I'll start with respect to deterrence. Certainly, I am amazed that with the level of the penalties under the Criminal Code, people still drive after drinking. You'd think these penalities would be enough to deter them, but apparently they aren't.
We talked about the loss of a licence. It's when you're talking about a person who is facing the minimum $1,000 fine out of their pocket, but being prohibited from driving for one year.... In that balance, for most people, it's not being allowed to drive for one year that it is the bigger deterrent. The advantage of the provincial administrative suspensions, however, is that they are now immediate in all provinces, I believe. Certainly I know that's the case in Manitoba, where they pioneered this, because I worked on it when I was there. If you're over 80 milligrams, they pull your licence and you're off the road for 90 days, or perhaps longer. You have an administrative appeal of that, which is usually fruitless, because it doesn't have the complicated parts of the Criminal Code. What they seem to focus on is: were you behind the wheel and did you blow over 80 milligrams in the breath test? Those are fairly easy questions to answer.
With respect to the simplification, our federal-provincial committee has for many years recognized that this is a problem. However, we've been developing the drug-impaired driving provisions, and those things that went into Bill C-2. We are now meeting fairly regularly and going through the code virtually line for line with the provincial prosecutors who deal with these things every day, and who say, “We were tripped up over this, and we were tripped up over that.”
I'll give you a simple example. If you don't get your breath test within two hours, you lose your presumptions of identity. It then becomes necessary for the crown to call a toxicologist, who will say, “Well, he blew 150 milligrams two and a half hours afterward.” And then that toxicologist does a back calculation, etc. In some Australian states, within two hours, that's what it is, and then they simply start adding. It's just part of the law: 15 milligrams will be added every hour beyond two hours, because we know you're in the phase of elimination, so why should we have to call a toxicologist and go through all that? That kind of simplification in the Criminal Code could be there.
We have a case that just came across my desk last week, dealing again with this issue of someone being over 80 milligrams after three hours. This case headed to the Ontario Court of Appeal because the affidavit of the toxicologist on behalf of the crown said, “I assume there has been no bolus drinking”—that is, a pile of drinking before he got behind the wheel—“and I'm assuming he didn't drink after he was arrested”, and then there's the scientific stuff. The judge has said, “Well, you established that he didn't drink in between.” That's true, because the police had him under observation. “But you didn't establish that he didn't have anything, or a pile of drinks, just before he got behind the wheel.” So the judge threw out the affidavit and the calculation that this person was at, I think it was, 130 milligrams; I'd have to look at it again. It was at 190 milligrams at the time they were driving, but the judge threw it out because they hadn't established that he wasn't....
How are the police supposed to keep somebody under observation for 15 minutes before they stop him? They stop him at the side of the road.