The legislation, particularly Bill C-46, which is the companion piece, will assist in that regard in two ways. First of all, it will introduce new roadside screening equipment that will be more helpful in providing preliminary information about potential drug impairment and then lead to more specific testing at the police station with blood samples. The equipment will help get more accurate information.
Second is greater training. Part of the money that I referred to in my remarks will go toward training more field sobriety-testing officers, who have the skill set necessary to identify situations at the roadside. At the moment, there are, roughly speaking, 3,500 of those officers properly trained across the country at various levels of police forces. Our objective is essentially to double that number over the course of the next 18 months to two years.
We're also aiming to increase substantially, by at least 50%, the number of drug recognition experts. These are people who are pre-qualified as experts in detecting drug-related issues and then testifying to that effect in court. There are now, roughly speaking, 500 of them in the country. We would want to see that number go up to at least 750, distributed across the nation, obviously.
Providing better equipment and providing larger numbers of properly-trained officers, either in the field or at headquarters in the police stations, will certainly enable us to be more precise in future with respect to tracking and quantifying the issue.