Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to lend my support to this very important bill.
I think we can get lost in statistics and they can become very impersonal. However, I will never forget the day that one of my colleagues at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, where I worked, phoned to say that he would not be coming to work that day because his sister had just been killed. It turned out that she had been killed by a drunken driver. I believe she was 18 years old at the time.
When something like that happens, we realize that this is something that is very serious and something that we must take great action to stop. As the parliamentary secretary just said, we probably cannot pass laws that will eliminate this totally. What we need is a massive overhaul of public attitude toward this.
It should be an automatic given that if a person is impaired, or anywhere near impaired, that they decline to drive. There is always another way of getting from point A to point B if they are not able to drive.
I remember one day—and this person probably does not remember who did it to him—I was driving behind a driver who literally was bouncing off the curbs where there were three lanes in the road. He was going from one side to another. I was heading out into the country where my family lives, and he was going onto a two lane country road. Fortunately, the very last light before he left the town that I was in was red. I pulled up behind him, threw on my four-way flashers, jumped out of my car, ran up, opened the door and took his keys away. He was very surprised. In a way, I guess, I made a citizen's arrest. Maybe I could get charged for doing something illegal now.
However, I always think that perhaps what I did that day was not only to save him the anguish of knowing that he had injured or killed someone, but that I had also saved the life of some person who could have been his victim. I knew that I had to do that.
As parliamentarians, today we have the opportunity to strengthen the law with respect to impaired driving. This is a bill which I believe is long overdue. It is a very important bill. We must send a crystal clear message to people who contemplate driving when they are impaired that it is something they just do not do because the risks are too high.
I just thought of an example, Mr. Speaker. You just mentioned that your grandchildren were watching on television. The government whip just said that it was his twin grandkids' birthday today. I have four grandchildren. None of us would have a place, say a catwalk in a store, where we would take away some of the railing that prevents kids from falling down and hurting themselves. If that railing was broken, we would block that place off and not allow anyone to go there until the risk was removed.
Here we have an opportunity to remove the risk or at least reduce it, thereby saving lives and saving the anguish of those people who go through life knowing that they have taken someone else's life.
This bill is long overdue. As I have said, I would like to give a little credit to our colleague from Prince George—Bulkley Valley, who has headed up the campaign to improve the law in the area of impaired driving. I would like to give him accolades for having done that.
We have a responsibility to the victims of impaired driving to legislate this very important amendment to the criminal code. This is an amendment that will give judges the means of imposing a life sentence for impaired driving causing death, a very serious crime.
I support this bill and I am fairly certain that all of my colleagues in the Alliance support it as well. We call on all parliamentarians to support the legislation. We urge the government and the Senate to pass it quickly. Let us not have the same thing with this bill as we had with the consecutive sentencing bill.
Because this bill has been such a long time coming and Canadians can wait for it no longer, I would, therefore, like to move:
That the question be now put.