Justice committee  There are a couple of things. One is that the legislation currently calls for the initial breath test to be done in an approved screening device—

Justice committee  Okay. Thank you. The approved screening device is designed for enhancing suspicion to reasonable and probable grounds roadside for breath demand. For the purpose of the drug evaluation, the instrument should be an evidentiary instrument that gives us a complete, full reading of

Justice committee  No, thanks.

Justice committee  Alberta had its first DRE course in November of last year. There were 24 candidates. Nine of them were from the Edmonton Police Service, and the rest were from around the province, including the RCMP. The majority of those were from non-major centres. It's going to be a problem

Justice committee  Yes, it is, and it has been since 2003.

Justice committee  For the drug evaluation, although the Supreme Court of Canada gave us the authority to stop vehicles, to check driver fitness and vehicle fitness, generally speaking the vehicles are stopped for some reason. If we suspect that it may be a matter of driver fitness, then they'd do

Justice committee  I would suggest they are somewhat unjustified. If an evaluation is done by a drug recognition expert, that evaluation must be reviewed by an instructor. Every evaluation the person does is put into a log. We're now working on an electronic log that will be done via the Internet

Justice committee  There are currently 2,428 police officers who have received training in standardized field sobriety tests. They run the gamut from every municipal, provincial, and regional agency, as well as the provincial police forces in Ontario and Quebec, the RCMP, and the Department of Nati

Justice committee  That's correct. The evaluator is also a police officer, but he or she is the person who does the evaluation in its entirety. The only things done roadside are the three divided attention tests that comprise the standardized field sobriety test. As for the actual looking for drug

Justice committee  They'd only carry it insofar as they'd be bringing them to the drug recognition expert, the same as they would for a breath test. They get them roadside. They make the determination that a person is impaired by alcohol. They bring them back and put them before an expert. The expe

Justice committee  Essentially that's what we're looking at right now. With the provisions of Bill C-32, we won't have that problem. There will be a demand to do the drug evaluations, the same as it is for a breath test, and the person will have the option of doing the evaluation or not. But if the

Justice committee  I can tell you that in states where the drug evaluation classification program has very solid footing, two of them being California and Arizona, the pleas are virtually all guilty pleas. The only way the defence can attack the findings of the evaluation is to attack the credibili

Justice committee  That evaluation is done by the police officer, the drug recognition expert, the trained police officer.

Justice committee  That's correct.

Justice committee  The evaluation is done in a controlled environment. The vast majority of the police officers working in Canada will never be trained as drug recognition experts. Again, it's a specialized field. What we do for training is attach an eight-hour block to the standardized field sob