This bill is from the 42nd Parliament, 1st session, which ended in September 2019.
Jody Wilson-Raybould Liberal
This bill has received Royal Assent and is now law.
This is from the published bill. The Library of Parliament has also written a full legislative summary of the bill.
Part 1 amends the provisions of the Criminal Code that deal with offences and procedures relating to drug-impaired driving. Among other things, the amendments
(a) enact new criminal offences for driving with a blood drug concentration that is equal to or higher than the permitted concentration;
(b) authorize the Governor in Council to establish blood drug concentrations; and
(c) authorize peace officers who suspect a driver has a drug in their body to demand that the driver provide a sample of a bodily substance for analysis by drug screening equipment that is approved by the Attorney General of Canada.
Part 2 repeals the provisions of the Criminal Code that deal with offences and procedures relating to conveyances, including those provisions enacted by Part 1, and replaces them with provisions in a new Part of the Criminal Code that, among other things,
(a) re-enact and modernize offences and procedures relating to conveyances;
(b) authorize mandatory roadside screening for alcohol;
(c) establish the requirements to prove a person’s blood alcohol concentration; and
(d) increase certain maximum penalties and certain minimum fines.
Part 3 contains coordinating amendments and the coming into force provision.
All sorts of information on this bill is available at LEGISinfo, an excellent resource from Parliament. You can also read the full text of the bill.
Bill numbers are reused for different bills each new session. Perhaps you were looking for one of these other C-46s:
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
Mr. Speaker, I am a member of the justice committee and sat through the hearings on this important bill. We heard over and over in testimony that it is the fear of getting caught that will be the most effective way to reduce impaired driving on our roads.
Can my colleague explain how this bill would increase the likelihood of people feeling more fearful that they would get caught if they are impaired drivers, and how that would reduce the incidents of impaired driving on our roads?
Marco Mendicino Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
Mr. Speaker, first I want to begin by thanking my hon. colleague for all the work he does on the justice committee. I have been privy to the questions that he poses, and they are thoughtful and certainly elevate the level of discourse in that body.
In answer to his question, this goes right to the core rationale of having a mandatory screening test available to our police officers. If the public is aware that for the purposes of keeping streets safe a police officer can inquire into whether someone has consumed alcohol, I would argue that one is less likely to consume alcohol before they get behind the wheel. That is how we keep our roads safer. Other jurisdictions have integrated similar approaches, and we have seen impaired driving rates come down.
Canada is learning from those examples. We are studying those examples, using them to inform our debate here, and they are informed by the language of the text in this bill, which I encourage all members to support.
Rob Nicholson Conservative Niagara Falls, ON
Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have this opportunity to say a few words with respect to Bill C-46, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (offences relating to conveyances) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.
Some of the areas I am going to address today have already been raised. The parliamentary secretary was just talking about one of these areas because the question was raised by a number of my colleagues. It was about measuring the level of impairment that people have. This is just one of the issues we are going to have to deal with. Part of the problem is the government's intention to ram this legislation through by July 1, 2018. In my opinion, the Liberals are not taking into consideration the increased risks to the health and safety of Canada.
The Liberals may say that this is a wonderful thing on Canada's birthday. What better way to celebrate it, they would argue, than legalizing marijuana and allowing grow-ops in people's homes? However, we heard quite a bit of testimony that there are concerns with respect to the government's pushing through both of these pieces of legislation, Bill C-45 and Bill C-46. They go together.
For instance, the Canadian police services have asked that this legislation be delayed until there is adequate training and resources put in place. The parliamentary secretary said they are going to be up and ready to go and that we do not have to worry about all the tests and everything else, but those on the front line are quite concerned. The Liberal government, in addition, has not taken the necessary steps to put in effective educational campaigns for Canadians, despite statistics that show the increase in fatalities due to drug-impaired driving. There is no greater risk that a person can have, among many things, than to get killed by impaired driving. This is one of the huge problems that this country has faced. Mandatory roadside testing and the vast number of officers who remain insufficiently trained to detect impaired drivers is another issue that is not being addressed by the government.
In addition, the government has refused to mandate the proper storage of cannabis in homes. The growing concern among jurisdictions where marijuana is already legal is that it is drawing more organized crime to operate the grow-ops and produce pot for illicit markets. This is one of the things that people told me when I was justice minister. They said that pot is the currency for guns and harder drugs coming into this country. They said that a lot of criminals do not send cheques anymore; the marijuana grown in Canada is what criminals use to buy illegal drugs and guns that come into Canada. This was completely unaddressed by the government, and I would suggest it has been ignored; it does not even play into this. My concern is that this will increase the possibility of danger that exists when we get illegal drugs and guns into this country.
Police services from across this country were very clear that the government should delay the legalization of marijuana to allow law enforcement services the adequate time they need to handle this new law. There is no chance, in my opinion, that police will be ready; I think they have it right. However, the Liberals are hell-bent on ramming this legislation through. They are not heeding those warnings from law enforcement officials. In my opinion, this puts a greater risk on the health and safety of Canadians.
The National Association of Chiefs of Police estimates that there are at least 2,000 trained officers. In July 2017, the numbers indicated that there are only 600 trained recognition experts here. They are not even close to having the number they need. Susan MacAskill, from Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, reiterated that the Breathalyzer will not detect drugs and that marijuana can be detected through a roadside saliva test. She said that it would cost $17,000 to train one person to be a drug recognition expert, and the government needs to make sure that those resources are in place to allow the training of 1,200 more officers that will be needed by the deadline.
She went on to say, “If every officer can have that (disposable saliva test) in their vehicle it will certainly have a positive impact on road safety.” Unfortunately, the Liberals have not been listening to their own experts. They have been unrealistic on what is taking place.
Again, a couple of my colleagues highlighted how difficult it would be. That is one of the things I point out for my colleague who sits on the justice committee. We heard time and again different amounts, how much marijuana, how long it would be in someone's system, what the combination between that and alcohol would be. Again, it is very problematic and I would urge the government not to push forward with the July 1 deadline.
The provincial premiers have warned the government that they may not be ready with provincial laws and regulations. Their fears are not without reason. After Washington State legalized marijuana, the death toll on its highways doubled and the fatal vehicle crashes on Colorado highways tripled. Equally concerning is that the Liberals have not launched an extensive marijuana and impaired driving education and awareness program as recommended by their own task force. It is easy to say that they ignored it because the Conservatives told them they should do it, but their own task force told them what to do.
The Canadian Automobile Association supports the findings. Jeff Walker, CAA vice-president, is quoted as saying, “It's clear from the report that work needs to start immediately in these areas, and that the actual legalization should not be rushed.” The task force also concluded that youth underestimated the risk of cannabis use. We heard this on a number of occasions, that some young people believed their ability to drive a car would be enhanced by smoking marijuana.
There are problems with the government moving forward on this. The government continuously says that it is concerned about the access to children, yet the age limits in the legislation are completely at odds with that. I ask my colleagues on the other side to consider this. What could be more accessible for young people to get marijuana if their parents have a small grow op in the kitchen? We urged the Liberals to make changes on that, and they did. They said that three foot plants would not be enough so it increased the height of them. How will this help our children?
This will be problematic for the people who have become victimized by impaired driving. We brought forward amendments to increase the penalties for those people who drove while impaired and killed someone. They should have to face up to the consequences of what they have done. Again, the Liberals have ignored that.
Just because the Conservatives have said there will be big problems with that, they will not listen. I understand we are in opposition and they do not have to listen to us. However, they should listen to police forces across the country. They should listen to our provincial counterparts and those who are concerned about impaired driving. They should listen to them for a change. I think Liberals will come to the right conclusion that for the bill should not be pushed forward by July 1of next year.
Chris Bittle Liberal St. Catharines, ON
Mr. Speaker, my hon. neighbour from Niagara Falls talked about access to cannabis. I went to school with the hon. member's kids and I am sure there was access to alcohol in his house, a drug at least as dangerous as cannabis, and his kids grew up great and are incredible adults.
With respect of our government's commitment to police forces, $274 million are committed so they will be ready to implement this legislation. Could the hon. member comment on that?
Rob Nicholson Conservative Niagara Falls, ON
Mr. Speaker, I have to listened to the expert testimony at committee. People were were quite concerned that the forces would not be ready to enforce this law by July next year. The member said that if people had some alcohol in their houses, that this was the same as having a a small grow op. I do not get that all. Alcohol can be a problem in households, so the Liberals say that they will solve those problems by having a small grow op, and maybe the kids will not go after the alcohol and instead they will check on what is happening in the kitchen. I cannot buy that.
We asked the Liberals make changes. Yes, they made changes. They want to increase the size of the plants in the grow op in the kitchen. This is a huge mistake. I ultimately hope that my neighbour will come to the same conclusion that I, most of my colleagues, and many people across the country have come to, which is that this will to be a disaster.
Sheri Benson NDP Saskatoon West, SK
Mr. Speaker, I often get to stand in the House to talk about the great statistics from my province of Saskatchewan . Unfortunately, however, according to Statistics Canada figures last year, my province had the highest rate of impaired driving in Canada, .
Previous governments have been ineffective in lowering impaired driving rates. Would my hon. colleague join with me in asking the government to include increased funding so governments can work better with community partners to reduce impaired driving in general?
Rob Nicholson Conservative Niagara Falls, ON
Mr. Speaker, I made very clear in my opening remarks that more funding had to go into this area to ensure the right education programs and the right training were in place. These things are necessary.
I reach out to the hon. member. She mentioned the terrible problem of impaired driving in her province. I can, without doubt, guarantee that it will get worse if people are legally smoking dope, in addition to drinking alcohol. We heard testimony at committee about how difficult it would be to get a quick test and the effects of combining smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol. Experts told us that the impact of marijuana was very precise at the beginning, but it remained in the body for quite some time. Many people do not realize that. What will be the effect of that be when they start to drink later on?
Impaired driving is a terrible problem. When we were government, we addressed many aspects of this. The amendments we brought forward in committee would ensure that the message would get out that there would serious consequences for people who were involved with impaired driving. I fear that with the Liberals pushing the marijuana bill through in the next few months in time for Canada Day, the problem of impaired driving will get worse.
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Mr. Speaker, nothing could be more important than the bill before the House today, Bill C-46, which deals with changes to the impaired driving laws in Canada to deal with not only drug impairment but increased sanctions on those who drive while impaired by alcohol. The NDP has long stood for improving this through legislation, smarter deterrence to deal with the tragedies taking place on our roadsides every day.
Professor Robert Solomon testified at the justice committee, which I had the honour to sit on during the testimony for most of this. He has long acted for Mothers Against Drunk Driving and put it very well. He said, “It's difficult to see how anyone can credibly make that claim”, the claim that the Criminal Lawyer's Association and others have made that mandatory alcohol testing is not necessary. He says:
...impairment-related crashes kill about 1,000 Canadians a year, injure almost another 60,000 more, a disproportionate percentage of whom are teenagers and young adults....Our current law has left Canada with one of the worst impaired driving records among comparable countries.
The enormity of the problem with which the bill is attempting to grapple is not lost upon us. However, we have great concerns about the mandatory alcohol testing to which Professor Solomon has testified.
The NDP leader, Mr. Jagmeet Singh, has been outspoken during his time in the Ontario legislature about the ability of the police to go after people simply on the basis of their race, be they indigenous, black, or Canadians of other minorities. The discriminatory police practice of carding has been central to his work in the Ontario legislative assembly. Mr. Singh says, “As Prime Minister, I'll enact a Federal Ban on Racial Profiling” to end it once and for all.
I raise this because of the potential of this mandatory alcohol screening that proposed section 320.27 of the bill would implement for the first time in Canada. We heard many witnesses at the committee, and after the break I will go back and talk about this in more detail. As long as the police have the ability to stop someone on a whim, that discretion can and will be abused.
Currently under the law as it exists, one has to have reasonable suspicion before stopping someone. If one no longer has to have that reasonable suspicion, which is what this section at issue would do, then there is the potential, indeed, the certainty that there will be disproportionate targeting of racialized Canadians, indigenous people, youth, and other marginalized groups. That is the nub of the problem and why this is such a difficult bill for the House to deal with.
I am not saying it is not as critical as the member for Niagara Falls has reminded us; it it is. I am not saying that the potential for deaths is not real, because it is there. However, we have to get this balance right. We are not convinced that it has been achieved. We are still studying it and will continue to study it before the vote takes place in the next while.
At the committee, the NDP did manage to get one amendment that would somehow address this issue. That amendment would add the proposed section 31.1 to the bill, which would require that this issue be studied and reported to Parliament within three years of enactment. The committee agreed with that, and I hope the House will accept that final amendment as well. We will see whether the concerns that so many experts have brought to the attention of the committee will prove true in practice.
I had the opportunity at committee to speak to Canada's leading constitutional jurist on this subject. He is the famous Professor Peter Hogg. He indicated that he had done a legal opinion upon which Mothers Against Drunk Driving relied. It basically says that he is in favour of mandatory alcohol testing and of the ability to stop people at random. However, I asked him, “If the evidence were that there were a disproportionate impact on racialized groups and minorities, would that not give you pause in defending this bill under section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms?”
If the evidence showed there would be this abuse, as others have predicted, would that give him pause? Professor Hogg, who of course agreed with mandatory alcohol testing, said that “It would give me pause if that were the case...but I think the pause that I would make would be to look at the administration of the law, so that it does get cleansed of any kind of racial bias or anything like that.”
Thus even a leading jurist who supports the initiative of mandatory alcohol screening is saying that it may be subject to defeat under section 1 of the charter if the evidence shows, as so many experts have said, that it would have this effect of racial profiling, that it would allow the police, on a whim, to stop people simply because of the colour of their skin, their age, or the like.
I will resume after question period, but at this stage, Canadians need to know how difficult this balance would be.
Motions in AmendmentCriminal CodeGovernment Orders
The Deputy Speaker Bruce Stanton
The hon. member for Victoria will have three and a half minutes remaining in his time when the House next gets back to debate on the question. Of course, he will have the time for questions and comments following that as well.
The House resumed consideration of BillC-46, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (offences relating to conveyances) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, as reported (with amendment) from the committee, and of the motions in Group No. 1.
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Mr. Speaker, in the short amount of time I still have available, I simply want to repeat where I started, which was the fact that in Canada impaired driving was the leading cause of criminal deaths. We have one of the worst impaired driving records in the developed world. It is not surprising that the bill attempts to address the scourge of impaired driving.
We heard from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and other countless witnesses at the justice committee, telling their heartbreaking stories of the loss they had suffered. However, the bill poses serious concerns, particularly in the area of mandatory alcohol screen. There are also problems with the bill, which time will not allow me to address, with respect to minimum sentencing provisions, something which the government said it opposed, yet brought it up again in the bill.
What is the concern with mandatory alcohol testing? The new police powers enacted through the legislation would remove the reasonable suspicion requirements for roadside inspection by peace officers that presently exist in the Criminal Code, instead moving to a mandatory system by which, at the discretion of the patrolling officer, motorists must submit to random breath samples without any justification whatsoever, in other words, on a whim.
The leader of the NDP, Mr. Jagmeet Singh, told the Toronto Star that he had been pulled over 11 times because of the way he looked. He said:
I've been stopped by police multiple times for no other reason than the colour of my skin. “It makes you feel like you don't belong, like there's something wrong with you for just being you.”
That is why he has worked so hard to address racial carding and the like in the province of Ontario.
Vancouver lawyer Ms. Kyla Lee from Acumen Law testified to the committee as follows:
As a Métis I am very concerned about how this is going to affect people from the aboriginal community. We see in B.C. already basically an offence of driving while native, and that's only going to get worse.
We have grave concerns about the bill, as do many witnesses, including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association that brought its concerns to the committee. It said:
Since some individuals will often be pulled over “randomly” five, ten, a dozen times in a few months, for no obvious reason other than their age, the colour of their skin, or the neighbourhood they were driving in, RBT will often be humiliating and degrading to individuals who are subject to search.
Despite bringing forward many amendments, the NDP managed to get at least one that will make a difference. We commend it to the House and hope it gets enacted in the final bill. As well, we succeeded in getting the proposed section 31.1 added to the bill. It states that the government must table a report in Parliament within three years after these controversial sections come into force, and that the Attorney General, “must undertake a comprehensive review of the implementation and operation of the provisions at question”.
This is a complicated bill. We will take the time over the next while to consult and ensure that the balance that has been struck has been struck properly for all Canadians.
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his usual thoughtful speech. He is a law professor, but he is a recovering law professor, I think.
His core analysis is that replacing the reasonable suspicion test with the mandatory test will, in effect, create more difficulties for people who already feel victimized by the way police officers target, for want of a better term, particular groups of people in our society. I represent a riding that possibly has one of the most, if not the most, numerous varieties of races, ethnicities, religions, etc., and this is a point of acute sensitivity for me.
I am concerned. He makes a good point, but I am not convinced that replacing reasonable suspicion with mandatory will actually address the scourge he is most concerned about. I am interested in his thoughts on that matter.
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Mr. Speaker, I know the member's riding to be one of the most racially diverse ridings in the country, so I know he comes to this with the same concerns I do.
At committee, I asked the famous Prof. Peter Hogg exactly this question. How can this be constitutional? He said he had done a legal opinion and that mandatory breath testing, etc. is fine, but if there were evidence that there had been, in a sense, the use of this in the inappropriate way we are concerned about, namely, racial profiling, that would give him pause.
If the evidence were, in the next three years, that it was indeed being abused in this fashion, then we, in the bill, would have the ability to have it changed. It would have to be a report to that effect in this place, and hopefully, members like the member for Scarborough—Guildwood and I would be the first to blow the whistle on those abuses.
That is why the section has been added. We hope it will be effective. However, we are still concerned that the bill is unconstitutional. I suggest that it be referred in a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada, given all the testimony we heard that it was unconstitutional. The government rejected that proposition.
We will have to see. We do not know what the government will finally do with this bill at this stage, but one hopes that it will take these concerns as seriously as the hon. member and I do.
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Mr. Speaker, regarding Bill C-46 and the concerns raised by NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and many others, we already have a problem in Canada with people of colour being pulled over by police simply because of the colour of their skin. In relation to this bill, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has highlighted that this could deepen the problem Canada already has with racial profiling and an understandable mistrust of police enforcement.
I would like to hear the member's thoughts about going deeper into that problem, as opposed to acceding to some of the police justice requests to have better resources for better training to deal with the laws we have already in relation to recognizing impaired driving, whether that be from alcohol or marijuana.