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.