Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak in favour of Bill C-201, which as we have heard, is an amendment to section 255(3) of the Criminal Code dealing with impaired drivers.
I do not want to go into the background. I know a lot has been said on this. There has been a lot of talk of victims. I think everyone in this room and probably people who are watching these proceedings, we all know of someone or some family who has been touched by this.
I will deal with a particular part of this bill. I have heard the criticism that any minimum sentence fetters the discretion of the
judiciary. As a general rule, I believe that is true. There is no question that we do not want to fetter the discretion of the judiciary.
Judges have to deal with all the facts. They have to consider all the evidence and then they will pass a sentence. That is why in our system of laws, as a rule we do not impose a minimum sentence. We impose a maximum. In the case of section 255 it is 14 years. However, we are dealing with the exception here. There are always exceptions. In law there is the old expression of exceptions to the rule.
The hon. member has struck on one topic that has become a problem in this country: Too many people are careening around on the roads in an impaired state. According to the most recent statistics, approximately 88,000 people were charged with impaired driving. More important, more than 1,400 people in 1994 lost their lives as a result of impaired driving. To me the telling statistic is that this is three times higher than the murder rate in terms of victims.
The argument could be made that we do not have a minimum sentence for murder so why would we want to impose one on impaired driving? The answer is quite simple. We recognize that murders are committed for various reasons. Some are premeditated but more often they are crimes of passion; they are done on the spur of the moment.
Impaired driving involves two steps. One is putting yourself into the position of being impaired and that is not an act of passion. That is not an act that happens on the spur of the moment. That is something that in most cases people can control. I do acknowledge there are people in our society who have addiction problems, but people have some degree of choice in whether or not they will drink. They ought to realize before they start drinking that they have a vehicle somewhere in the neighbourhood.
Once people get into that impaired state they lose all judgment. As a result we see there is a problem on the roads and highways in this country. In 1994 it caused 1,400 people to be killed, not by a crime of passion, not by somebody who got into a state on the spur of the moment, but they were killed by someone who ought not to have been behind the wheel. As I said earlier, we all know someone who has personally been affected by an impaired driver.
There were 1,400 people in 1994, three times the number of people who were murdered, acts of passion, being killed. It is a problem. We do move to address problems in this House. We are required and it is our duty to address problems. I commend the member for moving to do it.
I want to deal with the whole question of minimum sentencing. Whether seven years is appropriate or not, I am not certain. Whether two years is appropriate or not, I am not certain. But this is a situation that we have to deal with. This is a signal.
There are those who suggest that we could use the money we are going to spend incarcerating people on an education campaign. Education campaigns on this have been going provincially for years. There are road checks, spot checks, the RIDE program in Ontario. They have reduced it some. Every year there are various ways of dealing with it. Some people are either immune to it or not affected by the education programs, whichever. The end result is we have to take a more extraordinary measure to tell people they have a choice as to whether they are going to drink. We have to tell people to think about it before they climb into that car if they have had a drink because they are the risk on the road.
The time has arrived for this place to send this bill to committee and let the committee decide whether seven years is too severe, or maybe three years is more appropriate, perhaps one year. In principle, without any equivocation I believe that we have to look at a minimum sentence.
This is not saying to the judiciary that we want to fetter their discretion. This is saying to the judiciary that we believe this is an extraordinary circumstance and we believe we have to tell them what the parameters are at the bottom and at the top rather than saying just what the top is.
People in this country want this. This is not falling into a trap. It is an exception to the rule. It is an exception to our normal rules of jurisprudence but this is an exceptional problem and sometimes we must take extraordinary measures.