Public Safety Committee on Feb. 6th, 2017

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

We're looking at every time a police officer is in a situation of detecting the presence of alcohol. He would not have to have a visual sign that the person is intoxicated to justify testing.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Okay, but is that for roadside conditions or can they just pull anybody over?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Yes. If you are on the road and are asked to show your driver's licence, it's the same as if you are at the airport and you go through security screening. What we are witnessing and what has been demonstrated in other countries is that this is the way to save lives. This is the way to avoid recidivists going through the holes in the screening process.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

I would take this a little further as well because I know as we embark upon the legalization of marijuana we're going to run into exactly the same issues in terms of people getting behind the steering wheel and being absolutely off their brains. Would there be amendments to this that would incorporate the marijuana piece, or is it a subsequent...? I honestly don't see the difference. If you are drunk or if you are high, when you get behind the wheel, you could kill somebody.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Yes, absolutely.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

There have to be measures put in place to cover all of those things.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

I fully agree with you.

I was looking at the people from MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, because we had exactly the same conversation. This part of the bill, which is mandatory screening, is setting the base for the next step, which is also drugs. This particular part is addressing alcohol, but it's the same thing. A police officer may have a stoned person in front of him or her, but if the person doesn't look too weird, he cannot test them.

Let's begin with alcohol, and obviously, then, it will be easy to follow, because the precedent will have been set with this bill. We are laying out the basis, for whatever may come down the pike, to do the most to prevent lives being taken by drugged drivers.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Right. I'm not a lawyer, so I will ask this question.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

I'm not either.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

We have a few around.

I was under the assumption that, as things currently stand, a police officer could not pull somebody over unless they had probable cause. Is that not correct?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

You know, actually, if I have a muffler that's too noisy, someone can take me off the road. What is your question?

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

It's about probable cause. If a police officer's driving, they can't currently, as I understand the law, randomly pull people over.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

No, that's it exactly and that is the core of the problem. This is why we are losing lives. The police are not able to intercept that person and take this person off the road because it doesn't show. Down the road, this person may cause an accident because this person is under the influence—

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

The reason I ask that—

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Je m'excuse. Thank you very much. I need to move on.

This is the new, tougher chair.

Mr. Spengemann.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Blaney, for joining us today, along with witnesses from Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Families For Justice. Thank you for your advocacy, for your championship of the issue, and for bringing it to us.

I want to pick up on comments and questions raised by my colleague Ms. Watts. The first one I want to go to with you is the question of randomness and whether randomness is even the right term. The legislation, as it's framed right now, makes reference to randomness only in the title of a paragraph, and it doesn't seem to have any legal import. It basically says, “If a peace officer has in his or her possession an approved screening device, the...officer may, by demand, require the person who is operating a conveyance” to submit himself or herself to a test.

Some people might say few, if any, things in the human mind are ever random. The only way to really achieve true randomness would be to have a machine that's at the point of the decision of whether to test or not. It would then have a button and when you pushed the button, it would spit out a binary yes or no. That would be random. Everything else might be subject to some allegation that it's not random. If an officer, for example, were to pull over only black pickup trucks in a certain neighbourhood, then the complainant might say it's not random and challenge the legislation on the basis of a non-randomness defence.

In your exchange with my colleague Mr. Miller, you said that you want to avoid having the courts jammed up with bogus defences. Is it randomness we're after, or is it really the full discretion of an officer to do whatever she decides at the roadside, regardless of whether reasonable and probable grounds persist, to the effect that anybody at any time could be pulled over, randomly or not, and be subjected to a test?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

You raise a very legitimate question. I wish I were a lawyer or an expert or a constitutionalist to better answer your question. What I know is that this paragraph you've raised is really a very critical part of the bill, which actually, as you mentioned, enables a police officer to randomly test to detect the presence of alcohol.

I would align my views with the expertise of Dr. Hogg on that one. I feel that the wording is appropriate.

You know, I'm only a tool here, in your hands, so that this bill can move forward and attain its objective of saving lives. If you feel that, in one way or another, there's a way to amend the bill, I would certainly invite you or any member of the committee to move that along. As Mr. Di Iorio mentioned, for someone who commits homicide, there's no way to qualify a crime that is committed with a car by a person under the influence of alcohol. A previous bill, which actually got support from our current Prime Minister Trudeau, suggested calling it “vehicular homicide”. Well, I would say, please feel free to add it.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

To raise the stigma of the offence....

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Absolutely. It would have a very strong impact. Just as an example, in a case where a recidivist is caught driving under the effects of alcohol, it would be a break of his conditions. This person would be put in jail. We would at least prevent this person from taking the life of someone else.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Okay. Thank you for that.

The secondary aspect, which was also alluded to by my colleague Ms. Watts, was the relationship between alcohol and drugs. The bill captures drugs to some extent. The question is whether it does everything we need it to do, looking forward to legalization and regulation, and potentially also addressing other drugs. The bill as it stands now doesn't define drugs. If you look at the professional transport community, for example, for some folks a stimulant might be helpful at night when they're driving a shift. In other cases, an overstimulant might affect detrimentally somebody's ability to drive.

My question to you is a general one. How do we move in the direction of where we are with alcohol, where we know that alcohol after a certain threshold will relatively uniformly affect people negatively, but we don't know the same for drugs? Caffeine is a drug. There's a bunch of stimulants and a bunch of nerve-calming drugs that people might take after a day of anxiety at the office. If they drive home and get into an accident, they may be subject to the law.

How do we move forward on the science relating to drugs and the levels of inebriation causing detrimental effects?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

I thank you for your question. As you know, this is a private member's bill that is focusing on a holistic approach to target impaired driving, mainly with alcohol. Your government, having some views on moving forward regarding drugs, is certainly asking the very same question you are asking.

I can tell you that by implementing this measure, as I was responding to Ms. Watts, the mandatory

systematic testing and

random testing, if we do it as we plan to do it with alcohol, it will help to do it also with drugs so that the police officer can randomly, or with full discretion, test someone for the presence of any form of drugs. Of course, this is an area that needs to be explored and strengthened.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you, Mr. Blaney.

Mr. Clement.

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Blaney, I represent a rural riding, and I'm very proud to represent a rural riding. There are parts of your riding that would be the same. I was reviewing some of the testimony before the committee last September, and this is what a Department of Justice official said:

In major cities, a dozen police officers may stop traffic and select five or six individuals to test. In a rural setting, the police force may consist of four or five officers. So it would be a bit difficult to do the same.

I just wanted your perspective. Obviously we want to not only pass a bill, but we want to enforce a bill. How do we do that? Are there any responses you're expecting from the provinces, for instance, to make sure there's a full complement of police officers available to do this kind of thing?

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Thank you for your question, Tony.

My riding has an urban part and a rural part. I certainly am proud to get the support from the rural organization there, which is doing outstanding work. In Bellechasse there was a lot of crime. It's near Beauce. In Beauce and Bellechasse there are still some sad cases remaining, but a lot of effort has been made. I come from Quebec, where we have Opération Nez rouge. It's a great model for educating people that if they've taken a drink during, in that case, the Christmas period, they call someone else.

So yes, for the rural part, the bill fully applies in that regard. Again, it's whether a police officer has the latitude to detect the presence of alcohol, even though the person doesn't necessarily show any sign of being drunk, just as they would ask for a driver's licence or to have the person's car inspected. I just see benefits in it for both rural and urban parts of the country. I believe it will help to reduce accidents in rural parts.

[Tony Clement, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Could you elaborate a little? I know you've talked to a lot of stakeholders. You referred to that earlier in your discussion. Just talk about how stakeholders have responded to this particular bill in the context of the challenge of impaired driving.