Evidence of meeting #65 for Justice and Human Rights in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was impaired.
A recording is available from Parliament.
6:10 p.m.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Thank you.
I want to follow up on that line of questioning about boating, and perhaps bring in the random breath testing testimony we just heard.
I haven't encountered any, but is there any testing or police presence on busy docks or boat launch areas? It always seems that you're talking about incidents where it's after the fact. People drown, so then we test people.
6:10 p.m.
Vice-Chair, Canadian Safe Boating Council
Unfortunately, the level of marine policing across Canada varies dramatically.
The Ontario Provincial Police has one of the largest on-water police forces in North America. The Sûreté du Québec has some. After that, it gets pretty hit and miss, and as you say quite rightly, it's often after the fact.
6:10 p.m.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
I live in the Okanagan Valley where boating is a huge thing in the summer, and I've never heard of this happening. It's like you say, we hear about it after the fact.
6:10 p.m.
Chair, Canadian Safe Boating Council
I was out on the water a couple of weeks ago with one of the regional police forces here in Ontario. They have exactly the same facilities to use for a person drinking while driving a boat as they would if they were an officer on the road pulling somebody over in an automobile.
6:10 p.m.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Yes, we do have police out on the lakes. I just wondered if there was this random breath testing before people got into boats.
6:10 p.m.
Vice-Chair, Canadian Safe Boating Council
Certainly, the easiest way to do marine policing is at the launch ramp before the boat gets wet—“blow here”—or to catch them when they are coming back.
In Ontario, the Liquor Licence Act says that you can only have alcohol on board to be consumed if it's a residence, which requires permanent sleeping accommodation, galley, and head facilities—toilets—and you have to be at anchor, aground, or tied to a dock. It's very restrictive.
I was chatting with Mr. Blair earlier. I do a lot of accident reconstruction in my line of work, and the number of accidents where people have gone out for a day of drinking and using, typically marijuana..... Going boating and drugs and booze seem to be very popular. We in fact worked on one case with John doing the reconstruction and me writing the report for one of the sides in a civil suit.
This has been a problem for a long time, and it's one that the police struggle with. However, as John said, they are equipping themselves better and taking this into more of an account.
6:15 p.m.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Okay.
Ms. Wallage, I'd like to talk about some of your concerns with regard to the time-consuming nature of members of your society having to testify and go into court. I'm just wondering if you've done any extrapolation of how much more work your members would be doing once marijuana gets added to the mix, and how those resources look.
6:15 p.m.
Chair, Drugs and Driving Committee, Canadian Society of Forensic Science
Is this with regard to testifying in court?
6:15 p.m.
Chair, Drugs and Driving Committee, Canadian Society of Forensic Science
With the new bill, some work will be taken away from us, in theory, with regard to calculations for blood alcohol. The simple BAC calculation, or BAC extrapolation, can be done by somebody within the court system, by a judge or whoever is tasked with doing it. That will be taken away. We've also had quite a bit of testimony regarding disclosure wars, as my colleague said earlier. Hopefully that is minimized, but I'm not overly optimistic about that.
In conjunction with the new legislation and the legalization of cannabis, I anticipate that there will be immense pressures on the lab and probably a lot of requirement for us to go out and testify, especially because it will be new.
6:15 p.m.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
I don't know how many forensic scientists there are in Canada who do this sort of thing.
6:15 p.m.
Chair, Drugs and Driving Committee, Canadian Society of Forensic Science
Not enough.
6:15 p.m.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Is that a limiting factor as well, not only the time but also the number of people?
6:15 p.m.
Chair, Drugs and Driving Committee, Canadian Society of Forensic Science
Yes. It's about the number of people. From my personal perspective, it takes approximately three years to train somebody after they've been hired. You don't just start the job, hit the ground, and go to court. It takes time to train people in this specific field.
6:15 p.m.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Okay.
Dr. Watson, I have a question about the booze buses and the random breath testing. Who decides where those buses are parked? I'm just thinking back to Mr. Fraser's questioning around racial profiling. Is there any concern that those buses are habitually parked along routes that might create that effect?
6:15 p.m.
Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Health, Queensland University of Technology, As an Individual
The deployment of the booze buses is controlled by operational police, but senior police set various targets for the amount of breath testing that should be performed and the locations where that should occur. In keeping with the principles of general deterrence, I know that the police try to achieve a broader spread of the booze bus operations across their areas of control. In fact one of the things that prevents or discourages them from parking the bus always at the one time is that drivers quickly start to learn and spread the news that the bus is parked in a particular place. One of the challenges for police is to ensure that they can keep uncertainty about where the buses are being placed. An issue there is that the larger the bus, the more constraints there are on where it can operate. There are particular occupational health and safety issues that need to be kept in mind for the police.
There are a couple of other things I should mention. Often with the big booze buses they'll use a patrol car in combination. For example, a typical style of operation is that you have the booze bus on a major road, but if there are any turnoffs as the drivers approach the bus, they'll have a patrol car parked down that street to try to create a kind of satellite effect.
Coming back to your general point, the essence is to get a widespread effect of the booze buses. This whole issue about avoiding drivers and having some predictability about where the booze buses are tends to offset the issue you've raised.
6:20 p.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Ms. Wallage, is there any level for alcohol or THC, for example, where below this level it's safe to drive and above this level it's not?
6:20 p.m.
Chair, Drugs and Driving Committee, Canadian Society of Forensic Science
No. With respect to alcohol, because that's really predominantly what I testify on, as I am the chair of the drugs and driving committee but most of our cases are alcohol, certainly, within the scientific literature, impairment has been demonstrated at as low as 15 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood. I notice a lot of people are speaking in grams, but for the purposes of the Criminal Code, it's in milligrams. This may equate to one drink. That impairment has been demonstrated in a lab setting.
With respect to THC, the easiest answer is that if you compare somebody who has been smoking, regardless of their concentration, and somebody who has not been smoking, I would expect impairment in the person who has been administering the drug.
With regard to the question about concentration and correlation to impairment, when we were asked this question about coming up with a per se limit, of course we looked at what other countries were doing and things of that nature. We really did focus in on smoking, because ingestion of cannabis has such low THC levels that potentially they won't be caught in these per se limits. They could be lower than five and potentially lower than two. We looked at the literature.... Granted, these are not the high-potency types of products that are used recreationally now, and there's a reason for that. People don't want to study high-potency products because of the adverse drug reactions that are potentially possible—
6:20 p.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
I am trying to separate the concepts of safety and impairment.
6:20 p.m.
Chair, Drugs and Driving Committee, Canadian Society of Forensic Science
Then the answer is yes. If you smoke, regardless of your concentration, it's ill-advised to drive a car. There is a window during which I would expect that drug to have an effect.
6:20 p.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
I note that the charge we're talking about here would be driving in excess of a per se limit, not an impairment charge. I guess the argument there is that if you're driving over this limit, you're not safe, so the per se limit, whether or not it denotes impairment, would go towards fulfilling a public good. Would you agree with that?
