Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak in the House today to the motion to refer Bill C-32, an act to amend the Criminal Code, drugs and impaired driving, and to make related and consequential amendments to other acts, to the committee for hearings.
I believe I speak for everyone in the House and for the Canadian public generally when I say that everyone wants to propose the best legislation in dealing with this particular issue. The core of the legislation which is before the House is to change the Criminal Code so that police officers would have the authority to demand that a person who is suspected of having drugs in his or her body participate in standardized field sobriety tests, known as the acronym SFST. I see this as one more step in a continuum of tools that our police officers have at their disposal to deal with drivers who are under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
I practised law for quite a few years in Atlantic Canada. When I first started, the breathalyzer had only been in for four or five years. Anyone who is a little older than me can recall the tools that the police officers had at that time to deal with alcohol. They were the very tests that we have talked about here: touching the nose, walking a straight line, stooping over and the different tests that the police officers did at the time. Those tests did not give a very consistent or standardized approach. The trials were complex and complicated. The test results usually were fought by the accused because the success rate was certainly significant.
However, as time progressed, technology came to be and we developed the breathalyzer. There were certain problems with that, and then we had the offence of refusing a breathalyzer. This is all in the continuum as we deal with this very serious offence but we have been dealing with it for 40 years.
Although I will be speaking to this legislation, which is good legislation and I would ask my colleagues in the House of Commons to support it, I will point out that the Canadian public has dealt with the whole issue, not successfully, but there have been some successful steps made on the issue of driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. We also have had the penal sanctions and the publicity surrounding it.
However, when I look back, the best tool that the Canadian public has used on these offences, which we see so much with younger people in society, is that we have made the offence socially unacceptable. The statistics prove that this has lowered the incidents of the offence over the last 20 years, and especially over the last 5 or 6 years. We see with the younger people in society and I believe in every province that it is not socially acceptable to operate a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Getting back to the legislation, it is a serious issue and it would give the police more tools in their arsenal to deal with a situation where a person is not so much under the influence of alcohol but is under the influence of drugs. In this case, the core of the government's proposal is to change the Criminal Code so that police have the authority to demand that a person who is suspected of having drugs on his or her body participate in the standardized field sobriety tests which I have talked about before.
If the person failed these tests, the police officer would then, on a consistent basis, have reasonable grounds to believe that the person was impaired by a drug, or in some instances by a combination of a drug and alcohol. The police officer would be in a position to demand that the person accompany the police officer to a police station where the person would have to submit to further tests administered by a drug recognition expert.
The bottom line is that once that happened, a bodily fluid sample could be taken. Then and only then, if the final bodily fluid test indicated clearly what the drug was in the person's system, the concentration of the drug could be indicated. The expert could then form an opinion as to whether or not that concentration of the illegal drug was such that the person would be impaired pursuant to the Criminal Code of Canada. That would all go forward to the courts and if everything were done in proper order and the safeguards were there, the person would be convicted of that offence.
This is not a new technology. It is not a revolution of the law. It is just a further step. It continues the whole process that we are working on in society. I understand that this was developed in California in the early 1980s. It found its way into Canada quite some time ago, at least nine or ten years ago. It is my understanding that there is now in excess of 100 officers trained as drug recognition experts.
The program began in British Columbia in 1995 and some drug recognition experts are now present, I believe, in most of the 10 Canadian provinces. The RCMP, in cooperation with other police agencies, is conducting a training program. We can expect these training officers to be present throughout the land within the next year or so.
That follows on a trend that was started 30 or 35 years ago with the breathalyzer. That was a very complicated instrument when it first came into play. More police officers were trained in the use of that instrument and it is quite commonplace right now.
Dealing with the whole issue of drugs and alcohol, I want to point out to the House the incidence of drug users in fatal accidents. A Quebec study determined that in excess of 30% of fatal accidents in that province involved either drugs or the combination of drugs and alcohol.
As I already pointed out, we do have the offence within the Criminal Code right now. It has been there for as long as I can remember. Driving while impaired by alcohol or a drug is currently a criminal offence and can result in severe penalties. The maximum penalty, I believe, is life imprisonment if the offence causes the death of another individual.
We talked about the tests which are the first step in the three-pronged process leading to the conviction of a person who has in his or her body a concentration of illegal drugs that is causing impairment. Police officers across Canada need this tool in their arsenal because we are ploughing new ground, so to speak. The whole scientific literature, the decided cases and the jurisprudence involving alcohol is very well established but is a little behind with respect to drugs.
In a lot of cases there is no scientific consensus of the threshold of the drug concentration in the body which causes impairment and makes driving hazardous. It becomes difficult when there are drugs mixed with alcohol, drugs mixed with other drugs, and illegal drugs mixed with prescription drugs. There are all kinds of cocktails. That is why we need this legislation. It would be so beneficial.
I urge all members of the House to support the legislation. Let us refer this important piece of legislation to committee, so that the committee, the House and subsequently Senate can move quickly on it.