Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today on behalf of my constituents of Fleetwood--Port Kells to speak to Bill C-16, the drug driving bill.
As some in the House may know, my community of Surrey is currently overrun with marijuana grow ops. Organized crime has moved in and is operating in my constituency. That is why this legislation is of such critical importance to my constituents. The key points of this legislation are as follows.
One, drivers suspected of being under the influence of a drug will by law have to submit to a roadside assessment test administered by a police officer. Two, if drug impairment is suspected, the individual must be detained at a police station and submit to another drug impairment assessment and a sample of bodily fluids may be taken for testing. Three, the penalties for failing to submit to testing for drug impairment would be equivalent to the penalties currently in place for failing to submit to an alcohol breathalyzer test.
We all know of the wonderful work done by advocacy groups, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, on the subject of driving while impaired by alcohol. This has helped to bring into focus the terrible damage done to society by alcohol impaired driving that happens every day across Canada.
Over the past few decades, drunk driving has gone from a socially unacceptable but tolerated norm to a cause for shame and serious penalties from our justice system. Our police conduct spot checks. There are radio and TV campaigns urging people not to drink and drive. There are rules for advertising alcoholic beverages. There are courses taught in schools. There are role models. There is peer pressure.
Alcohol impaired driving, while certainly still a significant and very important issue, does not suffer from lack of attention. The same is not true for driving while impaired by a drug other than alcohol. While groups such as MADD do work in this area, there remains much to be done.
There is, for example, no scientific consensus on the threshold drug concentration level in the body for drug impaired driving as there is for alcohol. Length of time of use, tolerance, metabolism, height, weight, body fat, et cetera, all may have an effect on whether a drug might be impairing a driver's ability to safely operate a motor vehicle.
It gets even more complicated because we are dealing with so many different kinds of drugs. With alcohol, the comparison is the same wherever one is and whatever the drink. Alcohol is alcohol, whether it comes from beer, wine or spirits. Drugs, on the other hand, come in all shapes and strengths, which makes setting a threshold standard for actual impairment much more difficult. Different drugs have different effects.
Fortunately a good deal of work has been done by law enforcement officials on these and other issues surrounding the detection of the drug impaired driver. It is not a stretch to suggest that the biggest form of impairment our law enforcement officials find on the road, outside of alcohol, is cannabis.
We do not have the vast studies and statistics for drug driving that we do for the alcohol impaired, but what we do know is that people driving under the influence of drugs are just as dangerous and just as potentially deadly as those who are impaired by alcohol.
I single out cannabis not only because it is the most prevalent drug in use on our roads, especially in my riding, but also because the government has introduced Bill C-16 as a companion bill to Bill C-17, the legislation decriminalizing small amounts of cannabis.
One of the chief complaints when the government last tried to introduce legislation regarding the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana was that nothing was being done about drug impaired driving. Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Canadian Professional Police Association in particular at the time noted the bill contained no measures to increase police powers to combat drug impaired drivers.
Despite the government's attempt to rectify past mistakes, there are still a few problems with this bill. One of the main concerns I have with this legislation is that it is putting the cart before the horse.
Bill C-17 seeks to decriminalize small amounts of cannabis, and that would lead, by any reasonable conclusion, to an increase in cannabis-impaired users on our roadways. But Bill C-16 does not foresee the completion of training for law enforcement in the techniques to conduct field testing for drug impairment until 2008, so we unleash more cannabis-impaired drivers on our roads with Bill C-17 without giving our law enforcement personnel the proper training to enforce this new law immediately.
The bill authorizes police to demand a standardized field sobriety test when they suspect an individual is driving while impaired by drugs. It also allows for a sample of bodily fluids to be taken at a police station if impairment is suspected. This is simply allowing the police to make the same demands of someone suspected of drug-impaired driving that they make of someone who is suspected of alcohol-impaired driving.
Refusal to submit to this testing would become a criminal offence, punishable by the same penalties currently in place for failure to submit to an alcohol breathalyzer test.
My colleagues and I support any legislation that improves police officers' ability to detect drug impairment and detain suspected drug-impaired drivers for testing. As I noted earlier, however, we are concerned that this legislation does not train enough police officers in detection methods before 2007 or 2008, long after the Liberal government intends to decriminalize marijuana.
A key component of any anti-drug-driving initiative must include significant funding for research into new technologies that would assist officers in detecting drug-impaired drivers on site, such as currently exists for alcohol. I would encourage the government to earmark such funding and work with the provinces to help develop these new technologies to make catching and prosecuting drug-impaired drivers easier.
The cannabis epidemic is sweeping my constituency and the entire lower mainland of B.C. and now we have the government about to decriminalize small amounts for personal use.
If members will pardon the pun, it is high time the government brought in legislation of this nature giving our law enforcement officials the tools they need to fight drug-impaired driving.