Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak in support of Motion No. 148, which reads:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government should recognize the importance of educating Canadians about the consequences of impaired driving due to alcohol, drugs, fatigue or distraction, which, each year, destroys the lives and health of thousands of Canadians, by designating the third week of March, each year, National Impaired Driving Prevention Week.
This is a very timely and important issue that I believe all my colleagues in this House should be seized of, and I thank the Liberal member for Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel for his dedication to this matter, and diligence in bringing this motion to the House.
For a long time, we have known about the consequences of drinking and driving, thanks to advocates like MADD Canada, and police and community initiatives. Drunk drivers have now become the pariahs of society, and rightfully so.
Statistics suggest the efforts made in the fight against impaired driving have saved 30,589 Canadian lives since 1982. Despite this number of lives saved, Transport Canada reports there has been a total of 39,487 alcohol-related fatalities on Canadian roads since 1982.
Impaired driving was the leading cause of driving injuries and deaths in Canada up until a few short years ago. In the fall of 2009, a milestone in human history occurred and slipped by almost unnoticed. For the first time, cell phones around the world were exchanging more data than phone calls. The preference for texting and emailing on cell phones has risen steadily, year by year, since 2009. Alongside this rise, so too has the incidence of injuries and deaths from distracted driving.
The message is clear. In my home province of Ontario, one person is injured or killed in a distracted driving collision every 30 minutes. Drivers who use hand-held devices are four times more likely to get into crashes that are serious enough to cause injury. Even when drivers use hands-free devices, they are less aware of the traffic around them. They tend to react more slowly, and in fact may not detect the danger at all, failing to see up to 50% of the information in their driving environment.
Drivers who text are 23 times more likely to be involved in a crash. Distracted driving is now the number one risk on Canadian roads, with distraction being a contributing factor in 93% of rear-end collisions. A study found that in 80% of collisions, the driver had looked away from the road three seconds prior to the crash. At 90 kilometres an hour, checking a text for five seconds means that a driver will have travelled the length of a football field blindfolded.
Distraction is a factor in about four million motor vehicle collisions in North America every year, including in 10% of fatal crashes, 18% of injury crashes, and 16% of all police reported motor vehicle traffic crashes. Almost half of all people killed in collisions where a teenager was distracted were teenagers themselves. No text, no tweet, no call, no post is worth a life.
In my riding, on October 24, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry held an enforcement blitz on Highway 35, just north of Norland, in the city of Kawartha Lakes. Conservation officers said the road check focused primarily on moose hunters travelling back from their camps in the Minden and Bancroft areas. Numerous drivers throughout the evening failed to stop even though officers were holding stop signs, were wearing reflective gear, and had two vehicles with emergency lights flashing. One driver blamed their dog as the distraction, while another, completely oblivious, slammed on the brakes at the last minute and skidded right by the officers.
It takes just a few seconds of distraction to kill a father, mother, aunt, or uncle working on the side of the road. Earlier this month at the end of a province-wide campaign, Vancouver police were astounded after pulling over a driver with a tablet and phone taped to their steering wheel. During the campaign Vancouver Police issued nearly 2,000 distracted driving tickets in one month.
Since the beginning of January, Montreal police have handed out more than 10,000 citations to motorists for using their cell phones while driving. According to police, distracted driving remains the number one cause of collisions on roads in Quebec. From 2012 to 2016, 32.9% of fatal crashes and 41.7% of collisions leading to serious injuries in Quebec were linked to distracted driving.
In Edmonton, distracted driving infractions were up nearly 60% in the first quarter of this year.
In Saskatchewan, during the first two months of the year, distracted driving charges were up a staggering 197% over the same period in 2016. The year before, 5,700 collisions were linked to distracted driving, resulting in 36 deaths, over 800 injuries, and thousands of families in Saskatchewan whose lives have forever been changed.
Last year more than 140 Nova Scotians were killed or involved in serious collisions due to distracted driving.
In my home province of Ontario, it is much the same. The Ontario Provincial Police have said that in its jurisdiction, car crashes caused by distracted driving have come to outnumber those caused by intoxication or speeding. As of September, 1,158 collisions were due to drunk drivers, 4,700 were due to speeding, and just fewer than 6,400 were due to distracted driving.
Tragically, deaths related to this driving epidemic are on the rise. As of Aug. 28, 47 people had died because of distracted driving, which is a 16% increase compared to the same time last year. Another 26 lives were taken by distracted drivers before the close of 2016, making it the fourth year in a row that distracted driving led to the highest number of deaths on OPP-controlled roads.
Over the summer, Ontario highways have been the stage for a series of horrific and deadly vehicle accidents due to distracted driving. On May 11, four people died and two others were seriously injured in a seven-vehicle pileup on Highway 401 east of Kingston, Ontario. The driver of a transport truck approached a construction zone and failed to stop, crashing into vehicles at the end of the traffic queue. The impact was such that a vehicle was crushed and became engulfed in flames, killing the family trapped inside.
On July 27, in Georgina, on Highway 48, not too far from my riding, a dump truck hauling gravel collided with five vehicles, having failed to slow down for stopped traffic. Two died at the scene, and two others, including a 10-year-old boy, were airlifted with critical injuries.
Three days later, on July 30, in Chatham, a six-vehicle crash killed a mother and her son and seriously injured several others when a transport truck hit their trailer from behind, crushing it. The truck then mounted their pickup and pushed them down the road and into five other vehicles before stopping. The driver of the truck was not paying attention and did not even see the stopped traffic. The family was on their way home from a camping trip.
Just this past Halloween night, a chain reaction of collisions caused a 14-vehicle pileup that killed three people and left Highway 400, about an hour north of Toronto, littered with tangled, twisted metal and a series of explosions that melted the vehicles right to the asphalt. While the investigation is ongoing, driver distraction is the leading theory for this incident.
In another incident, which I fear will not be the last, a native of my town of Lindsay, Robert Griffioen, while visiting family in Oklahoma City, in the United States, was out for a run on August 20. He was killed instantly by a teenager who fell asleep going 80 kilometres per hour through a red light. Robert grew up in Lindsay and attended Heritage Christian School and St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Secondary School. He loved sports, especially running. He was also an army cadet and a reservist. He loved his community and he loved his country. He leaves behind a grieving widow and a 5-year-old son who miss him each and every day.
The time is now. We cannot wait any longer. We need to raise awareness. We need to get this message out. Distracted driving kills. It maims. It destroys lives and tears families apart.
Next year on Canada Day, though, 220 days from now, the government intends to legalize marijuana. This raises some very serious concerns for Canadians from coast to coast and the police officers sworn to protect them. The irony is that this motion is raised by a member of the same government bent on speeding up legalization before the guidelines and the public education are in place. I do not really understand it. We need to make our roads safer, not more dangerous, and we need to do that now. We all know that education is the key.
I am pleased to take a stand and commit my support for this motion against distracted driving.