Those are very relevant questions. Whether we are talking about Canada or other industrialized countries, no one can boast of having achieved absolutely fantastic results in terms of controlling the crime of impaired driving or drinking and driving.
We talked about education. When the Code was amended in Quebec in 1985, the amendment simply involved raising the minimum fines from $50 to $300. There was a highly visible television advertising campaign about this. The slogan was: “Drinking and driving is a crime”. Several years later, people agree—and there is a consensus on this—that this type of action, which includes visible barriers and highway spot-checks at strategic points, has contributed to a considerable drop in the number of people being arrested for impaired driving.
We can see this not only because police officers have less work, but also because it has been observed that there are fewer people driving drunk on the roads. That tells us that in terms of education, one of the solutions is to make people aware of the idea that they are committing a criminal offence, and that they will be arrested and punished for it. The certainty of being subject to punishment is 100 times more effective than increasing the fine from $600 to $1,000. That type of action changes nothing. When you're dealing with people who get in their car and drive after having a few drinks, the fact that the penalty will be $400 more will not change his behaviour.
The expression “unduly harsh penalty” has been used in this context. In the bill, we raise a problem related to that. The fact is that the minimum penalty is increased to 120 days for a third offence. At first glance, that seems perfectly reasonable. However, the result of it is that a judge would be prevented from exercising any discretion in terms of modulating that penalty. In some cases, for example, the accused would lose his job as he would be prevented from serving his prison term intermittently. The difference between 90 and 120 days is not very great, in terms of the actual punishment, but the effect, needless to say, is that the judge loses part of his ability to modulate the penalty. Nothing prevents a judge from imposing a 120, 160 or 200 day prison term on an offender, where it is warranted.
As you were saying, Mr. Thompson, it's really a matter of striking a balance between extreme penalties, which yield no result whatsoever because they do not act as a deterrent, and the complete absence of such measures. As regards drug-related measures, the Quebec Bar's primary concern is the lack of statistical information that would establish whether or not this is a real issue, as well as the lack of scientific data with respect to the validity of the methods being proposed to resolve the problem.