Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to participate in this evening's debate. It is probably one of the finer moments of this parliament. We hear voices from all corners of the House, all political parties saying that they want serious steps taken to remove people who drink and drive from the streets of Canada. This has to be one of our finer moments.
What we are debating and what will be passed later today will result in lives being saved in our country. The sooner we pass this legislation the better it will be. For that reason I will keep my remarks brief, but I do want to say a number of things.
Mr. Speaker, I do not know how old you are, but I suspect you are at least close to my age. I remember when I was growing up that it was considered to be macho or manly to drink alcohol and drive a car or a truck. That was the rule of the day and pretty well everybody I knew did it.
I grew up in southern Alberta. I do not know whether it is that different from most parts of Canada but a lot of people made a lot of money by going up and down the highways collecting beer bottles out of the ditches. Imagine how many people must have been driving and drinking with beer on the seats of their cars. They would finish their beer and throw the bottle out of the car window and people would go up and down the highways collecting beer bottles. I suppose they collected pop bottles too, but from what I can recall most of them were collecting beer bottles.
There must have been thousands and thousands of people driving up and down those streets drinking while they were driving and chucking the empties out of the window. If they were eventually stopped by the police they would not have an empty case of beer sitting in the car.
It is fair to say that those days are over. I would not say that it never occurs or that people do not drink and drive in that fashion any longer. But I know how unpopular it is now to see someone who has been drinking prepare to drive away from a house party or a gathering. People actually say “I do not think you should drive. Are you okay to drive? Should you be driving?” In some cases they stop other people from driving.
It has not even been one generation but we have come a long way. We are a much brighter society today when dealing with drinking and driving. This legislation will take us a whole lot further.
I am delighted to be part of this debate and part of this process. I want to pay tribute to one of my colleagues, the member for Sydney—Victoria, who has worked on this legislation with representatives from all political parties to bring us to this point today.
In order to move this legislation expeditiously through the House of Commons we have had to make some changes to the bill. One of the major changes is to take out the provision that says that a person who is convicted of impaired driving and takes someone's life will end up spending the rest of his or her life in jail. That is a pretty strong statement and a lot of people think we should talk about it a bit more. We decided to take it out of this piece of legislation and we will revisit it in the fall. When the House of Commons returns we will reconsider whether we should proceed along this rather harsh line.
I am familiar with other countries that have taken steps we would normally consider to be quite harsh. A few years ago I visited a family in Norway. There was some drinking going on at the dinner parties but there was always one person who did not drink a single ounce of alcohol. That person was the designated driver for the group. There were probably two or three people in the group. That person would drink pop and if somebody else in the group wanted to have a couple of glasses of wine or whatever, that was fine because they were not driving.
I said to them that they were obviously very serious about the issue of drinking and driving. They told me “If we get caught driving with alcohol on our breath, we do not have to be impaired, just with alcohol on our breath, we will go directly to jail for three months”. They go directly to jail and that is it. They do not go to court or anything. The policeman drives them to jail and there they are for three months. I suspect for most of us to disappear to jail for three months would cause us a problem with our jobs. People say “The risk is just too much, so I am not drinking and driving”.
Does it stop every single person from drinking and driving? I suppose not, but it certainly acts as a deterrent for most people. We could say that it is almost zero tolerance for drinking and driving. People who drink and drive in Norway do not even have to be intoxicated, they do not have to be impaired, they go directly to jail. That is for the first offence. I forget what the punishment is for the second offence. Maybe it is torture, I do not know, but it is obviously pretty serious stuff. We are not going quite that far with this legislation.
We are saying that we have listened to the police forces across the country. We have listened to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We have listened to our constituents. We have listened to victims rights groups. We have listened to groups across the country. They are all saying that they want parliament to send a clear message to the courts of Canada, to those people involved in our legal and justice systems, to get tougher on those who drink and drive and therefore take a lethal weapon into the communities of Canada.
That is what it is all about. If an intoxicated person who is not totally in control of his or her facilities jumps into a typical car or truck, it is like driving around with a great big cannon. It is a dangerous object.
On the tragic side, I suspect most members of parliament know someone close to them, either a family member, a close friend or a neighbour, who has been impacted by someone who was drinking and driving. I can think of personal friends who have lost children, spouses or partners as the result of someone else drinking and driving and ending up killing them as the result of an accident.
Perhaps even worse, they are those people who have been involved in very serious car accidents because of some else's drinking and driving and have ended up spending the rest of their lives as quadriplegics or being severely injured with a head injuries or something else. They live very difficult lives through no fault of their own but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and someone who was drunk and driving a vehicle struck them.
This is something that society ought not to accept. We do not condone, but we have to get a little tougher and say to folks that kind of behaviour is not acceptable. This legislation will act as a deterrent.
I acknowledge the hard work done by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and the report entitled “Toward Eliminating Impaired Driving”. I recognize the work of the committee in listening to people who are knowledgeable about this area, both in terms of victims and in terms of people who work in the courts, the legal and justice systems, and deal with people involved in these types of offences.
What are some of the amendments to the code we are considering tonight? It will increase the mandatory minimum fine for a first offence to $600. For some people that is a deterrent but for a lot of people it is not much of a deterrent. It is not that big a deal if an average income earner has to pay a fine of $600.
It will increase the driving prohibition order of not more than three years and not less than one year for a first offence or a prohibition of not less than three months, with the balance to be served by complying with an alcohol ignition interlock program where available. That is a pretty serious.
It will provide for a driving prohibition order of not more than five years and not less than two years for a second offence and not less than three years for a subsequent offence. That is getting serious and I like that a great deal.
There is one point we can all agree upon. If we look at an average community paper in Canada, there is always a section on court news which reports what has happened in the local court for that day. I am always struck by the number of people up on drinking related offences, in particular drinking and driving related offences. We have to say as a society that we will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.
The legislation will ensure sentencing judges consider a blood alcohol concentration level of two or more times the legal limit to be an aggravating factor for sentencing purposes. In other words, if a person had three or four glasses of wine and is caught, that is one thing. He or she is obviously kind of a dangerous person. However, if a person has had a whole case of 24 beer that is something else. It is obviously a more serious situation. This legislation will recognize that.
It will allow the sentencing judge to require the use of an alcohol ignition interlock as a condition of probation where available. It will allow the sentencing judge to order persons convicted of impaired driving to undergo assessment and to recommend a treatment as a condition of prohibition in those jurisdictions where treatment is provided.
It will increase the maximum penalty available upon indictment to five years. It will increase the penalty to a maximum of ten years imprisonment where the accident causes bodily harm, and life imprisonment where the accident causes death. This is where we have some further work to do.
It will allow a police officer to demand a breath or blood sample from an individual on reasonable and probable grounds that he or she has committed an impaired driving offence within the preceding three hours.
If we walk up to a person who has been drinking we can normally figure that out pretty quickly just because of the smell. Alcohol has a certain smell. We can tell if the person has been drinking scotch, beer or wine. The people drinking probably cannot tell because they have consumed the stuff. For those people who are not drinking, like a police officer, it does not take much to figure out that a person has been drinking. If a police officer thinks a person has been drinking and can clearly smell alcohol from the vehicle, the legislation say that the officer has the grounds to request a breath or blood sample.
I could talk about this matter all night. I feel very strongly about it, as do all my colleagues. We are anxious to get the legislation passed. It is time for society to say we are sophisticated enough that we will not tolerate people who put the lives of other people at jeopardy because they drink. It is as simple as that. To do that we have to increase the penalties very severely so that if a person is convicted he or she is penalized severely, and if the person takes someone's life he or she will be very seriously penalized.
One point in the legislation that I worry about is that many of the treatments or suggestions in terms of appropriate sentencing refer to where available or where possible. If one of the conditions of sentencing is the seeking of treatment for an alcohol problem, some alcohol treatment facility has to be available. If we tell people they have to do this or that as a way of breaking the habit, it behooves us as a society to ensure that those treatment facilities are available. That is another challenge we have to confront.
I conclude by saying that we are into the graduation time of year when a lot of young students from high school, college, university and other institutes graduate. A fair bit of drinking often occurs around these celebrations. For years and years we cringed at graduation time because we knew that one morning we would wake up and there would have been a horrible car accident with a number of young people killed because of drinking and driving while celebrating graduation.
It was as regular as clockwork year after year after year. A number of schools have taken a dry grad approach and made a point of the whole issue of drinking and driving. As a result it occurs a lot less today than it has in the past. Thank goodness for that but it still occurs.
It occurs in the summertime because people are out celebrating, enjoying themselves and partying. When a lot of people party they drink excessively and they are out driving boats and Sea-Doos. In Kamloops they actually drive Ski-Doos in the wintertime on the river, but that is another story. They are impaired and intoxicated when they do a lot of things and that is wrong.
On behalf of all parties we are trying to send a clear message to people that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable. I am pleased to be part of this discussion tonight and look forward to expeditious passage of the legislation so that it becomes law as quickly as possible.