I am sorry, Mr. Speaker. I do appreciate the rules and I did not want to allege that any New Democrats were not here but that the NDP are not going to put up any speakers in reference to the point that was made earlier.
I rise in support of this bill. I want to laud my colleague from Lakeland and certainly my colleague from Blackstrap who just spoke to the bill. Bill C-452 deserves the support of all members of the House because I am saddened to report that according to statistics, drunk driving is the number one criminal cause of death in Canada.
I am saddened in part because the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was made law in 1982 and yet one of its most commonly cited sections, subsection 24(2), deals with the exclusion of evidence at, among others, drunk driving trials.
Approximately 40% of all traffic fatalities involve alcohol. Every day 4 Canadians die and another 200 are injured because someone had too much to drink and acted irresponsibly. Canadians know that drinking and driving is illegal; however, they also know that there are a surprising number of ways to get out of a drunk driving charge.
The last time this bill was discussed in Parliament, on March 24, 2004, the member for Provencher spoke of the tremendous difficulty in successfully prosecuting someone for drunk driving. I think that Canadians should know more about the member for Provencher because it is important to understand his background and the leverage with which he speaks to the issue.
Before ever setting foot in the House, the member for Provencher was a criminal prosecutor, the director of constitutional law for the Province of Manitoba, and later Manitoba's attorney general and minister of justice. When he talks about the Criminal Code, we should all listen.
When he spoke on Bill C-452 on March 24, he said that as a prosecutor he would rather have prosecuted a murderer than a drunk driver. He told us how frustrating it was to deal with the technical defences on how to avoid convictions under the Criminal Code. Quite frankly, he said it was easier to prosecute a murderer than it was to prosecute a drunk driver.
How difficult is it? In opposing Bill C-452, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, the Liberal responsible for this bill, told the House that “It is better that 99 people who committed the offence go free than one innocent person be convicted”.
If that is the Liberal vision of justice, we are nearly there. A recent B.C. study showed that only 11% of impaired drivers taken to hospital were ever convicted. Think about this. In what kind of circumstances is a drunk driver taken to hospital? There are only three that come to mind. One, he hit another vehicle; two, another vehicle hit him; or three, he hit an obstacle like a tree or a wall.
In situations one and three, one would think that if the drunk driver was drunk enough to hit another vehicle or an obstacle like a wall or a tree--drunk enough in order that he would have to go to hospital because of the injuries--that he would likely be drunk enough to be found guilty of drunk driving.
The fact that only 11% of these people are convicted of drunk driving tells us that there is something seriously wrong with our system. Clearly, we need to do something about it and I wish that the government would stop sending mixed signals to my generation.
Young Canadians are very aware of the “Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk” campaign. Those of us who are under 30 do not typically have a drink with lunch on a workday. The idea of a designated driver is common practice. We are opposed to drinking and driving, and we want to keep drunks off our roads.
When we hear the government has tabled legislation to deal with drug impaired driving, we are encouraged. We are happy to hear that Alberta has asked its prosecutors to seek dangerous offender status and long term offender designations for habitual drunk drivers. At the same time when we see the government's members of Parliament here in this place fighting against Bill C-452, and when we hear that convicting a drunk driver is tougher than putting a murderer behind bars, we become concerned.
Then we read that Daniel Bert Desjarlais of Edmonton has been convicted 19 times of drunk driving including one offence that killed his uncle or we hear of Robert James Dornbusch, recently stopped by police staggeringly drunk, nearly three times over the legal limit, who is to be convicted for the 17th time of impaired driving, partly because his own lawyer described him as incorrigible.