Justice Committee on June 14th, 2007

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

So can I give the instructions that I'd like to add right now, or do you wish me to wait until we're at the business of the committee?

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

What would you like to add?

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

When you're looking at the case studies on impairment, can you please determine whether or not the courts have determined the criteria that can reasonably raise suspicion of impairment in the officer's mind when we're not talking about alcohol impairment?

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

Mr. Moore.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate both of you for being here.

Normally we have a larger panel of witnesses and longer speeches. You've endured, I would guess, five times more questions than a witness would normally have. We appreciate your expertise and your being here to clarify the law and some of the practical aspects, as well as the steps. I think you've helped to address what some may have had concern about with the safeguards in the number of checks and balances that have developed in this system and that we're putting in on the drug-impaired driving side with this bill.

In a recent year there were 1,257 fatalities from impaired driving and 47,000 injuries involving 245,000 vehicles, at a cost estimated at $11 billion, not to mention the emotional cost to families and so on in these accidents. When people talk about the cost, it's important to measure the societal cost if we didn't take action.

This has been a theme in a number of our initiatives. There's always going to be litigation—we know that with a certainty—on these things. There are always going to be challenges. There are always going to be costs, whether it's costs in the courtroom, to the police, or in some cases, costs of incarceration. But we have to look at the cost, too, of not taking action when it comes to people's lives, when it comes to property damage, and when it comes to having safe streets and a safe community.

To summarize, we've gone into a lot of the technical aspects of this. We've had alcohol-impaired driving for years. We know that drug-impaired driving is becoming an increasing problem. We're trying to address that.

Could you explain the challenges that police are facing right now in getting drug-impaired drivers off the streets, and how this bill will help to address that?

[Cpl Evan Graham]

The legislation prohibiting driving while under the influence of drugs has been in place since the 1920s. The problem is that there has been no mechanism in place to detect it, short of a body fluid sample that we could only get as the result of a crash. With this legislation and the ability to demand that a person undergo an evaluation to ascertain if in fact they are impaired by drugs, quite frankly that's the best of both worlds.

The technology is not there yet. This program is not perfect. It's constantly under revision to ensure that it's the best we can have. Right now it is the best that's out there. But if we get this legislation, we are going to be light-years ahead of any other jurisdiction in North America.

Even though jurisdictions outside of Canada—those being the U.K. and Australia—have drug testing as part of their motor vehicle acts, we'll be ahead of them as well. They can test for specific drugs. In the case of the U.K., they can go through a doctor, who uses his own criteria to determine impairment. He has no formal training in what he's looking for other than to say the person is not well and maybe it's because of drugs.

This is the only program that ties in impairment, drug categories, and driving. If we get this, we're going to be the envy of the world.

[Marthe Dalpé-Scott]

All that I want to add to Evan's conclusion is that on the laboratory challenge that they would have liked a roadside device for drugs, the reason we do not want the scientists to support launching any cheap old unreliable piece of instrumentation is that you'll end up with as many false positives as false negatives. That's our honest belief at the moment.

Furthermore, it would be restricted to oral fluids, because that's all you could ask a person at the roadside to give. The problem is, and I give this example, if you just smoked marijuana, you still have the remainder of that substance in your mouth, but it has nothing to do with your impairment because it's really not absorbed yet. You just smoked it five minutes ago and it hasn't really gone up in the bloodstream. I'm not advocating anything as to what you should do in your private life, but I do not want anybody to be wrongly accused of a substance because of a detection device at the roadside.

What I'm saying is that those devices are not ready yet. We are encouraging research for sure, but there's limitation at the moment in detection of various drugs that are at so low a level to be active in the system. I challenge anybody here.... The instruments we're using are from $100,000 to $500,000 to make sure we do our job right in an accredited laboratory. How are you going to have something at the roadside on the drug side at the moment? That's why I said it may come later.

I think at the moment the best we can offer society is the three steps: a standard field sobriety test at the level of suspicion of impairment, corroboration with the full 12-step test by the DRE, and corroboration with an accredited forensic laboratory. That is all in keeping and that's the best we can offer right now. I hope we can offer more in another five to ten years as far as magical boxes go.

The drugs, by the way, are not volatile. Volatile means that it evaporates from the blood to the air in the lungs and can be given to an instrument. The drugs are not like that. They're big huge monsters and they like to stay in the blood; they don't go in the air, and so there is nothing that you can get on the breath—except for alcohol.

I hope I haven't oversimplified that.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

Thank you very much, Madam Dalpé-Scott. That was quite a description, and I think we get the picture.

Mr. Petit.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you.

I have a question to ask Mr. Graham so I can be sure I have understood. You heard a number of persons mention earlier that, when there is an accident, the problem was knowing whether you could get blood samples and so on.

You remember the case of police officer St-Germain in Quebec: there were four deaths at the same time, and there was some question of a telewarrant. I imagine the telewarrant will be retained in order to obtain blood samples because it's provided for in the code.

What I want to know concerns the DRE and the 12 assessment steps. For example, there is a car accident, the person is unconscious and is transported to the hospital. You know that in the case of high blood alcohol levels, the physician in charge and the nurse currently must know whether consent has been given, and, after that, they take a blood sample, which they send to the lab in Montreal, where it is examined, and the results follow.

As some cases are serious, as it isn't always simply an ordinary citizen at the roadside, based on your reading of the bill, is this possibility of taking a blood sample, where there has been a serious accident and the individual is transported to the hospital, without there necessarily being any suspicion that alcohol is involved, being removed?

[Cpl Evan Graham]

No, not all. In fact, the bill will complement that, because we can deal with drivers who are capable of doing the test. A DRE would not be going to a hospital and testing somebody who is injured. We'd fall back under the current legislation, where a blood sample may be obtained if a person was involved in a crash where somebody was critically injured or killed. This legislation doesn't affect the current legislation at all.

[Marthe Dalpé-Scott]

I mentioned to you, Mr. Petit, that I was the toxicologist who was the expert witness in Mr. St-Germain's investigation.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

So you know what I'm talking about.

[Marthe Dalpé-Scott]

Exactly. That's an investigation in which members of the teaching staff at the Montreal breathalyzer test lab were involved. To show they were objective, they asked someone from outside the lab to come and examine the evidence and to testify.

So, yes, I handled that for a longer period of time than I am spending here today, to respond to Mr. Moore's comment. Today is absolutely nothing, if we compare the two. It is essential to spend the required time. It is not time wasted; it is time invested.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

Thank you very much, Mr. Petit.

I would like to thank the witnesses, Madam Scott and Corporal Graham, for their attendance here again. We really appreciate it.

That brings to a conclusion our presentations. The committee does, however, have some business to deal with, so I will suspend for one minute.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

I call the meeting to order.

Committee members, we do have a couple of items of business to deal with: one is a motion put forward by Mr. Larry Bagnell. I'll get to that in a moment. But starting next Tuesday, June 19, should we still be sitting, and Thursday, June 21, likewise, we will begin our clause-by-clause. That's to inform everyone, if we go that far, that's what we will be doing.

Mr. Bagnell, your motion.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Chairman, before we study the motion, would Mr. Bagnell allow me to take 30 seconds?

Before we study the motion, I simply want to consult the government members out of a concern for honesty. Our leaders are confident that the session will adjourn on Monday. You know how everything is unpredictable at the end of a parliamentary session: that's an assumption. I'm ready to vote. My doubts have been resolved this morning. We are in favour of the bill. We will probably have an amendment to submit.

If ever the government wanted... I don't know what my colleagues think; I only consulted Ms. Freeman. I think there's some flexibility among my Liberal colleagues. If there were a risk that we could not meet on Tuesday, and if the committee gave us permission to meet on Monday, I would be ready to do so. I tell you that because our leader believes that the session will be adjourned on Monday, because the budget has been passed. There's not a lot of unfinished business, and our leaders believed that the adjournment will be Monday evening.

If ever the government wants to close this file, I can say that I am pleased with the answers I have obtained this morning. I hope to read the memo as soon as possible. If ever there were a consensus, I would not object to the committee meeting perhaps Monday afternoon, because there are people coming from other ridings. I'm two hours from Montreal. If ever the session is not adjourned and the government just wants to continue the work in September, there's no problem. I'm telling you what my leader told me Monday evening.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

It might be wise to hear from the Liberal Party on that particular point. Is there an agreement with Mr. Ménard's position?

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

I appreciate Monsieur Ménard's warm and fuzzy collaboration in trying to get this business done, and I always think it's a good idea to try to do the clause-by-clause at the same time as you study it, rather than having a three-month gap when you can kind of forget.

But in this case, there is no tactical procedural advantage other than that to be gained by doing this on Monday as opposed to Tuesday. The House is simply not going to be able to get it dealt with before we come back in the fall, so I don't see any need to rush it. It would be a useful thing to have all of the members, where there are amendments, prepare them. I may have one or two myself. I find the Monday date a bit rushed for that purpose, and Tuesday would be more suited to me. If we're sitting on Tuesday, we can do it.

I appreciate the sentiment and the wishful thinking lying behind Monsieur Ménard's intervention, but I personally would rather be ready to do work. My own personal work on this, to the extent that it exists, will be ready for Tuesday or the fall or Thursday, should that eventuality mature as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

Mr. Moore.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

In light of what Mr. Lee said about doing clause-by-clause shortly after hearing testimony, I think that is the preferable route, so I'm in agreement with Mr. Ménard.

I haven't been around here too long, but I know that at this time of the year there's a lot of speculation about whether we'll be here or not. I would like to do the clause-by-clause before the summer. If there's a possibility that we'll be here on Monday, we can at least do our part as a committee. We might not wrap up everything on this bill, obviously, before the summer, but we could wrap up our work as a committee. So I support what Mr. Ménard is saying, that we hold our meeting on Monday. I think that gives us a couple of days to get ready and, if there are any amendments, to put them forward.

So I support that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

Is there a consensus to have a meeting at 9 o'clock on Monday morning or 10 o'clock? How about after question period, so 3:30 on Monday?

Madam Jennings.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

While we would like to be able to accommodate, unfortunately, Mr. Lee has amendments that he wishes to propose, and he does not believe, given his personal work agenda, that he would be in a position to have his amendments ready for Monday, whether it be the morning or the afternoon. He had prepared his schedule predicated on our sitting and going to clause-by-clause on the Tuesday, which would have allowed him all day Monday to work on those amendments.

It's really unfortunate, because there is a desire on our part to be able to accelerate the work on this. It is unfortunate.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

Mr. Lee.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

I'm going to ask members to really reach out big, to live life large. If the House is sitting on Monday, it's because we have something substantive to do, and we'll be voting in the afternoon, unless everything goes on division.

I'm assuming if we're here Monday, we have both feet on the ground Monday, and if we are here Monday, what's the problem with having the Tuesday morning meeting?

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

We won't be here on Tuesday.