Good afternoon. Thank you very much for permitting us to testify at this panel. My name is Paul Doroshenko. I'm a criminal defence lawyer in Vancouver. Kyla Lee is my colleague and is probably the busiest impaired driving lawyer in British Columbia, and the head of the Canadian Impaired Driving Lawyers Association.
There are three things we are in a position to speak to today and that we would like to give evidence about. The first is the change in the onus for bail in circumstances of individuals who are charged with domestic assaults. The second is the change to the limitation period to lay a charge with respect to summary offences from six months to one year. The third, which we've already heard is quite contentious, is the matter of police officers providing evidence by way of affidavits. This is a significant concern for us, because when we look at it, as far as we're concerned, it appears that the police can basically put their whole case in by way of affidavit.
If you take a look at the thing that's already been mentioned, routine police evidence, there is a definition of that that's supposed to guide a judge and, I guess, prosecutors and defence lawyers, with respect to making those applications and putting things in by way of affidavit. If you look at what is actually listed in there as routine police evidence, it is the entirety of a police investigation: collection of evidence and observations of the police officers. That's what happens in most summary offence investigations. If you're dealing with, for example, an impaired driving case, it's routine police evidence for a police officer to pull somebody over and make an ASD demand. It's routine police evidence for a police officer to get a fail on an ASD roadside breath tester. It's routine police evidence to make observations of evidence about a person's status, such as whether or not their speech is slurred. This is all routine police evidence.
My particular concern is that putting in evidence in this way is going to lead to wrongful prosecutions, particularly in cases where people are self-represented accused and they don't know about this whole procedure to try to make an application to courts to oppose the Crown's application to rely on affidavit evidence. From a defence lawyer's perspective, obviously this is something that we're going to challenge, but since I read this section I've been trying to think of a single case in my career—and this is 18 or 19 years—in which a police officer has testified in a trial and I did not have questions for that police officer on the basis of their testimony. I'm trying to think of a case in which routine police evidence is going to arise in such a circumstance that it's not going to be contentious in any way or not going to build on, in some manner or another, the case that I want to use for the defence of my client.
Really what it comes down to—here's one of the fundamental problems with it—is that we have to put our client's argument to the court. We have to put our version of events to the witnesses who are presented in court. So if the Crown shows up and they proceed by way of this affidavit only, how do we put our version of events to that person? How does the judge make a finding of fact? How do they assess credibility in circumstances where all they have is an affidavit of a police officer? Well, there are two different ways they can go. As a judge, they can say they're just going to accept everything that police officers put in this affidavit, which, I can tell you, I don't think is going to happen. The other is that they're just going to say, well, okay, somebody else is testifying that something didn't happen that way. The police officer hasn't been there to testify. There's been no cross-examination or testing of that evidence, so ultimately, they're just going to accept the evidence that they've heard from the people who are giving evidence that contradicts what the police officer has in that affidavit.
This is something that we've already seen in British Columbia with respect to the immediate roadside prohibition scheme, and that's something that Ms. Lee deals with all the time.
Do you want to go ahead?