I have a couple of points.
First of all, the statistics I gave about police officers not laying charges are not based on anecdote. One is based on a national study published by the director of Transport Canada. The other is a study by the B.C. ministry of justice. The existence of these offences discourages police from laying charges in the first place, discourages the Crown from proceeding. We have large numbers of jurisdictions where, because of these defences, the Crown will simply take a plea to careless driving rather than go to trial, so it has a major deleterious impact.
In a survey done by the ministry, 40% of police officers indicated that one of the reasons why they don't lay charges is these kinds of technicalities in the law. It is having a major deterrent impact. Last week I spoke to Chief Superintendent Grodzinski, who is the director of traffic safety for the OPP, and I asked him about this issue. He confirmed that these defences have a demoralizing, discouraging, and deterrent impact.
The worst-case scenarios that are being trotted out by my friends do in fact lack a certain air of reality. If I am a regular marijuana user for medicinal purposes and I'm stopped by a police officer and acknowledge that I have drugs in my body, the officer then has the power to demand a standard field sobriety test.
The validity of the standard field sobriety test has been confirmed in study after study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the United States, in terms of its ability to predict impairment. If I'm not impaired, I'm not going to fail the standard field sobriety test. The officer is not then going to have reasonable grounds to take me to the station. If I somehow fail the standard field sobriety test, I'm taken to the station. At the end of that twelve-part process, if the officer concludes that I'm not impaired by a drug, then no blood sample is going to be demanded.
People want to ignore the fact that it's not automatic that when you're stopped, you automatically have to provide a urine or blood sample. That comes at the end of the process, when you have failed each and every part in order. At the end of that process, a bodily fluid sample is demanded.
It is a mischaracterization. I stick to my original statement—