For a whole host of reasons, we do not support lowering the Criminal Code threshold of impairment from 0.08 to 0.05 BAC. The fact is that all Canadian provinces and territories, with the exception of Quebec, whose legislature did consider and reject adopting such administrative measures about 14 months ago.... They had quite a deliberative process, looked at it and said, “not at this time”. All of the rest of the provinces and territories maintain and enforce roadside administrative sanctions that immediately take drivers off the road if they have been drinking but their BAC is below 0.08. These administrative procedures are already effectively dealing with persons who register at 0.05 BAC, and in some provinces at lower BACs, and they are doing so in a way that gets potentially at-risk drivers off the road quickly and with minimum fuss. Moreover, led by the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators, improvements are being made to these locally administered programs to make them even more useful in deterring people from drinking and driving.
It’s also significant that the diverse group of people who undertook the creation of Canada’s new national alcohol strategy purposefully declined, amongst their 41 recommendations, to include any proposal for lowering the current criminal threshold. This group of people, comprised of addictions organizations and experts; the medical community; academia; interest groups; federal, provincial, and municipal governments; native community representatives; police, road safety, and research authorities; and industry, chose not to include changing the threshold, believing that there were much more robust opportunities to reduce and eliminate drinking and driving than amending the legislation in this form. And lest anyone assume that drinking and driving wasn’t considered by the group, I want to draw your attention to five separate national alcohol strategy recommendations that deal specifically with the issue of drinking and driving.
Recommendation 37 endorses and supports the “Strategy to Reduce Impaired Driving 2010”, or STRID. You may have heard about that; I'll come back to it in a minute.
Number 38 supports CCMTA's short-term suspension model and other actions to address drinking drivers with lower BACs.
Recommendation 39 calls for reinvigorating law enforcement around drinking and driving, in part to deal with the persistent suggestions that police are not pressing criminal charges unless drivers are at or over 0.10.
Recommendation 40 calls on government to focus on high-risk and alcohol-dependent drivers as well as repeat offenders--those with BACs often well above the legal threshold--and to actively pursue more widespread use of technology to help mitigate these well-identified subsets from getting behind the wheel.
Recommendation 41 calls for graduated licensing, including zero tolerance—that's zero BAC—for all drivers below the age of 21 years.
The national alcohol strategy members felt strongly that these actions--rather than lowering the criminal threshold--were the ones that could deliver the most progress over the shortest time in combatting drinking and driving.
I won't take the time now to detail the various actions embodied in these five recommendations, but I would be pleased to answer any questions you might have about them.
I want to turn to a notion that you will hear repeated by those promoting a reduction in Canada's legal threshold. You will be told that countries around the world are moving to lower their policies to embrace the 0.05 threshold and that Canada is falling behind by not taking such action. Now, given Canadians' deep-rooted desire not to be out of step, this is a popular notion, and while part of it is accurate, it really presents a distorted picture of what's occurring. The true part is that many countries are moving to 0.05 BAC and to even lower BAC thresholds in some cases. The false assertion is that these countries are making 0.05 BAC their criminal threshold.
In a study conducted at the University of Ottawa for the Canada Safety Council in 2002--which was then updated in 2006--it was established that the vast majority of countries that have adopted 0.05 BAC have done so administratively and not through their criminal law. I understand that the Safety Council is again updating that study to reflect more current realities. Indeed, what the study found is that many countries are doing exactly what Canadian provinces and territories have been doing for a long time, which is using roadside administrative sanctions to get people who have been drinking off the road. They are not using their criminal law to criminalize driving at 0.05 BAC, as some are proposing we do here.
I'd like to come back just for a moment to what is being done in this country to deal with drinking and driving, and the result it is producing. About a year ago, the Canada Safety Council appeared before this committee. I want to reiterate a few facts they shared when they were here. They reported that road crashes involving drivers who had been drinking took 851 lives in 2005. Of these, 459 were drivers whose blood alcohol concentration was above the legal threshold of 0.08. They went on to state that the 2005 fatalities were down by 34% from 1995, when 1,296 driving deaths involved drinking drivers. In part, they attributed the decline to the fact that provincial governments and Transport Canada, along with many non-governmental organizations, had been making concerted efforts to deal with this issue. CCMTA has been coordinating efforts across all of these jurisdictions and levels of government to design and improve measures to reduce the incidence of drinking and driving. One of the most significant activities that occurs right across Canada is the aforementioned police intervention with drivers with BACs at or above 0.05.
My colleague just mentioned technological advances, and I want to lend our support to them. Numerous safety and expert organizations have cited the availability of new developments such as ignition interlock, and they recommend them for chronic repeat offenders who pose public safety concerns. The federal government should be doing more to facilitate the use of these devices and should work with the provinces and territories to find out why we're not seeing more uptake of them. These instruments save lives by keeping those with known problems with alcohol away from cars. Their use should be expanded. When you consider that an overwhelming majority of drunk driver deaths are caused by drivers well above the 0.08 criminal threshold, we think it is a cause for concern that these devices are not more commonly available.
In a January 2008 research study for Transport Canada, the Traffic Injury Research Foundation reported that 55% of fatally injured drinking drivers had a BAC level of over 0.16. So more than half were impaired at more than twice the legal limit. Thirty percent were between 0.08 and 0.16. Ten percent of fatally injured drivers who had been drinking had less than 0.05, while only 5% of those drivers had BACs between 0.05 and 0.08.