated, there would be few drugs for which there would be a scientific consensus on the concentration level at which there would be impairment for the general population of drivers.

The bill proposes no legal limits for the wide range of drugs. Instead, the idea is to provide for the investigation of a driver's drug impairment by observing physiological symptoms that are unique to a particular class of drugs, and then to confirm with a bodily fluid sample whether the drug was indeed present.

If the tests do not show impairment, the driver is free to go. If the officers see a medical condition, they can obtain medical help.

The combination of steps, that is, the police officer observing the driver's ability to perform the simple tasks of the roadside standardized field sobriety test, the results of the more comprehensive testing by the drug recognition expert, and the confirmation by the independent laboratory analysis of the presence of the drug identified by the DRE as causing the impairment, will provide the necessary checks and balances.

Let us consider the charter considerations. We know that the demands for alcohol breath tests on approved screening devices at roadside, without a right to contact counsel, have been found justifiable by the courts under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, pursuant to the section 1 demonstrable justification limitation on a right.

The right to counsel must be given following the demand for an alcohol breath test on an approved instrument back at the station and before the approved instrument testing is done. It is anticipated that the same practice would prevail for the DRE evaluations envisaged under Bill C-32.

I would suggest that there are aspects of the bill that need further consideration. I do express reservations regarding the new offence of driving while in possession of an illegal drug, where any person found in possession of a controlled substance while operating or in the care or control of a motor vehicle, vessel, aircraft or sailing equipment is guilty of an offence. This provision would apply whether the person is in personal possession of the drug or the drug is simply in the vehicle, provided that the individual knowingly had possession of the drug without lawful excuse for such possession.

I agree with those who claim that this new offence does not belong within Bill C-32 as there is no connection between possession of a drug and impairment and possession of a drug that is already prohibited under section 4 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Of necessity there will have to be an educational component of this new impaired driving strategy, under either the justice or the health department. Individuals using marijuana may or may not know that they could be impaired and should take this legislation very seriously. Individuals taking prescription or off the shelf drugs may not understand that they could come within the boundaries of this legislation and must ensure that they do not operate a motor vehicle while influenced by such drugs.

I have every confidence that NGOs such as MADD will continue to put out relevant and compelling information in this respect. The federal government should either do the same thing or provide funding assistance to organizations such as MADD to do so.

Impaired driving continues to be a scourge on our society. I will continue to support legislation that will help not only to reduce it but to eventually and ultimately eradicate such conduct.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

Mr. Speaker, we were debating Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving).

As the deputy justice critic and like my party, I consider the bill very important because it aims to provide the instruments required to enable police to fight impaired driving effectively. I do think, however, that we must look more closely at certain elements of this bill, as the proposed additions warrant analysis to ensure their real effectiveness.

Among the concerns I would like to share with the House is my hope of meeting experts and groups in the course of the deliberations of the Standing Committee on Justice who can shed light on the following points. First, as this committee's report entitled “Toward Eliminating Impaired Driving" rightly pointed out, the nature and the legislation pertaining to the concept of “reasonable grounds” used by the police to have people tested must be defined. This definition would be vital should a driver suspected of driving while impaired refuse, because it would become a criminal offence. This is in fact what the current bill is proposing, but it remains fuzzy as to the “reasonable grounds” used by the police.

In addition, it would seem basic to find a proven screening test that is both quick and non invasive. Do we have the technology? Which drugs are we screening for? I think this warrants our attention, since, with the variety of drugs currently available and their various effects on the human body, it becomes increasingly relevant to look at the methods and scientific processes used in screening.

But again, how are we going to distinguish between illicit drugs and legal drugs, prescription medications, that is? A person can be in legal possession of those medications, but the person's faculties may be impaired by their effects, effects that are clearly stated in the warnings given about the medications.

And then, in logistical terms, do we actually have the equipment that would enable us to do a simple roadside test for all drugs, as we do for alcohol with the breathalyzer? Let us recall that the bill would authorize the police to do a drug test during a roadside spot check. It is therefore important to have very effective, tested tools, to keep potential legal challenges to a minimum. As well, this must be done with utmost respect for the spirit of the Charter, and they must be as constitutional as possible. We often think of taking a blood sample as an intrusive action. In addition, there is the fact that it sometimes takes a long time to get the results of a blood analysis, so the offender has to wait to know whether charges will be laid against him or her.

As well, in legal terms, all of these complications have to be avoided so the bill does not end up in interminable court challenges. As members probably know, impaired driving, particularly driving with a blood alcohol level over 80, is one of the offences in the Criminal Code that is most difficult to prove. As I noted earlier, the “two beer” defence is a perfect example.

Let us also not forget the prohibition set out in clause 8(3) and 8(5) on using oral testimony alone to defend against an incorrect charge. We should give this our full attention in order to determine whether it is valid.

Last, in social terms, impaired driving awareness campaigns have in fact had some success in reducing this kind of offence. Will there be financial and human resources allocated, however, for an education campaign about driving while impaired by drugs?

We must also not forget that the higher fines proposed by Bill C-32 will certainly have a greater effect on lower income brackets in the population than on the more well-off members of society.

These are a few points that show, beyond any doubt, how important it is to work on this bill and make it into something even better.

I repeat that the Bloc Québécois takes this matter very seriously and will participate in developing standards and measures that are intelligent and effective for achieving the desired results. As well, we support initiatives to provide law enforcement agencies with concrete and effective methods for enforcing laws that are designed to deal with driving while impaired by alcohol and other drugs.

That is why we are prepared to support Bill C-32, so that it can be referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. The committee would then be able to study the bill in depth and call witnesses who could offer their expertise. As well, it could propose the amendments that it thought necessary in order to make Bill 32 even more effective.

I will add that we still have reservations about some aspects of this bill, which I described earlier. I therefore hope that the government will work constructively with all opposition parties so that those reservations are taken into consideration and the result is useful and effective legislation.

To conclude, therefore, I hope that all of the points I have raised will be addressed by witnesses and experts who will respond to them when they appear before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in the near future.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part today in the debate on Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving), which is now before the House. This bill offers us an opportunity to look into a serious problem in society, one that is often in the headlines. We all know that drunk driving is an irresponsible act. A lot of preventive work is being done, in fact, to reduce the occurrence of this phenomenon. Unfortunately, there are still incidents in which an individual who is driving while impaired takes the lives of people on our roads, including, very sadly, young children.

Bill C-32 is therefore meant to respond to this situation by providing the police with tools to make their job easier when it comes to gathering evidence for laying a charge against an impaired driver. More specifically, it is aimed at people driving under the influence of drugs, such as marijuana.

The impaired driving problem goes back years, if not decades. A number of studies have considered the question and suggested ways in which the problem can be addressed. I would note that in 1999, the Standing Committee on Justice submitted the report entitled “Toward Eliminating Impaired Driving”, in which it was recognized that drugs could be a cause of accidents and that we had to find better methods of detecting them. It also stated that we had to improve the process of gathering evidence to allow for people driving under the influence of drugs to be prosecuted.

At that time, the committee identified two major obstacles: first, the absence of a clear definition of what constitutes “reasonable grounds”, the basis on which a police officer administers a test to a driver to detect drugs; and second, the apparent lack of a single non-invasive test for detecting drugs. Given the relative difficulty of the tests that have to be done, the committee suggested that the Charter implications of testing be taken into account. One of the recommendations made in the report was that blood samples be taken if the police officer had “reasonable grounds” for doing so.

The obstacles identified by the committee were also recognized by the Senate committee, which proposed at the time that more studies be done of the driving habits of drivers under the influence of drugs, a reliable and rapid testing tool be developed, and the blood alcohol level be lowered.

Four years later, the Minister of Justice issued a study report that came out of the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Justice. The study, entitled “Drug-Impaired Driving: Consultation Document”, suggested finding a legislative way of compelling drivers to take screening tests administered by police officers.

To that end, the document suggested setting a legal limit for drugs and legislating to allow police to administer a screening test. An expert on site could, with “reasonable grounds”, administer a test on the offending driver and then, if the test was positive, investigate further by taking a bodily fluid sample. The results would have been given by another expert to the closest police station. The tests and police testimony would be used as evidence to charge the driver.

However, the document stresses the importance of considering the Charter in legislating to amend the Criminal Code with regard to requests for bodily fluid samples and the offending driver's rights to consult a lawyer. Bill C-32, which the Liberals introduced on April 26, 2004, addressed these concerns, but died on the order paper in May 2004 when the election was called.

Reintroduced as C-16 in November 2004, the bill again died on the order paper a year later. The new Bill C-32, which happens to have the same number as the original and was introduced by the Conservative government, contains essentially the same provisions but, for ideological reasons, increases penalties for drivers found guilty of impaired driving.

I know that all the members of this House recognize that impaired driving remains one of the criminal offences most likely to cause death or injury to others. As I explained earlier, this is the third time this bill has been introduced in order to deal with the problem of impaired driving.

The Conservative bill is similar to the old Bill C-16 tabled in the previous Parliament. In short, it suggests the following three things. First, it would require people suspected of driving under the influence to take an alcohol or drug test ordered by police officers at the arrest site, that is to say, at the side of the road. Second, it authorizes experts to take samples of bodily fluids, something that is not in the current Criminal Code. Refusal to comply would constitute a criminal offence, just like refusal to take a breathalyser test. Third, the bill would limit the evidence that can be introduced in court to cast doubt on the way the breathalyser was used or the results of the blood alcohol tests.

This is often called the “two beer” defence, where the accused states that he or she had consumed only one or a particular number of drinks over a certain period of time and therefore could not possibly have had a blood alcohol reading as high as what the test said.

The government also wants to stiffen the sentences and introduce life imprisonment instead of five years for infractions causing the death of another person. To that are added the fines that are adjusted to reflect the number of repeat offences by the driver in question: $1,000 for a first offence instead of $600; 30 days in custody for a second offence instead of 14 days, and 120 days in custody for a third offence instead of 90 days.

I am deputy justice critic and, like our party, I think that this is a very important bill because it is intended to provide the tools that the police need to fight the impaired driving problem effectively. However, it is essential for us to review certain points in the bill because the proposed additions should be studied in order to determine whether they really will be effective.

In the course of the work of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, I would like to meet with experts and groups to shed light on the following concerns about which I want to inform the House—

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join this debate and speak in favour of Bill C-32, a bill that amends the Criminal Code in relation to impaired driving.

A great deal has already been said about the provisions of the bill. I do not wish to go over the same ground. Instead, I want to focus on some of the objections to the legislation that have appeared in the media regarding the bill.

First, there have been some who question whether the bill is constitutional with respect to the drug impaired driving provisions of the bill. I remind the House that this was extensively canvassed when Bill C-16 was considered.

Of course, no government will present to the House legislation that it considers is going to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unless it is convinced that the bill will be upheld as a reasonable limit on those rights. The previous government obviously considered the bill charter compliant or it would not have introduced Bill C-16.

When Bill C-16 was in committee, the then minister of justice, a well known human rights advocate, in his opening remarks on the bill addressed the issue of charter compliance. He said:

Let me deal for a moment with some charter considerations. We know that the demands for alcohol breath tests on approved screening devices at roadside, without a right to contact counsel, have been found justifiable by the courts under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, pursuant to the section 1 demonstrable justification limitation on a right.

The right to counsel must be given following the demand for an alcohol breath test on an approved instrument back at the station and before the approved instrument testing is done.

I anticipate that the same practice would prevail for the DRE evaluations envisaged under Bill C-16. With Bill C-16, we have tried to closely parallel the grounds that our prerequisites for making alcohol breath test demand. I believe that Bill C-16 offers good and important solutions that will be found justifiable under the charter.

Later, in response to a question he went further:

No, I think the court would apply the generic approach with respect to whether a limit on a right is justifiable under the circumstances, and then they would go into the four-part proportionality test.

They would ask themselves, is there a pressing and substantial objective? They would come to the conclusion, in my view, that there is a substantial and pressing objective, which is of course, at the bottom line, the saving of lives.

They would then look to see whether the means chosen were appropriate for the purpose or objective sought to be secured, as the other part of the proportionality test. I think the court would conclude here that this is a proportional remedy for the objective sought to be secured.

I believe the House can be assured that the requirement that a driver perform standard field sobriety tests at the roadside which are relatively brief will be upheld in the same way the roadside screening for alcohol has been upheld.

Similarly, the tests back at the station which will be performed by a trained officer are analogous to the test on an approved instrument.

I know many, if not most, members of the House would like to have an instrument that would measure quickly the concentration of various drugs just like the approved instruments that measure blood alcohol concentration.

The technology simply does not exist and, until it does, we will have to rely on various tests such as the reaction of the eyes to light, blood pressure, pulse and muscle tone on which the trained officer bases his opinion of which drug or combination of drugs and alcohol has caused the impairment. That opinion has to be validated by finding the drug in the person when bodily fluid is sampled.

Another objection to the proposed legislation's constitutionality was made by the president of the Ottawa Defence Lawyers Association reported in the Globe and Mail. He objected to the proposed offence of refusing to provide a breath sample when a person has been involved in a crash which will be punished in the same way as impaired driving causing bodily harm or death. He said:

There is no connection between the fact that you refuse to provide bodily substances and the accident itself. If you refuse, you have no defence.

When a person is charged with impaired driving causing death or bodily harm, the Crown has to establish the impairment and that the driving caused the accident.

The new offence will require the Crown to prove the refusal and then prove that the driver knew or ought to have known that he or she had caused an accident that had caused death or bodily harm.

This offence is modelled on the offence of failure to stop at the scene of an accident. The mental element is the intention to frustrate the police investigation.

In the case of flight, the person simply tries to avoid the police. In the case of refusal, the person refuses to provide a breath sample, the breath sample evidence necessary to determine whether the person was over .08 or in the case of a drug the person refuses to perform the test or to provide the bodily sample to determine whether the drug is actually present in the body.

Of course, in most accident situations the person will be well aware that there has been an accident. The police will still have to have reason to suspect the person has alcohol or drug in their system before making the demand.

Finally, I note that some of the users of medical marijuana claim that this legislation is aimed at them and will prevent them from driving their cars.

Russell Barth, quoted in the Edmonton Sun and other newspapers and described as a medical marijuana user and member of the National Capital Reformers, said that, “Discriminating against us based on our medication is much like discriminating against us based on the colour of our skin”.

In fact, medical marijuana users will be treated like other persons who take prescribed and over the counter drugs. People take all kinds of drugs for legitimate medical reasons. The question is whether they are impaired by that drug. If they can take their medicine and still pass the standard field sobriety test, they can drive. If they cannot, then they had better find someone to drive them around.

The offence of driving while in possession of an illicit drug also specifically provides that the person must be doing so without legitimate excuse. Clearly, persons who have been admitted to the medical marijuana scheme have a legitimate excuse to transport a supply of marijuana with them and would not be caught by this new offence.

I believe the bill is a balanced response to a very serious problem. I believe it is in fact long overdue. The minister in his speech made it clear that the government was prepared to consider any amendments that will strengthen the bill that the standing committee may suggest after hearing from witnesses.

I urge the members to give the bill second reading. I also urge the standing committee, which has a heavy workload, to give this bill priority. It will undoubtedly save thousands of Canadians from being injured or killed by impaired drivers.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure exactly what the member was asking.

However, in specific relation to driving while under the influence of drugs, currently there is no opportunity for the police or for any crown prosecutors to be able to convict anyone of a drug related driving offence. Bill C-32 creates a platform and an opportunity in three specific areas to do that. One is suspicion, two is possession, and obviously the third relies upon the fact that they will be able to use a standardized test that is used in many other jurisdictions in North America. They will go to the police station and under reasonable suspicion the individual will be tested and evaluated to see if in fact the individual is under the influence of a drug or certainly has driven under the influence of a drug.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the fine member for Peterborough.

It is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-32. It is an important piece of legislation that will close some serious holes in our impaired driving laws.

In 2003 impaired driving cost our society $10.5 billion, but there were other more significant costs. In that same year impaired driving took the lives of 1,200 Canadians and over 47,000 Canadians were injured, many of them very seriously. That is more than three people killed and over 125 injured every single day. How do we put a price tag on that? I strongly believe that we can prevent many of these tragedies in the future and it certainly is our duty to try. The legislation introduced today will give police and prosecutors the tools they need to rid our streets of drunk and drugged drivers. Let me begin by discussing the drugged drivers.

In researching this issue I was terrified by the statistics relating to teen drugged driving. According to a 2005 report on drug use by Ontario students, almost 20% of all student drivers reported driving after smoking marijuana. By grade 12 that figure is over 25% and they are not driving alone; 22% of all high school students from grade 9 to grade 12 reported that within the last year, they had been a passenger in a car driven by someone who smoked marijuana.

Of course, it is not just teenagers. A Senate report in 2002 found that between 5% and 12% of all drivers may drive while high. Drugged driving is obviously a very serious problem and as of right now, law enforcement is all but powerless to stop it. Police officers' hands are almost completely tied when it comes to collecting evidence. As Sergeant Brian Bowman of Toronto explained to CBC News:

If we see someone driving erratically, we really have a high hill to climb to prove it's from drug-impaired driving. We almost need the smoke to waft out of the car or have the pills fall out onto the road.

The police cannot even demand a physical sobriety test. This legislation will close that loophole. With this legislation police will now be able to request the performance of a roadside standardized field sobriety test when there is reasonable suspicion that a driver has a drug in his or her body.

They will also be able to demand a drug recognition expert evaluation to be performed at the police station. The DREE system has worked well outside Canada and it will work well here as well. Failure to comply with these demands will be considered an offence under the Criminal Code, just like refusing to take a breathalyzer test. A final deterrent to drug impaired driving will be added by making it a criminal offence to be in control of a motor vehicle while in possession of a controlled substance.

Now let me turn to the drunk drivers. Drunk driving was once winked at, but no longer. Today everyone recognizes that it is a deadly, serious problem. OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino has noted that the leading cause of criminal death in my home province of Ontario is not murder, it is drunk driving.

In my community, I had the opportunity to sit down with members of the Niagara Regional Police Service, to work with local MADD organizations and to meet on a number of occasions with their communications and public relations person, Chris George. In 2003 the Niagara Regional Police Service arrested 28 people during its month long holiday RIDE program. The Niagara OPP laid 99 charges of impaired driving in 2006 alone. The number in my riding continues to increase.

Drugged and drunk driving is listed as one of the top three justice concerns for the people of my community. This bill delivers on that concern. Bill C-32 toughens penalties for drunk drivers and helps prosecutors secure the convictions that are needed to keep the roads safe for responsible drivers.

We have strengthened the mandatory minimum penalties for first, second and third offences. The maximum penalty for impaired driving causing bodily harm will now be 10 years, and for causing death it will be life imprisonment. This is simply the right thing to do.

Our bill will help prosecutors get convictions. When prosecuting drunk drivers, the crown has objective scientific evidence from approved instruments that measure blood alcohol content.

In the 2005 case of R. v. Boucher, the Supreme Court ruled that the credibility of such testimony cannot be called into question by breathalyzer results, not even if someone blew more than twice the legal limit.

The two beers defence is a joke. Testimony from one's drinking buddies should not be allowed to distort objective scientific measures.

Getting this legislation passed should not be a partisan fight. In fact, in 1999 a Liberal dominated justice committee released a report on the issue. The committee's recommendations included the following: allowing imprisonment for life following conviction for impaired driving causing death; allowing for a maximum of 10 years' imprisonment where an accident causes bodily harm; and authorizing the taking of a blood sample for the purposes of testing for the presence of alcohol or drugs based on reasonable and probable grounds. Those were all good ideas agreed to by the Liberal MPs but good ideas nonetheless.

In 2003 the Department of Justice released a consultation document on the issue noting that drug recognition expert programs had been successfully implemented in many American jurisdictions. It was a very good point.

Bill C-32 will protect Canadians from impaired drivers. I encourage all members to support it. We have the opportunity to reach across all party lines and put forward legislation that is tough, that is fair, that is right and that is current with what is happening in jurisdictions around the world.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak with regard to Bill C-32 which essentially has two major components. One of which would address for the first time a methodology to use in our criminal justice system to deal with impairment while driving an automobile or plane under the influence of a drug rather than alcohol.

The second part to the bill, which quite frankly is probably more significant in terms of its effectiveness, deals with our existing law regarding impairment because of consumption of alcohol. One of the defences to those charges that has cropped up quite frankly has gotten to the stage of almost being a scandal in this country in terms of the number of times it is used and what I would call the underlying weakness of the jurisprudence that allows for that defence.

Both of these sections are important sections. We need to address them as a legislature and to see if in fact we can more effectively deal with the problem of impaired driving whether it is because of alcohol consumption, as we have traditionally looked at it, or now both a combination of alcohol and drugs or drug impairment on its own.

The first part of this bill is a reincarnation of Bill C-16 from the last Parliament that dealt exclusively with the issue of impairment by drugs. The sections in this bill are replicated from that former bill. Essentially what it attempts to do, which I have some concerns about, is to take us down the road that we followed with regard to impaired driving by alcohol going back now some 30 plus years and using technology, as we did then in the form of the breathalyzer, to identify people who were impaired and to deal with them by way of criminal penalty sanctions.

The difficulty I have is that the existing technology with regard to drug impairment is basically non-existent. It is nowhere near the situation we have with alcohol impairment. Because of the technology we initially developed and have now refined, the assessment of an individual being impaired as a result of the consumption of alcohol is quite clear and scientific.

Generally speaking, and it is in the percentile of 100%, it is irrefutable. Unless the equipment is malfunctioning or the operator is not qualified and has not used the equipment properly, the equipment properly and effectively assesses a person's impairment.

I think we can safely say there are two exceptions to that and a crucial one is when the test is given. If there continues to be some consumption of alcohol between the time the person stops operating the vehicle and the test is administered, it is possible that consumption will bring up the blood alcohol level and in fact take it over the prescribed limit when in fact the accused individual may not have been impaired at the time he or she was operating the vehicle. That is one defence and it stays in.

The second one is where the consumption of alcohol was huge immediately prior to the operation of the vehicle. When the test is given, the person is over the limit but in fact again, because it takes some time for the alcohol to work its way through the system and impair a person from operating a vehicle, that person in fact would not have been impaired at the time of the operation of the vehicle.

This bill, as did Bill C-16, preserves those defences, so if that can be established by evidence there would then be a defence to the charges because people would not have been impaired at the time they were operating the vehicle.

The difficulty we have with the drug impairment attempt that is going into this bill, and again that was in Bill C-16, is that we do not have two things. We do not have the technology to do a quick test, roadside or at a police station, but more importantly, we do not have any standards as to what type of drug will have what type of an effect in terms of impairment and the ability of the human being to operate a vehicle.

Because of the work we did in the last Parliament on Bill C-16 we took a great deal of evidence. In this regard the European Union and a number of countries in Europe are working to try to establish a standard of impairment from the consumption of marijuana or the chemical derivatives. They have not been able to do that up to this point. They believe they are making some advances but they are clearly not there at this stage.

In regard to marijuana specifically, one of the problems we have is that the particular chemical derived from the marijuana plant stays in the system for an extended period of time. This was a defence by one of our Olympians and that was his argument at that time. It saved the day for him. In fact, it is the scientific reality that the chemical substance stays in the system for an extended period of time, so it is going to be very difficult from what we can see at this point, mostly because of the work that has been done in Europe, to set that minimum standard.

The reason this is so important and that I am pursuing this issue with regard to marijuana is that there is no question, and we are hearing from our police officers across the country, from our prosecutors, from people involved in the impaired driving issue, that marijuana after alcohol is clearly the second biggest problem substance that we have. People consume it and then drive a vehicle while impaired. However, we do not have the technology or the science at this point to establish that minimum standard.

We also do not have any equipment that could be used at the roadside or at the police station that would do a quick assessment. That can only be done by way of taking a blood sample or a urine sample. This legislation recognizes that this can only be done by a qualified medical person, a doctor or medical technician which generally would have to occur at a medical clinic or hospital.

The proposal in the bill, as was in Bill C-16, is to establish a system in Canada mimicked after some that have been used in the United States and I believe in England, where we would have specially trained police officers. It would be a three stage approach. Initially the police officer who stopped the vehicle based on reasonable and probable grounds that the driver was operating the vehicle while under the influence of some chemical or drug would do an examination. This may include the traditional ones of walking the line, trying to touch the nose, balancing on one leg, looking at the eyes, and hearing the individual speak, the traditional ones we had before the breathalyzer for alcohol consumption.

If the officer made a determination that the person was clearly suffering from some impairment in terms of being able to operate the vehicle, the officer would then require the person to attend at a police station where he or she would be examined by a specially trained police officer. The language that is used in the statute is that of an “evaluating officer”. This person would be a police officer with general training but would have additional training and this is where I have one of the problems.

Not taking anything away from the individual, but in looking at the training material they use to train this person, I have serious doubts about his or her ability to make this evaluation. The evaluation they are required to make by statute is not only to evaluate the person's impairment, but to evaluate the type of drug was used as well. Was it marijuana, heroin, cocaine, or a prescription drug, legal or illegal? We can go down the list. We heard some evidence about the potential of there being hundreds of drugs. I see this method of evaluation as being a serious flaw.

If the evaluating officer makes a determination, this law would then require the accused person to attend in front of a qualified medical person, either in a clinic or a hospital, where a blood sample would be taken. The legislation then says that the sample could then be admitted in a courtroom to establish the fact that the evaluating officer was correct, that the person had consumed a drug, whatever it was.

Most lawyers who looked at this would ask what good this would do for them when they are in front of a judge and have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person was impaired.

Wearing the hat of a prosecutor, I would put this evidence forward and I would expect this question from the judge. Why was I giving this information that the individual had X amount of parts per million of a drug in his or her blood? Would that tell the judge anything about the person's ability to operate a motor vehicle? As I said earlier with regard to the work and the research that has been done with respect to impairment by marijuana, the answer from me as the prosecutor would be no. I could not tell the judge that this gave any indication as to whether the person was impaired. Obviously the judge would have to make an early decision.

Now wearing the hat of defence counsel, I would be telling the judge that the evidence was severely prejudicial to my client because it showed he consumed a drug but that was not what he was charged with. He was charged with impairment. The evidence has no value whatsoever toward establishing his impairment. That is the argument I would make as defence counsel.

In most cases the judge would indicate that the evidence was severely prejudicial because it showed the individual was a drug user, but it had no probative value in the courtroom as to the charge in front of the judge. I fear the case would be turfed based on that. That is not even a charter argument. This is evidentiary rules in our courts. Therefore, it has a fundamental flaw.

There is a charter challenge as well. As a result of the limited qualifications of the evaluating officer, the court may very well determine that a person's personal security was invaded, which is one of our fundamental rights in our country. A determination could be made under this section of the charter that it would not be reasonable to make the person give a blood sample, or in some cases a urine sample, because of the basis on which the demand was made. It was made by the evaluating officer, who was not a medical expert by any means and had a limited ability to make an assessment as to whether the drug was marijuana, heroin, or prescription, which may include a legal prescription, had been ingested by the accused.

During the Liberal government, the NDP supported the bill. It was sent it to committee and it did all the investigation. However, at the end of the day, we had serious concerns about whether this part of the bill would survive that challenge. Because of the risk of whether this will survive those challenges in the courtrooms, it also raises the issue as to whether it is worthwhile expending the kinds of dollars for the training that will be necessary to prepare our police officers for this methodology.

Those are our concerns. We will support the bill, even with regard to this part of it, to go to committee. We hope we perhaps we will find some more evidence now. Maybe the work being done in the Europe is more advanced. The last time we looked at this was about a year and a half ago.

I turn to the second part of the legislation, the more important part in terms of its usefulness in our system and in the courts. Finally, after at least 10 years, getting closer to 20 years, there is a manufactured defence in effect, and my friends in the criminal defence bar will hit me for saying this. Unfortunately our courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, have accepted this defence I think because of poor wording in the code, and I will give them that much credit, when we first passed this. The key wording is one can establish with evidence to the contrary that in fact the person was not impaired.

When I started to practise law, the Breathalyzer was just beginning to be used. At that point, it was generally accepted that if one could establish the machine was not working properly, as it has to be tested in certain ways before it is actually administered, or that the operator was not qualified or did not use it properly, then those defences could be used to establish that the Breathalyzer evidence was unacceptable and the charge could be avoided.

There is no question that those defences should remain. With any system that involves humans, there will be some flaws in it and we have to allow for those defences.

However, what happened was not those two defences or the defence of when the alcohol was consumed. What cropped up was a whole industry of defence lawyers and toxicologists and we would get this “two beer” defence. We would have this sequence.

This is where the two beers defence arises. For most people the consumption of two beers, within a reasonable timeframe of the test being administered, does not put them over the .08 limit. The accused would take the stand say that he or she had only two beers, or one glass of wine, or one shot. Then a friend or an acquaintance, who was with the individual that evening, would take the stand and confirm that. Then a toxicologist would be brought forward at great expense. These defences cost between $5,000 and $10,000. Unfortunately, a judge would have to say, “As I read this section of the code that's contrary evidence” and person would be acquitted. The number of times that has been used has almost become a scandal.

I believe proposed amendments to the sections in the code will remedy that problem. We will finally get the convictions we are missing now. Those individuals who are driving impaired, sometimes repeatedly will be convicted and penalties will imposed. Hopefully, that will reduce the amount of impaired driving in our country.

We will be supporting this bill, at least on second reading, and hopefully addressing some of the problems that I have mentioned in my remarks today.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the focus of my speech was on blood alcohol impairment, but as the member points out and as Bill C-32 deals with, it is impairment with drugs as well.

The drug recognition experts, DRE, are at RCMP detachments. It is a problem within our country. The impairment can be caused by a lack of sleep and someone not being safe to drive. Impairment can be caused by the use of prescription drugs, and it can be caused by illegal drugs or alcohol.

If individuals are impaired by whatever the cause and they are not safe to drive, they should not be driving. Therefore, an RCMP officer or a provincial police officer will now be able to ask for a roadside sobriety test. If it is determined that there is an impairment, they would then be going back to the detachment and a DRE would determine what is causing the impairment.

The commitment from the government is to make our communities safer, to make our streets safer, and to lower taxes and provide the dollars in a responsible way where they are needed. That is why we are supporting and providing the tools to the police. We are providing the tools for a cleaner environment and we are providing lower taxes. We want safer communities and we are getting the job done.

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I think we all share concerns about the harmful effect of driving while under the influence, whether it be alcohol or a controlled substance. They both diminish our faculties.

I look forward to seeing the results of the committee's work. I think everyone agrees with the principle of Bill C-32 but I know there are some concerns with the administration or defining of it. I would like to know if the parliamentary secretary shares these concerns and, if so, if he sees any solutions.

One concern is the question of creating an offence of up to five years imprisonment for possession of a controlled substance while driving. The driver might not have used the substance but it may be in his presence. I have fears about that. I will be speaking later this afternoon and I will discuss that more.

The other concern I would like the member talk about is the question of the drug recognition expert and the question of taking body fluids or blood in the case of an investigation or charges. In rural Canada that work will undoubtedly have to be administered by the RCMP.

The distances from station to station for the RCMP are far apart. They generally do not have staffing in the off hours. The administrative burden that will be put on the RCMP and the costs associated, the costs that will be transferred in this manner to the provinces and the municipalities because they do bear a portion of the policing costs in provinces such as Nova Scotia and I believe in all provinces, will be very high if each detachment needs to have someone trained as a drug recognition expert and be available 24 hours a day. That means that there would need to be multiple officers with that training. Some of these detachments have only three or four officers.

We would then need to have someone with the training to take the blood and body fluid samples in a safe manner. That would require a lot of nursing training or health type training and the person would need to be available on a 24 hour a day period. If not, then we are looking at the transportation of potential abusers, but people who may very well be innocent, of distances of three or four hours or more. This would be very difficult in the administration of this particular program.

I would ask the member if the government has considered these questions. Has the government looked at what it would cost, how it would do it and how it would ensure that the municipalities, cities, rural municipalities and the provinces are not overly burdened with these costs?

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not have the specific number but it is in the hundreds. It is more difficult to get a conviction on impaired driving than it is a murder conviction.

Before being elected to the House I worked as a loss prevention officer for the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. One of the things I had to do was provide answers to the ICBC, if there was ever a fatal accident, of what the causals were. It often was drug impairment, lack of using seat belts or bad choices. It is a very dangerous choice to drink and drive. It not only puts the driver at risk, it also puts the lives of other Canadians at risk who are sharing the road.

Bill C-32 is good legislation and it would bring us into the 21st century. We need to move forward. I hope all members of the committee will work together to ensure the bill moves quickly through the House.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, we are getting the job done and we are moving forward to action.

I am pleased to speak to Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts. This bill would bring Canada's impaired driving laws into the 21st century and would greatly assist the police in their efforts to investigate impaired driving incidents and the Crown in its prosecution of alleged offenders.

I know that all members recognize that impaired driving remains the single criminal offence that is most likely to result in death or injury of Canadians. If passed, this legislation would make an immeasurable contribution to the safety of all Canadians. Therefore, I trust that all parties will support the legislation and that we can cooperate so that these needed changes can be considered by the standing committee. I can assure all members that the government is open to consideration of all improvements that the committee can suggest, after hearing from stakeholders, to make the bill even more effective in achieving its goals.

The bill has three main components. First, it would give the police the tools they need to investigate drug impaired driving. Second, it would make changes to reflect the great advances that have been made in breathalyzer technology since Parliament first introduced breath testing almost 40 years ago. Third, it would introduce new offences and increase penalties for existing offences.

Many members in this House are familiar with the drug impaired provisions of this bill. They are virtually identical to the provisions of Bill C-16, which was introduced in the last Parliament, reviewed and amended in committee and reported unanimously with amendments by the committee. However, it died on the order paper.

There is no question that police and prosecutors are eagerly awaiting the passage of those changes.

I will confine my remarks to the new provisions of Bill C-32 so that members will understand what motivated the government to bring these amendments forward.

Probably the most important change in the bill is the proposal to ensure that only scientifically valid defences can be used where a person is accused of driving with a concentration of alcohol exceeding 80 milligrams in 100 millilitres of blood, driving 80 over, or .08, as the offence is commonly known.

Parliament first enacted an alcohol driving offence in 1921. Our current Criminal Code section 253(a) offence of driving impaired was enacted in 1951. It has been known for more than 50 years that a person with more than 80 milligrams of alcohol in his or her system is a danger to himself or herself and others on the road. A person with a blood alcohol content, BAC, of 90 milligrams is estimated by the U.S. Department of Transportation to be at least 11 times as likely to be involved in a fatal accident as a sober driver. Above that level, the risk increases exponentially. At a BAC of 125, the person is at least 29 times as likely to be involved in a fatal accident.

While recognizing the risk of collision with escalating blood alcohol concentrations, the problem has always been how to prove the concentration. Determining the BAC can be done by analyzing blood. However, obtaining a blood sample is intrusive and it can take a long time to complete the blood analysis, during which time the accused does not know whether the charge will be laid.

The problems with blood analysis were overcome in the 1950s with the invention of the Borkenstein breathalyzer, which converted alcohol in breath to alcohol in blood in a reliable, scientifically valid process.

Parliament recognized the risk of a blood alcohol concentration that exceeds 80 when in 1969 it passed legislation making it an offence for a person to drive with that much alcohol in his or her system. It is a peculiarity of the law that it can only be proven by making a person provide the evidence that can be used against him or her in court. Accordingly, Parliament made it an offence to refuse to provide a breath sample on an approved instrument.

Advances in technology made it possible to measure BAC at roadside, so Parliament provided for the use of a roadside screening device in 1979. These screeners indicate that a person has failed, but do not give a precise BAC for use in court. They do provide the police with grounds to demand the approved instrument test and the results from the approved instrument are admissible in court. Again, it is an offence not to provide a breath sample on an approved screening device and it is an offence not to provide a breath sample on the approved instrument.

The courts have recognized the unique nature of this law. They have upheld its constitutionality as a reasonable limit on the charter right against unreasonable search and seizure that is justified by the horrendous toll caused by drunk drivers.

In 1979 Parliament had established a two step process for determining whether a driver was over 80 that appears simple: a reasonable suspicion of alcohol in the driver leads to a roadside approved device screening test which, if failed, leads to an approved instrument test which, if over 80, is proven by filing the certificate of the qualified technician in court.

However, impaired driving, and in particular, the over 80 cases, have become among the most complex cases to prove under the Criminal Code. It almost seems that every word and every comma in every section has been litigated.

Anyone who doubts how complicated the law has become only needs to pick up Martin's Annual Criminal Code. The 2007 edition has 12 pages of legislative text and annotations for the 13 sections dealing with murder, manslaughter and infanticide. Martin's has 62 pages of legislative text and annotations for the nine sections dealing with impaired driving.

Section 253(b) over 80 cases take up a grossly disproportionate amount of provincial court time. Often this is the sole charge as there is no evidence of erratic driving and few signs of impairment. If the defence can raise a reasonable doubt as to the blood alcohol content at the time of testing being equal to the BAC at the time of driving, the prosecution will virtually never have other evidence to prove the person was over 80 at the time of driving.

When Parliament first adopted breath testing legislation in 1969, the operator had to perform a series of tests to ensure the approved instrument was calibrated properly and had to read a needle to obtain a reading which was recorded manually. Clearly, there were opportunities for operator error and even an erroneous transcription of the BAC. Therefore, Parliament provided that the BAC reading is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, deemed to be the BAC at time of driving.

Unfortunately, even for a new generation of approved instruments that give digital readings, have automated internal checks and give a printout of the internal process, the courts have interpreted “evidence to the contrary” to include evidence given by the accused that he only had a small quantity of alcohol to drink, typically the two beer defence. The defence then calls a toxicologist to estimate the defendant's BAC based on the accused's testimony regarding the consumption of alcohol, time elapsed, food consumption, et cetera.

Essentially the accused is saying that regardless of the BAC at the time of testing, his or her BAC while driving could not have been over 80, given the small amount of alcohol consumed. The accused does not have to account for the BAC reading on the approved instrument at the police station. The courts, unless they reject totally the accused's evidence, hold that the presumption that the BAC at testing equals the BAC at the time of driving is defeated. Without this presumption, the prosecution does not have evidence to prove the over 80 offence. The defendant is acquitted for a lack of evidence showing the legal BAC at the time of driving.

The Supreme Court considered evidence to the contrary in Regina v. Boucher in December 2005, where the accused who had blown .092 testified that he only had drunk two large beers. Although the conviction was restored five to four, the decision turned solely on the credibility of the accused and whether the judge had properly considered the evidence as a whole.

The majority found at paragraph 43, “The judge also erred when she stated that the credibility of the accused and his witnesses could be assessed in light of the results of the breathalyzer test before applying the presumption”.

Consequently, the Supreme Court has effectively found that the results of a breath test can be disregarded by a trial judge and an accused found not guilty without any evidence whatsoever that the machine has malfunctioned, at least for the presumption of accuracy for the qualified technician's certificate.

Even if the court is suspicious of the accused's evidence, the presumption is lost because the accused only needs to meet the test of raising any evidence to the contrary. Frankly, I believe the courts have misunderstood what evidence to the contrary is meant to be.

Parliament passed the breathalyzer law in 1969 so that the calculation of the BAC could be done by the approved instrument, which takes the guesswork out of the equation provided the approved instrument is functioning properly, the operator uses it properly and the results are properly recorded.

The court's interpretation may have been justified when the technology was such that operator error could affect it and there would be no direct evidence of this. Therefore, it is very much a defence that reflects the weakness of the technology in use 40 years ago. I do not believe it is Parliament's intention that evidence to the contrary should be simply speculation about what an accused BAC might have been.

Given today's state of technology, evidence to the contrary must be direct evidence that the machine either did not operate properly or was not properly operated. If there is no such evidence, then the BAC produced by the machine must be accepted. The accused may still be acquitted if he or she can show that he or she was under 80 at the time of driving without contradicting the BAC results on the approved instrument at the police station. This could happen, for example, if the person downed several beers and was arrested before the alcohol was absorbed. It could occur that after driving but before being tested the person consumed alcohol and then it was absorbed by the time the approved instrument test was taken.

The fundamental question for Parliament is whether it can trust BAC readings produced by the approved instruments. Fortunately, advances in technology ensure that the accused receives full disclosure of modern approved instrument tests through the printout of the internal operations of the equipment.

In March of last year, the department commissioned a report from Brian Hodgson, a forensic toxicologist and chair of the alcohol test committee of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science on the validity of breath testing. I would be happy to provide a copy of this report to any member who wishes it. I trust that Mr. Hodgson will be called as a witness on the standing committee if we send the bill for review after second reading.

I would like to summarize his paper in this way. He wrote, “The Breathalyzer is entirely manually operated and therefore the reliability is vulnerable to human error. The test results are handwritten by the operator and vulnerable to transcription error. The advanced instruments have pre-programmed functions that minimize human error. For example, when electrical power is first turned on, all instruments must reach a specified operating temperature and the operator can then proceed with the testing of the subject. With the Breathalyzer, this function is the responsibility of the operator. The advanced instruments will not operate until the specified temperature is reached and have pre-programmed safety checks that will signal problems by means of air messages and will abort the testing procedures.

These approved instruments are highly sophisticated and must pass a rigorous evaluation process before the alcohol test committee recommends that they be listed as approved instruments under the Criminal Code for use in the courts. These instruments cannot be bought off the shelf at Wal-Mart. Perhaps the standing committee can arrange to have a demonstration of the older instruments and the new instruments so they can appreciate the differences.

In light of this science and the developments with the approved instruments, it is unfortunate that our courts have failed to reflect, in their jurisprudence, the evolution of the technology. Ignoring the BAC produced by one of the modern approved instruments and substituting for its accurate, scientific analysis of breath alcohol a calculation based on the testimony of the accused is deeply discouraging to the police and the prosecutors who have done everything that Parliament has prescribed.

As far back as 1968, the alcohol test committee expressed concern over the courts accepting testimony that effectively contradicted the approved instrument. In 1999, evidence to the contrary was discussed during the special hearings on the standing committee regarding impaired driving. The committee wrote:

The Committee understands the frustration expressed by justice system personnel over time-consuming defenses that, at least on the surface, may appear frivolous. However, given that the accused would have no effective means of checking the accuracy of a breath analysis machine, the Committee agrees that limiting the interpretation of “evidence to the contrary” in such a manner as recommended could effectively amount to the creation of an absolute liability criminal offence. Such a result would run the risk of interfering with an accused person's rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In present circumstances, therefore, the Committee does not support amendments to the Criminal Code that would limit the interpretation of “evidence to the contrary”.

Circumstances have changed. We now have modern technology that not only is designed to eliminate operator error but also prints out the results of the internal diagnostic checks that ensure that it is operating accurately. The accused receives a copy of that printout and can make a full answer and defence.

It is just as unacceptable to ignore the approved instrument BAC reading in favour of the testimony of the defendant and his or her friends as it would be for a court to ignore DNA found on the victim which analysis showed came from the accused because he or she and some friends testified that the accused was not at the scene of the crime, with no explanation of how the DNA happened to get there.

As MADD Canada's CEO, Andrew Murie, said in a press release calling for a rapid passage of the bill. He said:

Canada appears to be the only country that throws out the results of the evidentiary breath and blood samples based on the unsubstantiated, self-serving testimony of an accused impaired driver. We are very pleased to see the government limit these challenges.

I believe members will agree that a person who has been drinking is unlikely to have an exact recollection of the amount of alcohol that he or she consumed and it is appropriate that the blood alcohol content of the driver be established by a scientifically validated instrument that gives an exact reading rather than by a calculation based on a shaky foundation.

The amendments that we are proposing abolish the loose, undefined concept of “evidence to the contrary” and lists the actual scientifically valid defences that an accused can bring forward.

We are also reflecting in Bill C-32 the advances in technology by reducing from 15 minutes to 3 minutes the time required between the two required breath tests. The old breathalyzers required at least 10 minutes between tests for the operator to set the instrument back up so it was ready for another test. The new instruments are ready in a matter of minutes and they signal to the operator that they are ready to proceed.

Although there are other technical changes in the bill, I wish to conclude my remarks by discussing the changes in the offences and the new punishments.

The Criminal Code currently provides for higher maximum penalties for impaired driving causing death and impaired driving causing bodily harm. These higher penalties do not apply to refusal and over-80 offences, so unless there is also a conviction for causing bodily harm or death arising from the accident, a lower maximum penalty applies.

While evidence of BAC is not a prerequisite in order to prove the charge of impaired driving causing death or bodily harm, it is admissible in court. There is, therefore, an incentive for the accused to refuse to provide a sample in a case involving injury or death because the maximum penalty for refusal is five years.

Even if it is admitted, the BAC reading is not necessarily sufficient to prove the offender was impaired. The Crown must call a toxicologist to establish what has been known for more than 50 years, namely, that the person who is over 80 is impaired. Virtually all toxicologists agree that at 100 milligrams each person's ability to operate a vehicle is impaired.

We propose to eliminate the incentive to refuse by making a person who is over 80, and is the cause of a collision resulting in death or bodily injury, or who refuses to provide a breath sample knowing of the death or bodily harm, subject to the same penalties as a driver who, while impaired by alcohol or drug, causes death or bodily harm.

As for the penalties of impaired driving where there is no death or injury, the government believes that they do not adequately reflect the seriousness of this offence. We are proposing to raise the minimum fine for the first offence to $1,000. When combined with the prohibitions on driving, provincial licence suspensions and higher insurance costs, this should be enough to convince the people not to commit this offence again.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

Sadly, it is quite fitting for me to be discussing impaired driving today. Only a few days ago New Brunswick provincial court judge Sylvio Savoie gave a maximum five year sentence to a dangerous drunk driver who has been a threat in our community for some time. Judge Savoie sentenced this dangerous individual to a maximum punishment, despite the fact that the crown prosecutor asked for a four year sentence, which clearly shows, on this side of the House, that our view to leave discretion with judges often works to the benefit of the community.

Judge Savoie put it in his own words best when he said that it was his duty to see that those people on the highway are protected. That is what we on this side believe about our criminal justice system.

This particular individual could serve as the perfect example for us today in discussing Bill C-32 and criminal legislation in general, in justifying tougher sentences and harsher punishments to put a definite end to impaired driving of any sort.

In fact, this repeat offender served 21 days in 1990 for refusing the breathalyzer, 14 days in 1995 for refusal, 30 days in 1999 for a refusal and 18 months in 2002 for driving over the legal blood alcohol limit. If that was not bad enough, he was given 22 months for impaired driving and driving while prohibited. He returned to court a week later to deal with another outstanding impaired charge and was sentenced to three years.

Last week this five year sentence was added to that list of sentences and to the great benefit of the law-abiding citizens to whom this person represented a severe threat.

It is important to note that this sentence was handed out under existing Criminal Code provisions, the bulk of which have been enacted under Liberal governments. Let us face it, impaired driving is not acceptable. It is a dangerous criminal behaviour that sadly kills too many Canadian citizens every year, lives that could be easily spared.

Quite frankly, I hope one day that impaired driving will be a thing of the past and we simply will not have to deal with bills such as Bill C-32 because all Canadians will know it is not acceptable to drink and drive.

For now, though, we still have a lot of work to do in our society and as legislators in this Parliament to get there. Bill C-32 is a start. It proposes to help curb the problem of impaired driving.

This is not the first time, however, that the House has dealt with impaired driving legislation. In recent years the House of Commons has been in fact quite active. In 1999 a House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights released a report entitled “Toward Eliminating Impaired Driving” which recognized the need to develop better ways to detect impaired driving, especially impaired driving related to drugs.

A Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs also published a report called “Cannabis: Our Position for a Canadian Public Policy”. Once again, the committee noted that there is no reliable, non-intrusive roadside test for drugs.

In 2003, the Department of Justice also released a report entitled “Drug-Impaired Driving: Consultation Document”. Again, conclusions mentioned how drivers do not routinely submit to drug tests and how few measures the police had at their disposal to test drivers for alleged influence of drugs.

This is why in 2004 the previous Liberal government introduced a bill to establish a new national strategy to deal with impaired driving. Unfortunately, this legislation died on the order paper when an election was called. As soon as Parliament was back at work after the 2004 election, the re-elected Liberal government reintroduced legislation to deal with impaired driving and that was known as Bill C-16. It is very unfortunate that this piece of legislation also died on the order paper when the 2006 election was called.

Here we are today with the current Bill C-32 legislation, highly inspired I suggest by the very progressive Liberal justice agenda of previous governments.

Let us look at the bill in its pith and substance. Bill C-32 does a number of things. It provides tools to detect drug-impaired drivers and creates the offence of driving while in possession of illicit drugs. This would be routinely known by those of us who have dabbled in law and know that with respect to alcohol-related offences, it is also, under many provincial statutes, illegal to have possession of alcohol in the vehicle, which is a precursor to preventing the improper imbibing of alcohol while driving or being under the influence of alcohol while driving. This is a mere extension of that with respect to drugs.

It would restrict the evidence to the contrary rule, which I will delve into subsequently. It will also create the offence of being over .08, causing death or bodily harm, which goes of course to the alcohol side of impairment. It would increase penalties for impaired drivers and for driving while disqualified under provincial statutes or otherwise. It would, finally, assist the police in investigating alcohol-related crashes.

Bill C-32 provides for several means of determining whether a driver is impaired by drugs including standard sobriety tests, training experts to recognize drivers impaired by drugs, taking samples of bodily fluids, and creating an offence for refusing to comply.

In addition, Bill C-32 will establish a new hybrid offence punishable by a maximum of five years imprisonment and prohibition on driving.

The bill will also limit the use of “evidence to the contrary”, better known as the “two-beer” defence, while retaining valid defences.

The elimination of the two beer defence is an interesting point brought forward by this law. Forty years ago, breathalyzers and other machines used to calculate blood alcohol levels were prone to errors depending on operator experience, various circumstances and external factors. Frankly, technology has come a long way.

Therefore, it was possible in the past that individuals were wrongfully accused and sometimes wrongfully convicted after roadside tests and station-administered tests. They were wrongfully accused and convicted of offences relative to the .08 limitation.

However, today increasingly accurate technological advances have ensured that such malfunctions with detection devices are almost impossible. Each machine prints out internal checks before each test. Operators are better educated. In short, we have the science now.

There are very few cases where the calibration of the machine is in error or where the operator did not have specific knowledge of how to administer the impairment test. Consequently, there are very few cases, I am very confident in saying, where the accused are wrongfully accused or convicted of driving over the legal limit of .08 on the alcohol side.

We have made progress. Just as there are very few, if none I might say, wrongful accusations for convictions, I would also say on the other hand that there are more convictions, making our roads safer places. It is safe to say that in the mores of society, drug impaired driving has not caught up to and maintained the same level of vigilance in detection that alcohol impaired driving has.

Let me for a moment compare the technical aspects of evidence gathering with respect to crime. By doing so I hope to illustrate that we are a long way from being precise on drug impaired driving. We have made great achievements with respect to alcohol impaired driving, and on all other aspects of criminal justice we have made great progress because of science.

Let me compare our state of affairs with respect to impaired driving with the introduction of DNA evidence in the criminal justice system as a whole. With all the technology police and law enforcement officials have at their disposition today, would we ever consider debating a DNA match in court by presenting a few friends who could testify in favour of an accused who was faced with a positive DNA match? I doubt very much that any judge in this country would find the testimony of a few friends of the accused as a valid basis for rejecting accurate, scientifically precise DNA matches.

Oddly enough, on the impaired driving side, if a few drinking buddies are willing to testify that the accused only had a beer or two, a court can today reject the results of highly reliable, technologically advanced, precise instruments that otherwise perhaps would have not been available in the past.

This is how this amendment, building on Liberal traditions, is keeping up with technological advances. It is important to support our police officers, those on the front line who administer such tests, and give them the faith that we should have in the laws as they administer the tests and bring about proper convictions.

In December 2005 the Supreme Court of Canada considered the evidence to the contrary, the two beer defence, and found that the results of a breath test can be disregarded, could be disregarded, without any evidence of machine malfunction if the accused meets the test of raising a doubt, raising evidence to the contrary.

Bill C-32 establishes new offences, namely impaired driving causing bodily harm, punishable by imprisonment for a term of not more than ten years, or causing death, punishable by life imprisonment. A new offence for refusing to provide a breath sample, in cases of bodily injury or death, will carry the same sentences.

In addition, penalties for impaired driving will be higher. For a first offence, the fine increases from $600 to $1,000; for a second offence, sentencing increases from 14 days to 30 days; for a third offence, sentencing increases from 90 days to 120 days and a maximum of 18 months on summary conviction. Naturally, individuals found guilty of impaired driving will also lose their licence.

Bill C-32 also provides tools to assist the police by enabling them to test drivers within three hours of a collision. It also allows them to reduce the current time between breath tests to three minutes and also to extend the driver's seat presumption for refusal cases.

Let us be clear. As parliamentarians representing all regions of this country, as legislators, we have a special task, but we are all also somebody's son, husband or wife, somebody's father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, and we see, as law-abiding citizens, aside from our role as parliamentarians, the carnage of impaired driving in our society. We react not just as parliamentarians, but as parents, as children, as friends of people who have been hurt by the ravages of impaired driving, whether alcohol or drug. In short, drunk drivers are dangerous not only to themselves but to the whole of society.

That is why Bill C-32, while a good attempt, must be a good law. It must be efficacious. In its current form, it does not address many of the points raised in the multitude of committee and justice department reports that I referred to in the first part of my address.

It is crucial that this law be built on a solid foundation and take the findings of the reports, the commissioned studies and the justice department opinions and effect a very solid law, as we have seen with technological advances on the alcohol side, a law, as administered, that results in convictions, will provide deterrents and also does not lead to wrongful accusations or convictions. But primarily, the law must work.

Bill C-32 raises a number of questions which I as a member of the justice committee will be most eager to delve into so that we can perfect it and hopefully bring it back to the House as a efficacious law. These questions, and they must be raised, are as follows. They relate to how to test drivers on roadsides for drug impaired driving.

The amendments with respect to the alcohol side are terrific amendments and will act as further deterrents and better help on detection with respect to alcohol impaired driving. With respect to drug impaired driving, there are currently no reliable tests. I would quote the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada when he said in the House last week that “we do not have the equipment in place that can provide a roadside test for all drugs in the same way that we have with roadside breathalyzer tests” for alcohol detection.

And never a truer word was spoken by a member of the Conservative Party, a Conservative parliamentarian and member of the cabinet by virtue of being a parliamentary secretary. I want to give compliments where are compliments are due. I am certainly open to complimenting my friends on the Conservative side when they speak the truth and are 100% accurate, but 100% accuracy is really the standard which we are trying to achieve, with respect, as parliamentarians in Bill C-32, and the law as drafted cannot be said to achieve that on the drug impaired aspect.

There is another question related to the proposed legislation. I will be happy to study this and help this through committee. What drugs would the police be testing for? All drugs? Certain drugs? This certainly raises many questions. It has been scientifically demonstrated that cannabis can leave traces in the body for weeks after the physical and mental impairment effects have dissipated. How would the new drug recognition experts panel react to this?

How are we going to deal with the multitude of drugs, perhaps not even listed in the Criminal Code, if they cause impairment? What about prescription drugs? Although acquired legally through a doctor's prescription, many medications have warnings on them. Many people are irresponsible in taking one or several medications without reading the warnings. They put themselves in a position to harm others. They put themselves in a position to be impaired and not capable of driving safely. How does this bill deal with that aspect? How would the new drug recognition experts deal with this?

We live in a country where winter, certainly just lately but before that perhaps not, is very harsh and is synonymous with cold and flu season. That can last up to five or six months. What about the millions of Canadians who take flu and cold medications? For many of those medications, we are told not to drive or operate heavy machinery while taking them. This is a problem that Bill C-32 does not specifically address. I do not think we can leave it to the regulations to detect. This certainly must be canvassed through the best of expert testimony at the committee level.

The standardized field sobriety tests and the pooling together of the experts is an excellent idea, but we have to ask where they would be. Would they be available to every region of Canada? It is a high level of expertise. Will it apply in rural parts of Canada, like the riding of Tobique—Mactaquac, for instance? Certainly in the grand city of Moncton we would get those experts.

Furthermore, the only reliable test for drug impaired driving is a blood sample or a urine or saliva test and many of these might not stand a charter challenge, unfortunately.

In short and in conclusion, Liberals support this bill. We support it going to committee. We support the work of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We support local operations such as Opération Nez rouge. We want our streets and roadways to be safe. In doing so, we support the bill. We have many questions and we hope those questions will be answered at committee. We hope the House will support the questions and give the committee enough resources and time to proffer the proper evidence and come back with a bill that will protect Canadians.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-32, which the Bloc Québécois would like to review in committee. In committee, members can realize their full potential and focus on all the details. The Bloc Québécois would like this bill to be referred.

Before getting into Bill C-32, I want to take a few minutes to say that the government, where justice is concerned, has a rather controversial record. We know that this government has been very active, having introduced nearly a dozen bills. I would add that none of the bills really appeal to us.

There was Bill C-9 to amend section 742 on conditional sentencing. The government wanted to remove judicial discretion from the judiciary. One of the characteristics of the government is not to believe that our judiciary is serious and competent. It always wants to control and restrict the capacity of judges and increase their limitations when they pronounce sentences or make rulings.

The purpose of Bill C-9, which amended section 742, was to remove conditional sentences as an option for the trial judge for all offences punishable by 10 years in prison, even if it was brought down to one or two years in prison.

Unfortunately, we had to fundamentally change this bill in committee. I think we did our work as parliamentarians. Bill C-32 before us is a little more interesting because its purpose is to harmonize section 253 with everything to do with impaired driving. This a significant social problem and there is jurisprudence. I will have a chance to say more on this. They want to harmonize the legislation and use standardized sobriety tests. Our challenge, in committee, will be to look into the sensitivity, performance and operational nature of these tests.

There was also the bill on judges' salaries. This is an important debate because we have all studied Montesquieu and I know we are all motivated by the philosophy of strict separation of the legislative, the judiciary and the executive.

It is important for the three branches to live together with a healthy regard for each other's jurisdictions. That is why, when the question of judges’ salaries arises, Parliament wants to have an independent commission. It is hard for Parliament to decide how much judges’ salaries should be because judges are a major branch of the government involved not only in the administration of justice but ultimately in the interpretation of our laws. As parliamentarians, we make the laws. The government is empowered to implement them, and we hope that judges can interpret them.

For a long time, there was a balance. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was supposed to earn the same salary as the Prime Minister, and everything flowed from that. Then the government decided to upset the balance and proposed remuneration levels that were different from what the independent commission suggested. That was another bill we were unfortunately unable to support.

As I was saying, we want Bill C-32 referred to a committee because impaired driving is an extremely serious matter. People who take the wheel and drive on public roads must not pose a danger to their fellow citizens; that is obvious.

Thus, the government has passed legislation on suspended sentences and on the remuneration of judges.

The government has also introduced a bill on dangerous offenders. The government even hopes to establish a legislative committee. Everyone in the House understands the difference between a legislative committee and a standing committee. A legislative committee exists for the life of a certain bill, for example, the air quality bill leading to Canada’s Clean Air Act, which has been introduced by the government. My hon. colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie is one of the Bloc Québécois’ leading lights when it comes to the environment and the Conservative government should also recognize him as a leading light in view of his great expertise and the soundness of his views.

It is the Speaker of the House who appoints the committee chairs for as long as the work of each legislative committee continues. It is not the chair’s peers, the hon. members assigned to the committee, who elect the chair.

The bill on dangerous offenders is a very bad bill. It is animated by a reflexive reaction that would lead to the “three strikes” kind of approach we see in the United States. This is not a bill that the Bloc Québécois intends to support.

The government has introduced a bill on the age of consent, which is called the age of protection, with a clause that creates an exception when the age difference is less than five years. I believe that the leader of the Bloc Québécois said he was in favour of this bill when he was asked. Clearly, we will have to make amendments to reflect the new reality. It is true that sexuality is probably not what it was in your early childhood or early adolescence, Mr. Speaker. Today, adolescents start having sex earlier, when they are younger. In my day, we waited longer. All that has changed, and we have to take stock of those changes.

The government has also introduced a bill containing amendments relating to summary prosecutions. This is a rather technical bill, and I have to say that we are more or less in favour of it.

The government has also introduced Bill C-10 concerning minimum penalties for offences involving firearms.

Hon. members will remember Allan Rock. I am not sure whether his name evokes good or bad memories for the members of this House. When Allan Rock was minister of justice, he introduced a bill. I think that for my colleague, the former leader of the official opposition, this is an excellent memory. I know he was close to Allan Rock, whom the member for LaSalle—Émard, the former Prime Minister, appointed as Canada's ambassador to the United Nations. I have a great deal of respect for Allan Rock. I think he is a brilliant man who served this House well, except when it came to young offenders. The former government went completely off track on that issue.

All of this is to say that the current government has introduced Bill C-10, which seeks to increase the mandatory minimum penalties for offences involving firearms. Unfortunately, we do not have any conclusive studies on the deterrent effect of mandatory minimum penalties.

This morning in committee, we were doing a clause by clause study of Bill C-10. There is a great deal of wisdom gathered when all of the opposition parties are united in asking the government to do certain things. All of the opposition parties—the Liberals, the Bloc and the neo-Bolsheviks—asked the government to undertake a longitudinal study of the impact of mandatory minimum sentencing to find out whether it works as a deterrent or not.

Simply increasing mandatory minimum sentences is not enough. We have to know whether that will really bring peace to our communities. The Bloc Québécois, with its characteristic complete openness and scientific rigour, will see if the government does agree to the request for a longitudinal study of the impact of mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes because we have had mandatory minimum sentences for 10 years now.

Before I get back to Bill C-32, I cannot help but emphasize the government's remarkable inconsistency. On the one hand, the government is demanding that we increase mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes, but on the other, it wants to abolish the gun registry. Police officers in Canada and Quebec consult this registry hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day. Before entering a dwelling, officers need to know if there are firearms inside. I cannot for the life of me understand why the government wants to abolish this registry and deprive police officers of a tool they need.

I felt it was my duty to review the government's record. The government also introduced a bill about the national DNA database maintained by the RCMP. The committee will have an opportunity to study this bill.

Historically, the Bloc Québécois has always been concerned about street gangs and organized crime. It is always a pleasure to work with my colleague, the member for Ahuntsic. She and I have agreed on a number of measures and proposals that I will be presenting to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to ensure that we have the most effective means of combating street gangs and organized crime.

The Bloc Québécois is more committed to an approach that would enable our police to carry out successful investigations than to increasing mandatory minimum penalties.

Having completed this overview, I feel it my duty to begin discussion of Bill C-32. This bill would enable police officers to require that a person suspected of impaired driving due to alcohol or drugs submit to a sobriety test.

At present, the Criminal Code already contains provisions concerning impaired driving involving alcohol. Now, there would be more specific provisions concerning drugs. A person suspected of impaired driving could be compelled to submit to a test. However, jurisprudence is not clear on that subject. The interpretation that the Minister of Justice makes in this bill is to say that the Criminal Code at present does not give police officers the power to require that a person submit to a sobriety test nor to take a sample of bodily fluids as part of an investigation into infractions related to impaired driving.

If Bill C-32 is adopted, police officers will be able to require that a person suspected of impaired driving involving drugs must undergo tests and consent to the taking of bodily fluids for testing.

There is a need for some fine tuning. The work of the committee will be to ensure that the available detection technology—and I believe this is based on experience in the United States—is not unduly intrusive. We have a Charter and judicial guarantees. We want the police to have the proper tools, but it is a matter of balance.

It is important to talk about the difference between drugs and alcohol. As a member, I drink very little alcohol. I can claim no credit for that; I have never liked alcohol, and I do not use drugs. In short, I could be considered rather straight and my lifestyle reflects that. My greatest pleasures are not derived from alcohol or drugs. However, some of our fellow citizens do use drugs and alcohol.

We do not want people with a licence driving out on public roads to pose a threat to their fellow citizens. We believe that the police are empowered under the common law and the Criminal Code to stop people they see in situations of potential risk.

In 1985, if I am not mistaken—I do not want to mislead the House—in the matter of Dedman v. The Queen, the Supreme Court examined the legality of the R.I.D.E. program in Ontario. Under the program, road blocks are set up. This is done in Quebec too. Checks are done in busy areas. The police, peace officers on duty, stop people to find out whether they have been drinking. Obviously, when this practice began at the end of the 1980s, there were questions about the legality of the operation.

Usually, under the common law and the Criminal Code, a person stopping someone in a car must have reasonable grounds for believing that the individual is impaired or contravening the law. Operation R.I.D.E., as run in Ontario and as it is now run in Quebec, was simply a preventive measure. The aim was to see that all who were stopped were sober, even if there were not reasonable grounds. But, I repeat, under the common law and the Criminal Code, the exercise of the power to stop and arrest people must be based on reasonable grounds.

The Supreme Court said that people could be stopped to see if they were sober, but that would be as far as it went. When a person is stopped at a roadblock to check if they have been drinking, their car cannot be searched for heroin. The Supreme Court authorized the practices saying that a public goal of sufficient importance was involved to warrant police intervention.

The bill today wishes to go a bit further. The aim is to be able to determine impairment not only from alcohol but also from drugs. A major distinction, however, must be made. The presence of alcohol in the blood is much more easily detected than the presence of drugs. From what we have been told, if a person has consumed marijuana, traces of such consumption can be detected in the blood of this individual for up to seven, eight, nine or ten days afterwards, but that does not mean that the person was intoxicated at the time of their arrest.

That is why the committee must be very careful to recognize that what is actually important to the public is to make sure that the people who are driving vehicles on public roads are completely sober, that they are not intoxicated by either alcohol or drugs.

Breathalyzers work according to a different premise. Breathalyzers can determine whether the alcohol level in the blood is over 0.08% or 0.8 grams per litre. These facts are verified and charges can be laid. Where drug detection technologies are concerned, however, we have to make sure that they are sophisticated enough so that peace officers do not end up laying charges against people who are not really intoxicated.

Since I still have a minute, I will close by adding that one of the merits of this bill is that it will harmonize things. Since section 253 provides for different penalties, depending on whether charges are laid under paragraph (a), in which an individual is impaired by alcohol or a drug, or under paragraph (b), in which it is proved that an individual has consumed a specific quantity of alcohol or drugs.

The penalties are not the same, which does not make a lot of sense. It is the consequence of the deeds committed, and not just the evidence provided under paragraph (a) or (b), that should determine the sentences.

In conclusion, the Bloc Québécois hopes that Bill C-32 will be the subject of serious study in committee. I am sure that we can count on all parliamentarians to be thorough and rigorous in their work.

The House resumed from January 30 consideration of the motion that Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the fine words of welcome from the opposition House leader.

Today, of course, we will be continuing with the opposition motion. Tomorrow we will continue debate on the report stage amendments to Bill C-31, the election integrity act amendments with which we are all familiar.

For Monday and Tuesday, we are intending to call Bill C-26 on payday loans, which is at third reading, Bill C-32 on impaired driving, Bill C-11, the transport act, and Bill C-33, the technical income tax bill.

On Wednesday we hope to begin debate on the third reading stage of Bill C-31, followed by Bill C-44 relating to human rights.

Thursday, February 8 shall be an allotted day. Next Friday we would like to begin debate on the anti-terrorism motion that would extend the application of certain sections of the Anti-Terrorism Act that are due to expire.

Finally, as members know, democratic reform is a priority for Canada's new government, and given that the Liberal leader has publicly expressed his support for term limits for senators, could the official opposition inform the House as to when it can expect the unelected, unaccountable Liberal senators who are delaying and obstructing that bill to give us a chance to consider it here in the House of Commons?

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that this is the first time that I stand in this House as the opposition justice critic and I am very pleased to do so.

It gives me great pleasure to speak to Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

As I just said in French, this is my first speech as the official opposition's justice critic. I look forward to working with my colleagues, be they in my party or in other parties, to provide intelligent, smart solutions to all justice issues that come before this House.

In considering Bill C-32, we must look at its history in order to understand it. The history of Bill C-32 goes back quite a few years, in fact to May 1999 when the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights released a report entitled “Toward Eliminating Impaired Driving”.

The committee then recognized that drugs were a contributing factor to some fatal motor vehicle accidents. It also emphasized the need to develop better measures to detect drug impaired driving and to obtain the proper evidence allowing for the successful prosecution of individuals who drove while under the influence of drugs.

A further study on this issue was the Senate special committee on illegal drugs report entitled “Cannabis: Our Position for a Canadian Public Policy”. One of its important findings was that there was no reliable, non-intrusive, rapid roadside test for drugs. In the case of cannabis, the best way to test is through blood samples. This then obviously represents a challenge that needs to be met in order to address the problem of drug impaired driving.

In response to the 1999 report, the Department of Justice and its working group on impaired driving consulted extensively with the provinces and territories. The results of these consultations was the October 2003 release of the report entitled “Drug-Impaired Driving: Consultation Document”. This document pointed out that many drug impaired drivers were not voluntarily participating in testing. It does stress the need to develop measures that would allow police to demand that drivers suspected of being impaired by drug use would submit to testing.

The report highlighted two options. The first option was to set a legal limit on the presence of drugs on the body. The second option was to propose legislation that would improve the ability of our law enforcement, our police officers, to demand drug tests. A certified officer could demand a physical sobriety test or take a saliva or sweat sample at the roadside based on the reasonable suspicion of drug impairment. Failure on such a test would then represent reasonable grounds to conduct a more detailed evaluation and, obviously, more intrusive evaluation at a police station. The bill that is before us, Bill C-32, follows in the steps of this second option.

The House of Commons special committee report on the non-medical use of drugs released in the fall of 2003 called for Parliament to develop a strategy addressing the question of drug impaired driving. In April 2004, our then Liberal government, and it is quite coincidental I am sure that the present government bill carries the same number, reintroduced Bill C-32. That bill would have dealt with the drug impaired driving in the fashion described above. Unfortunately, the bill died on the order paper in May 2004 when an election was called.

The Liberals were re-elected, albeit as a minority government, and in November 2004 reintroduced that same bill but as Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts. That bill made its way to committee and was reported back to the House with some amendments. Unfortunately, that piece of legislation also died on the order paper when the election was called in November 2005.

Thus, the current minority Conservative government's Bill C-32 has followed in the footsteps taken by the previous Liberal government. The Conservatives, however, have chosen to reintroduce it with a few changes, namely, by incorporating stronger penalties than the Liberals' two previous bills had envisioned.

On the same topic, I noted that Canadian Press reported on the introduction of Bill C-2 with the following words. I am quoting from the November 22 wire which reads:

The federal Conservatives have brought in legislation to crack down on drug-impaired drivers--by resurrecting a plan first advanced by the Liberals, adding heavier fines and jail terms, and calling the result a Tory initiative.

I think that this description is accurate, and I can only commend the Tories for recognizing a great idea even when it was developed and first presented by another party, the Liberal Party when it was the government.

Now that we have discussed the background for the bill before us, we must examine the amendments it will make to the Criminal Code. The summary for Bill C-32 reads as follows:

This enactment amends the Criminal Code

(a) to create an offence of operating a motor vehicle while in possession of a controlled substance as defined in subsection 2(1) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act;

(b) to authorize specially trained peace officers to conduct tests to determine whether a person is impaired by a drug or a combination of alcohol and a drug;

(c) to authorize the taking of bodily fluids to test for the presence of alcohol or a drug;

(d) to create an offence of operating a motor vehicle with a concentration of alcohol in the blood that exceeds 80 mg of alcohol in 100 mL of blood and causing bodily harm or death to another person;

(e) to clarify what evidence a person accused of driving with a concentration of alcohol in the blood that exceeds 80 mg of alcohol in 100 mL of blood can introduce to raise a doubt that they were not committing the offence;

(f) to create an offence of refusing to provide a breath sample when the accused knows or ought to know that the accused’s operation of a motor vehicle caused an accident resulting in bodily harm to another person or death; and

(g) to increase the penalties for impaired driving.

The enactment also makes consequential amendments to other Acts.

As the Liberal justice critic, I want to say that my party takes very seriously problems of impaired driving caused by alcohol and/or other drugs. In my opinion, the proof of this is that, when we formed the government, we twice introduced a bill amending the Criminal Code to deal with this problem.

I believe the proof is there. We take this issue very seriously and we also take very seriously measures that are smart and effective and that have a good chance and even an excellent chance of achieving the intended objectives. Moreover, we support initiatives to provide services responsible for maintaining public order with concrete and effective tools to implement legislation aimed at cracking down on impaired driving caused by alcohol or other drugs.

We are therefore prepared to support Bill C-32 so that it can make its way to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. The committee could examine the bill in greater detail and summon witnesses and experts to give their own particular perspective. In addition, the committee could propose any amendments it deems necessary. However, I would like to say that we still have reservations about some aspects of this bill. We hope that the government will work constructively with all the opposition parties to address these reservations and that the most useful and most effective legislation will be adopted.

What concerns or reservations do we have about this bill?

Some hon. members have already voiced them.

The Canada Safety Council has already voiced some objections to roadside drug testing. It asks which type of drugs police would test for. Would it simply be illicit, illegal drugs, or would it also be drugs that are legal, in the sense that they are prescription drugs. The person could be in legal possession of those prescription drugs, but the effects of those drugs may cause impairment and it is clearly indicated, for instance, as part of the protocol for taking that drug.

How many of us have not come down with a bad cold or a bad infection, have been prescribed medication by our doctor and when we receive it at the pharmacy it clearly says on the label not to operate machinery or a moving vehicle while taking that medication.

The Canada Safety Council has concerns about what are the drugs that are going to be tested for and whether there will be the possibility of distinguishing between prescription drugs and illegal drugs. As well, how would we deal with the fact that there are certain drugs, like marijuana, which may linger in the body well after the initial high is over and well after the effects of impairment of one's abilities have completely dissipated but traces of the drug still remain?

The Canada Safety Council is asking these questions. How is this bill going to deal with these issues? These are questions that hopefully will be answered if this bill goes to committee.

As I said, as the Liberal critic I will be recommending to my colleagues to vote in favour to send it on to committee so that we can attempt to get answers to these questions and, if it is possible, to amend the bill. If we are given solid answers by experts who say that yes, we could do that and we could amend the legislation in such a way to ensure that it happened, then we would hope that we would get government cooperation in order to do so.

I had another question which was not answered by the parliamentary secretary during questions and comments. I asked whether or not studies had been done to determine in what percentage of cases where there has been death or injury caused by a motor vehicle and there is evidence of impairment--and let us just consider alcohol impairment--the Crown actually brought forth manslaughter charges, which includes the section of the Criminal Code that exists right now that deals with manslaughter and also includes death and injury caused by a vehicle, including impaired driving and provides for a maximum sentence of life.

I would like to know what scientific studies have been done to determine why it is that those provisions have not been used obviously sufficiently from what the parliamentary secretary said. He talked about people who are impaired causing carnage with their vehicles et cetera and that they are getting away with it because they are refusing to take the testing. Where are the problems? We have provisions right now but they appear not to be used. Why is that? What is the evidence that would show why they are not being used?

Finally, we know the government has announced that it will be placing $2 million to the benefit of our law enforcement in order to get the training and to do these roadside sobriety tests. How much money, if any, is the government planning to use to do a public education campaign?

History has shown that Canada-wide public education campaigns about impaired driving have been very well received by the public.

That is why today people have a designated driver when they spend an evening with friends or go to a party in a hall or restaurant where alcohol is served. Today, the vast majority of people resign themselves to drinking nothing. But if they do decide to drink, they have a designated driver.

Does the government plan to put money and people behind the idea of an education campaign on driving while under the influence not only of alcohol, but also drugs, for example? I would like to know. Perhaps the answers will come out during the committee hearings, if the House decides to refer this bill to committee.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, and thank you to my colleagues in this House who are taking part in this debate. As I have already said, I recommend that my colleagues from all parties refer this bill to committee so that we can try to answer these questions and, if necessary, improve the bill.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-32, an act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other acts.

The bill would help bring Canada's impaired driving laws into the 21st century and would greatly assist the police in their efforts to investigate impaired driving incidents and the Crown in its prosecutions of alleged offenders.

I know all members recognize that impaired driving remains the single criminal offence that is most likely to result in the death or injury of Canadians. If passed, this legislation will make an immeasurable contribution to the safety of all Canadians. Therefore, I trust that all parties will support the legislation and that we can cooperate so that these needed changes can be considered by the standing committee expeditiously.

I can assure all members that the government is open to consideration of any improvements that the committee can suggest, after hearing from stakeholders, to make the bill even more effective in achieving its goals.

The bill has three main components.

First, it would give police officers the tools they need to investigate drug impaired driving.

Second, it would make changes that reflect the great advances made in breathalyzer technology since Parliament first introduced breath testing almost 40 years ago.

Third, it would introduce new offences and increase penalties for existing offences.

Many members of the House are familiar with the drug impaired provisions of the bill. They are virtually identical to the provisions of Bill C-16, which was introduced in an earlier Parliament. That bill was reviewed and amended in committee and reported unanimously with amendments by the committee. However, it died on the order paper.

There is no question that police and prosecutors are eagerly awaiting the passage of those changes.

I will therefore confine my remarks to the new provisions in Bill C-32 so that members will understand what motivated the government to bring these amendments forward.

Probably the most important change in this bill is the proposal to ensure that only scientifically valid defences can be used where a person is accused of driving with a concentration of alcohol exceeding 80 milligrams in 100 millilitres of blood. This is known as driving over 80.

Parliament first enacted an alcohol driving offence in 1921. Our current Criminal Code, section 253, subsection (a), offence of impaired driving, was enacted in 1951. It has been known for more than 50 years that a person with more than 80 milligrams of alcohol in their system is a danger to himself or herself and also to other users of the road.

A person with a blood alcohol concentration of 90 is estimated by the U.S. Department of Transportation to be at least 11 times as likely to be involved in a fatal accident as a sober driver. Above that level, the risk increases exponentially. At a blood alcohol level of 125, for example, a person is at least 29 times as likely to be involved in a fatal collision.

While recognizing the risk of collisions with escalating blood alcohol concentrations, the problem has always been how to prove the concentration. Determining BAC can be done by analyzing blood. However, obtaining a blood sample is often seen as intrusive and it can take a long time to complete the blood analysis, during which time the accused does not know whether a charge will be laid.

The problems with blood analysis were overcome in the 1950s with the invention of Borkenstein Breathalyzer, which converted alcohol in breath to alcohol in blood in a reliable, scientifically valid process.

Parliament recognized the risk of blood alcohol concentration that exceeded 80 when it passed, in 1969, legislation making it an offence to drive with that much alcohol or more in a person's system. It is a peculiarity of the law that it can only be proven by making the person provide the evidence that can be used against him or her in court. Accordingly Parliament made it an offence to refuse to provide the breath sample on an improved instrument.

Advances in technology made it possible to measure the BAC at roadside, so Parliament provided for the use of a roadside screening device in 1979. These screeners indicate that a person has failed but do not give a precise BAC for use in court. They do provide the police with grounds to demand the approved instrument test. The results from the approved instrument are admissible in court.

Again, it is an offence not to provide the breath sample on an approved screening device and it is an offence not to provide the breath sample on an approved instrument. The courts have recognized the unique nature of this law and they have upheld its constitutionality as a reasonable limit on the charter right against unreasonable search and seizure, a limit that is justified by the horrendous toll caused by drunk drivers.

Therefore, by 1979 Parliament had established a two-step process for determining whether a driver was over 80. It appears simple. A reasonable suspicion of alcohol in the driver leads to a roadside approved device screening test which, if failed, leads to an approved instrument test, in which over 80 is proven by filing the certificate of the qualified technician in court.

However, as all members are likely aware, impaired driving, and in particular over-80 cases, have become among the most complex cases to prove under the Criminal Code. It seems that every word and every comma in every section has been litigated. Anyone who doubts how complicated the law has become need only pick up Martin's Annual Criminal Code. The 2007 edition has 12 pages of legislative text and annotations for the 13 sections dealing with murder, manslaughter and infanticide. Martin's has 62 pages of legislated text and annotations for the nine sections dealing with impaired driving.

Subsection 253(b) over-80 cases take up a grossly disproportionate amount of provincial court trial time. Often this is the sole charge, as there is no evidence of erratic driving and there are few signs of impairment. If the defence can raise a reasonable doubt as to the BAC at the time of testing being equal to the BAC at the time of driving, the prosecution will virtually never have other evidence to prove that the person was over 80 at the time of driving.

When Parliament first adopted breath testing legislation in 1969, the operator had to perform a series of tests to ensure the approved instrument was calibrated properly and had to read a needle to obtain a reading, which was recorded manually. Clearly, there were opportunities for operator error and even erroneous transcription of the BAC.

Therefore, Parliament provided that the BAC reading is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, deemed to be the BAC at the time of driving. Unfortunately, even for a new generation of approved instruments that give digital readings, have automated internal checks and give a printout of the internal process, the courts have interpreted evidence to the contrary to include evidence given by the accused that he only had a small quantity of alcohol to drink, typically “two beer”. This has become known as the two-beer defence.

The defence then calls a toxicologist to estimate the defendant's BAC based on the accused's testimony regarding consumption of alcohol, time elapsed, food consumption, et cetera. Essentially, the accused is saying that regardless of the BAC at the time of testing, his or her BAC while driving could not have been over 80 given the small amount of alcohol consumed.

The accused does not have to account for the BAC reading on the approved instrument at the police station. The courts, unless they reject totally the accused's evidence, hold that the presumption that the BAC at testing equals the BAC at the time of driving is defeated. Without this presumption, the prosecution does not have evidence to prove the over-80 offence. The defendant is acquitted for a lack of evidence showing the illegal BAC at the time of driving.

The Supreme Court considered evidence to the contrary in December 2005, where the accused, who had blown .092, testified that he had only two large beer. Although the conviction was restored, the decision turned solely on the credibility of the accused and whether the judge had properly considered the evidence as a whole.

The majority found, at paragraph 43, that:

The judge also erred when she stated that the credibility of the accused and his witnesses could be assessed in light of the results of the breathalyzer tests before applying the presumption.

Consequently, the Supreme Court has effectively found that the results of a breath test can be disregarded by the trial judge and the accused found not guilty without any evidence whatsoever that the machine has malfunctioned, at least for the “presumption of accuracy for the qualified technician's certificate”. Even if the court is suspicious of the accused's evidence, the presumption is lost because the accused only has to meet the test of raising any evidence to the contrary.

Frankly, this may be a misunderstanding of what “evidence to the contrary” was intended by Parliament to be. Parliament passed the breathalyzer law in 1969, so the calculation of BAC would be done by the approved instrument, which takes the guesswork out of the equation provided the approved instrument is functioning properly, the operator uses it properly and the results are properly recorded.

The court's interpretation may have been justified when the technology was such that operator error could affect it and there would be no direct evidence of this. Therefore, it is very much a defence that reflects the weaknesses of technology in use some 40 years ago. It was not, I believe, Parliament's intention that evidence to the contrary should be simply speculation about what an accused BAC might have been.

Given today's state of technology, evidence to the contrary must be direct evidence that the machine either did not operate properly or was not operated properly. If there is no such evidence, then the BAC produced by the machine should be accepted.

The accused may still be acquitted if he or she can show that they could have been under 80 at the time driving without contradicting the BAC results on the approved instrument at the police station. This could happen if, for example, the person downed several drinks and was arrested before the alcohol was absorbed. It could also occur that after driving, but before testing, the person consumed alcohol and it was absorbed by the time the approved instrument test was taken.

The fundamental question for Parliament is whether it can trust the BAC readings produced by the approved instruments. Fortunately, advances in technology ensure that the accused receives full disclosure of more modern approved evidence tests through the printout of the internal operations of the equipment.

In March of last year, the justice department commissioned from Mr. Brian Hodgson, a forensic toxicologist and the chair of the alcohol test committee of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science, a report on the validity of breath testing. I will be happy to provide a copy of this report to any member who wishes it. I trust that Mr. Hodgson will be called as a witness by the standing committee if we send the bill for review after second reading.

Let me summarize his paper this way. He wrote that the Breathalyzer is entirely manually operated and therefore the reliability is vulnerable to human error. The test results are handwritten by the operator and vulnerable to transcription error. The advanced instruments have preprogrammed functions that minimize human operator error. He continued, saying that, for example, when electrical power is first turned on, all instruments must reach a specified operating temperature and the operator can then proceed with the testing of the subject. With the Breathalyzer, this function is the responsibility of the operator. The advanced instruments will not operate until the specified temperature is reached and have preprogrammed safety checks that will signal problems by means of error messages and will abort the testing procedure.

These approved instruments are highly sophisticated and have to pass a rigorous evaluation process before the alcohol test committee recommends that they be listed as approved instruments under the Criminal Code for use in the courts. One does not buy these instruments off the shelf at Wal-Mart. Perhaps the standing committee can arrange to have a demonstration of the older instruments and the new instruments so they will be better able to appreciate the differences.

In light of this science and the developments with the approved instruments, it is unfortunate that our courts have failed to reflect in their jurisprudence the evolution of the technology. Ignoring the BAC produced by one of the modern approved instruments and substituting for its accurate, scientific analysis of breath alcohol a calculation based on the testimony of the accused is deeply discouraging to the police and prosecutors, who have done everything that Parliament has prescribed.

As far back as 1986, the alcohol test committee expressed concern over the courts accepting testimony that effectively contradicted the approved instrument. In 1999, evidence to the contrary was discussed during the special hearings of the standing committee regarding impaired driving.

The committee wrote:

The Committee understands the frustration expressed by justice system personnel over time-consuming defenses that, at least on the surface, may appear frivolous. However, given that the accused would have no effective means of checking the accuracy of a breath analysis machine, the Committee agrees that limiting the interpretation of “evidence to the contrary” in such a manner as recommended could effectively amount to the creation of an absolute liability criminal offence. Such a result would run the risk of interfering with an accused person's rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In present circumstances, therefore, the Committee does not support amendments to the Criminal Code that would limit the interpretation of “evidence to the contrary”.

Circumstances certainly have changed. We now have modern technology that not only is designed to eliminate operator error but also prints out the results of its internal diagnostic checks that ensure it is operating accurately. The accused receives a copy of that printout and can make full answer in defence.

It is just as unacceptable to ignore the approved instrument BAC reading in favour of the testimony of the defendant and his or her friends as it would be for a court to ignore DNA found on the victim that analysis shows comes from the accused because he or she and a few friends testified that the accused was not at the scene of the crime, with no explanation as to how the DNA happened to be there.

As MADD Canada's CEO Andrew Murie said in a press release calling for rapid passage of this bill:

Canada appears to be the only country that throws out the results of the evidentiary breath and blood samples based on the unsubstantiated, self-serving testimony of an accused impaired driver. We are very pleased to see the government limit these challenges.

I believe members will agree that a person who has been drinking is unlikely to have an exact recollection of the amount of alcohol he or she consumed and it is appropriate that the blood alcohol content of the driver be established by a scientifically validated instrument that gives an exact reading rather than by a calculation based on such a shaky foundation.

The amendments that we are proposing abolish the loose, undefined concept of “evidence to the contrary” and list the actual scientifically valid offences that an accused can bring forward.

We are also reflecting in Bill C-32 the advances in technology by reducing from 15 minutes to three minutes the time required between the two required breath tests. The old breathalyzers required at least 10 minutes between tests for the operator to set the instrument back up so that it was ready for another test. The new instruments are ready in a matter of minutes and they signal to the operator that they are ready to proceed.

Although there are other technical changes in the bill, I wish to conclude my remarks by discussing the changes in the offences and the new punishments.

The Criminal Code currently provides for higher maximum penalties for impaired driving causing death and impaired driving causing bodily harm. These higher penalties do not apply to refusal in over-80 offences, so unless there is also a conviction for causing bodily harm or death arising from the incident, a lower maximum penalty applies.

While evidence of BAC is not a prerequisite in order to prove the charge of impaired driving causing death or bodily harm, it is admissible in court. There is, therefore, an incentive for the accused to refuse to provide a sample in a case involving injury or death, because the maximum penalty for a refusal is five years.

Even if it is admitted, the BAC reading is not necessarily sufficient to prove the offender was impaired. The Crown has to call a toxicologist to establish, as I have said, what has been known for more than 50 years, namely, that a person who is over 80 is impaired. Virtually all toxicologists agree that at 100 milligrams each person's ability to operate a vehicle is impaired.

We propose to eliminate this incentive to refuse by making a person who is over 80 and is the cause of a collision resulting in death or bodily harm, or who refuses to provide a breath sample knowing of the death or bodily harm, subject to the same penalties as the driver who, while impaired by alcohol or a drug, caused a death or bodily harm.

As for the penalties for impaired driving where there is no death or injury, the government believes they do not adequately reflect the seriousness of this offence. We are proposing to raise the minimum fine for a first offence to $1,000. When combined with the prohibitions on driving, provincial licence suspensions and higher insurance costs, this should be enough to convince the person not to commit the offence again.

However, for those who do commit another offence, we propose that they be subject to imprisonment for a minimum 30 days on a second offence instead of the current 14 days. For a third offence, we propose 120 days rather than the current 90 days' imprisonment.

I am indeed pleased to recommend to the House that it give second reading to Bill C-32. I urge all members to support it.

[Chuck Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Fraser Canyon, BC]

moved that Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Business of the House

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to confirm that the holiday season will be beginning in due course. In the meantime, we will continue with Bill C-37, the tax convention; Bill C-12, financial institutions; and Bill C-36, an act to amend the Canada Pension Plan and the Old Age Security Act.

Tomorrow we will begin the third reading of Bill C-28, budget tax measures.

We will continue next week with the business from this week, with the addition of Bill C-40, sales tax; Bill C-32, impaired driving; Bill C-33, technical income tax; Bill C-35, bail reform; and, of course, as is the tradition, as the member would know, it is great to get into a prebudget debate and that usually lasts about two days.

We have a busy agenda and I look forward to the cooperation of the hon. member. I am sure we will have further discussions on this.

Criminal Code

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (impaired driving) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)