Mr. Speaker, I was very pleased to second the private member's bill proposed by the member for Prince George-Bulkley Valley which would provide a sentence of seven years for the offence of drunk driving causing death.
This is a very serious issue in Canada today. Let us look at what happened in Prince George recently. It was the scene of the murder of a young father from Prince Rupert and his two children. The murder weapon in this case was an automobile with an impaired driver at the wheel.
When the offender was sentenced, the entire community, as well as virtually everyone who heard about it in the province of British Columbia was shocked at the extremely light sentence of three and a half years to be paid for taking three lives.
Judges in British Columbia commonly treat lightly the offence of using a motor vehicle as a deadly weapon. Impaired driving is a very preventable form of death. Sad to say, it is very often our young people who lose their lives for making the tragic mistake of drinking and driving.
For example, in February three young women from the city of Vernon in my riding of Okanagan-Shuswap paid that price when they decided to drive home from an evening's entertainment at nearby Kelowna. They made it only a few miles north of Kelowna before they turned in front of a logging truck in the early hours of the morning. All three paid the price. They died. Their families and friends were devastated.
It is our duty to structure the Criminal Code in such a way that such unnecessary deaths are prevented, along with the murder of innocent victims by drunk drivers. We should send a much stronger message in the sentences handed out for drunk driving offences.
It is not only the young people who like to party. If we could convince them as soon as they start to drive that alcohol and gasoline are an extremely dangerous and deadly mixture, the good habit of not driving when they have been drinking would probably stay with them all their lives.
A poster which hangs not far from the Parliament Buildings says that if you are old enough to drink, you are old enough to drive: Choose one. That is excellent advice. A very good way to emphasize that message would be to include a minimum sentence of seven years for drunk driving causing death.
There are many sad figures available about drunk driving. For example, there were a total of 6,700 alcohol related accidents in British Columbia in 1994, including 3,231 personal injury claims and 138 fatalities. There were 3,331 accidents with property damage and 11,379 impaired driving offences.
In my riding of Okanagan-Shuswap the total number of impaired offences for 1994 was 406. That number only represents the drivers who were caught by police. For every one caught, many more manage to get away with drinking and driving until that fateful day when a child rides his bike suddenly around the corner or a grandmother suddenly steps into a downtown crosswalk or another driver does something a little too fast for the delayed reflexes of that impaired driver.
The cost of impaired driving is not limited to accidents. An estimated $200 million is spent on enforcement, court, medical and other costs in British Columbia as a direct result of drinking and driving. That does not get into the terrible emotional costs to the families. Look at that $200 million and what it could do. It could pay nurses' salaries. It could help provide essential medical
services like kidney dialysis, x-rays or CAT scans. It could be used to provide computers for British Columbia classrooms. That $200 million thrown away because of drinking and driving represents a great loss to the people of B.C.
The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia estimates that 21 cents of every premium dollar is spent repairing damage done by drunk drivers. That is a very important point because most families in British Columbia are having a very difficult time making ends meet. Most B.C. families also own a motor vehicle. It is common for families to spend $3 a day or more just to insure their cars, and 21 per cent of that goes to repair damage done by drunk drivers.
We could say that drunk driving increases the cost of every family's premiums by at least 63 cents a day or $4.41 a week. That would buy every family a couple of litres of milk and a loaf of bread every week. Maybe that is not a big deal to the members of Parliament whose inflated egos make them think they deserve the gold plated pension plan they voted in for themselves. I can assure my colleagues that is a very big deal to the grocery budgets of most young mothers in particular.
The dollar costs of drunk driving are not just the numbers on a sheet of paper. They represent a burden to the family income at a time when most families have far too little income as it is. In large measure this is due to the excessive spending and the resulting excessive taxes imposed by Liberal, Conservative and NDP governments, those advocates of big government.
Let us look at drunk driving causing death in a different way. Are today's penalties doing the essential job of preventing drinking and driving? Those penalties include the following: The punishment for a first offence is loss of privileges and a fine of up to $2,000. The punishment for a second offence is a mandatory jail sentence of 14 days to one year. The punishment for a charge of impaired driving causing bodily harm is a maximum 10-year sentence and 10 years of prohibition from driving, which means they can go into court and bargain it away.
The punishment for a charge of impaired driving causing death carries a maximum penalty which includes a 14-year jail sentence and up to 10 years from driving. I do not know of one case that even touches that point. We just heard about a judge who gave three and half years for taking three lives and yet the opportunity was there for him to give up to 10 years.
A recent tragedy involving the death of a 17-year-old youth in my riding has reopened the question of more severe sentences for impaired driving among the residents of Vernon and area. Because the offender had a history of alcohol related offences, concerned citizens of the Vernon area collected 5,000 signatures on a petition calling for stiffer and longer sentences.
In view of the tragic damage that driving while impaired can cause, I strongly support the requirement of much stronger sentences for drunk driving causing death.
Some people may object, especially on the government side, saying that to impose these kinds of penalties is too harsh. Is it too harsh for taking the lives of a mother, father or children, because the excuse will be: "I was drunk when it happened".
The truth is that most offenders who are guilty of driving while impaired have committed one or more previous alcohol related offences. In other words, for those on the other side who are having trouble with this, in most cases it is not the first time they have been charged. In most cases it is not the first time they had been in an accident. Of course, we have no idea of how many times they also drove while impaired and got away with it. We will never know.
I have always believed that the first responsibility of any government is to protect the innocent and law-abiding citizens to the best of its ability. For far too long we have seen that governments have not lived up to that and it is time we started. I strongly urge that we take the first step by supporting this bill. Having a stiffer penalty may be just the kind of tough love we hear talked about all the time that could save lives. In fact, I strongly believe that if such a penalty had been in effect, maybe we could have saved those three women I talked about earlier.
In conclusion, I would like to remind all hon. members in the House that when they stand to address this bill, they have to face the public. They have to go back and look their constituents in the eye. Believe me, there is not one in this House in our term that will not have a case of death caused by impaired driving before them in their own constituency. I hope they all remember that when the time comes.