Thank you, Mr. Chair, honourable members.
The Criminal Lawyers' Association welcomes the opportunity to appear before the standing committee on what is obviously a fundamentally important study.
Our organization represents 1,000 criminal defence lawyers across the Province of Ontario. Together with the crown attorneys, we are in many ways the front-line workers of the criminal justice system, so we experience on a day-to-day basis the net impact of the laws you folks make here in Ottawa.
Today I'm here with Jonathan Rosenthal, who is widely recognized as a leading expert in the defence of drunk driving cases. Mr. Rosenthal has a wealth of experience, and we're prepared to share our thoughts on any questions you have.
I will just start out very briefly with a small thought or overview, and I'll turn it to Mr. Rosenthal to address the issue of the 0.05 blood alcohol limit.
I just want to start with the observation that there should be no mistake about it, our members all support fair and constitutional measures aimed at ensuring the safety of our streets. All people, and I add criminal lawyers in that group as well, have a direct interest, obviously, in seeing the reduction of the carnage caused by drunk driving.
Now, having said that, we urge this committee, like we've urged committees in the past, to carefully consider any change, to deliberate on the impact that change will have on the administration of justice across the nation.
The criminal justice system is blunt. It's also delicate. It's blunt in the sense that it's an instrument that does not always change the way society acts. So it's not an answer in all cases to fixing our problems. By way of delicacy, I just want to suggest that the criminal justice system is already near the breaking point in terms of delay and load, and anything you do here has the potential for an exponential impact on the criminal justice system in terms of delay.
The only thing I want to point out to you on that issue is that the Province of Ontario has recently started looking at the issue of court delays through an initiative called the justice on target initiative. That's an effort to try to speed up the delivery of fair justice.
One of the issues you look at in Ontario is that we have an effective trial rate of about 7%--7% of our cases are sent to trial and 93% are either dealt with by way of guilty plea, withdrawn, or stayed. If you change that 7% trial rate by 1% or 2%, you will have an effective change of 15% to 20% in the number of trials that take place in the system. So it's a delicate system. And if the system is strained right now, we have Askov problems recurring in the Province of Ontario at every courthouse. If cases are being stayed and thrown out, if you tinker with that system by 1%, it's a 15% change in the number of trials. It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out what will happen. So I just urge the committee to keep considerations like that in mind, but of course we support the committee in its work.
I'll just turn it over to Mr. Rosenthal briefly.