Thank you for your question.
The short answer to your question is no. Removing the possession provision doesn't make the bill acceptable, for a few reasons.
As Mr. Brayford has pointed out with respect to the evidentiary restrictions, people have the right to defend criminal charges in this country. That's a right enshrined in the charter, and it's one that should not be taken away from them.
The assumption that the breath test machines are infallible is simply a faulty assumption. I think Mr. Solomon said there are no other jurisdictions in the world where people put on these kinds of two-beer defences. In reality, that's simply not the case.
I practised criminal defence law in the United States for about five years, and I can tell you that people regularly take the witness stand and say that despite what the breathalyzer machine said, they only had one or two beers. All the people who were with them at dinner for the past four or five hours will get up on the stand and testify that the person only had one or two beers, and here's their receipt from dinner showing that they only had one or two beers.
You can't take that right away from an accused person or else what you're doing essentially is saying that the breathalyzer spits out a result, you're guilty, and you go to jail, you lose your driver's licence, or both. It's simply not acceptable.
It's interesting to hear that one of the frustrations the police have is that there are a lot of abilities for defence counsel to gum up the system, to spend a lot of time defending these charges, and that's why they don't lay charges. This bill doesn't solve that problem. I can tell you that I like running charter arguments, and this evidentiary restriction is a charter argument in every single case. You have to run it in every single case. That's not going to make the process more efficient. If anything, it will do quite the opposite.
The other problem is the drug testing provisions themselves. I understand there's a great deal of support for them, but we have to realize that police have the ability to charge people with driving while impaired by drugs. We train police to detect impairment at the side of the road. The fact that we're now contemplating forcing people to give blood or urine samples at a police station on the basis of a procedure used by a DRE officer, a procedure that is not infallible and will yield toxicology results that themselves are not infallible and are simply not proof of impairment, is a real problem with this bill.
Let me give you this example. There are about—