Thank you.
I want to thank the other presenters for their comments, and I certainly echo what they've said about random breath testing. As a Métis I am very concerned about how this is going to affect people from the aboriginal community. We see in B.C. already basically an offence of driving while native, and that's only going to get worse.
We also don't need this law. Statistics Canada has been tracking impaired driving rates since the 1980s, and there has been a consistent decline over the years. The laws we have are working. There is a correction in this issue. It is taking place. Provinces also have adopted administrative measures that are working, or so they say. I take issue with that, but they do say they're working.
Dealing with the administrative laws in British Columbia, which is one of the areas our office handles frequently, I see first-hand every day the way that giving police unfettered power causes abuses of that power. In British Columbia there is no practical ability to challenge the demand for the breath sample under our administrative scheme, so we have de facto mandatory random breath testing in British Columbia already, and all it has led to is a reduction in policing skills and a reduction in respect for charter rights from police that invades other areas of criminal law.
If we pass this law in its current iteration and allow police the ability to conduct random breath tests and to engage with drivers for the purposes of random testing, all we are going to be doing is saying that the charter doesn't matter if we worry about the type of offence. That can't be what we are supposed to have in a legal system in a free and democratic society. Living in a free and democratic society means we have to strike a balance between individual liberties and protection of the public. Sometimes that balance is going to lead to cases where people are put at risk, but that's a risk we take to protect the rights and fundamental freedoms we have as Canadians, and we need to keep that in place.
It's also illogical. There's a significantly concerning aspect about this law to me, and that is that there is a reasonable suspicion for saliva testing for the drug-impaired scheme, but there is no reasonable suspicion standard for alcohol-impaired driving. There's no justification for having one standard for drugs and a different standard for alcohol. Do you have more rights because you use drugs than if you drink? It doesn't make sense.
Not only does this law fail to strike a balance, but from my perspective it will almost inevitably lead to convictions. This law is designed to convict people charged with impaired driving, rather than to let them have the right to a fair trial. My colleague has spoken about the limits on disclosure that will impede an individual's ability to get the evidence necessary to prove their innocence. Mr. Spratt has spoken about the limits this law creates on the ability to challenge the breath test results in the absurdities of the law. This law is designed to convict, and that's not what our legal system is supposed to do. It is supposed to create a process by which a person can have a fair trial.
Because we have an introduction of random breath testing, we're going to see the end of things that the Supreme Court of Canada has tried to put to rest earlier this year. The recent case of Alex, talking about how issues related to the presumptions aren't related to the validity of a breath demand, is just going to go back to the court. We're never going to put other issues to rest, because we're going to have less to challenge as defence counsel and less for accused persons to challenge.
I'm particularly concerned about the elimination of a defence of post-driving consumption. I can tell you that I probably run more impaired driving trials in British Columbia than any other lawyer right now, and I have never in all my time practising run a bolus drinking defence, a post-driving consumption defence. Mr. Spratt is quite right that it does not come up. It is not a frequent thing. We also have laws in place that address this problem when it's used to obstruct an officer's ability to investigate. We have seen police officers in British Columbia convicted of obstruction and sentenced to jail time for engaging in post-driving consumption to skew breath test results.
We don't need this law. We don't need this change. We have a system in place, and it creates a “guilty until proven innocent” mechanism. Again, dealing with the roadside prohibition scheme in British Columbia, I have seen the way that “guilty until proven innocent” works. You have triers of fact who end up distrustful of the evidence of the so-called “guilty party”. It's difficult to have a fair hearing. I can only predict that this pervasive attitude will infect the court system as a whole, and it has the danger of creating an unconscious bias against accused drivers.
These proposed changes will not work. Our justice system depends upon safeguards against wrongful conviction, respect for charter values, and an overall desire to create laws that make sense to address real problems and not imagined ones.
Thank you.