Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm not a member of this committee, and normally I wouldn't enter into the fray, because I'm not sure where you are with the study, but I have had some exposure to this particular issue, because until recently I had two big breweries in my riding, Molson and Labatt breweries. Now I have a Molson brewery. But I have been quite involved in the issue because, of course, how this shakes down is very important to them.
Many of the provinces have the 0.05 already, and those are administrative sanctions. When you move to putting it into the Criminal Code, I'm worried about the casual person who has one beer too many but doesn't really create a terrible hazard and ends up with a criminal record. That criminal record is with them for life.
The other thing is that I am more concerned with chronic offenders. You pick up the paper, and there are the people who have been accused and charged and convicted of drunk driving so many times they've had their licences removed, or suspended, and they're on the road. Some of them are on the road when they don't even have a licence. How do you police that? You have to police it by pulling them over and finding that out. But it seems to me we should be very harsh on repeat offenders. You can't do anything about the person who's not entitled to drive, who gets in the car and drives anyway. All you can do then is hopefully lock them up for a bit. I'm more concerned about the chronic offender.
Maybe you could talk about what police and the provincial jurisdictions are doing about that. It seems to me we could have some harsher sanctions for the chronic offenders.
There's another area that I'm not sure you've touched. We're talking about alcohol, but the big issue emerging is drugs. It's a difficult issue, as you know, because you can measure alcohol through a Breathalyzer, but drugs are a little thornier problem. Parliament just passed some legislation not too long ago, but for measuring what's in a person's system, whether they have medicines or they have a bit of coke or a bit of crack or a bit of this or that, the technology just isn't there right now.
I gather that a lot of young people and other abusers of drugs and alcohol are moving more now to drugs, because if they are going to drive, it's harder for them to get caught and convicted if they're taking drugs.
I'm wondering if you could talk on those two aspects, the chronic offender and also drugs and how to deal with that.