Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Brampton East.
It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. colleague on the justice committee, the member for Niagara Falls. Indeed, this is an issue which unites us and should unite us as Liberals, New Democrats, Conservatives, Greens, and members of the Bloc, because we all want to get drunk and impaired drivers off our roads. We all want strict penalties for those who commit this crime.
Watching the news yesterday and seeing the mug shot of Tiger Woods looking out at us should be a stark reminder to every one of us that this is an offence that anyone can commit. Tiger Woods had not had a sip of alcohol, according to the breath test that he did. He was overdosed on prescription medication. So many people today in this country are driving while under the influence of either alcohol, prescription medication, or other drugs that we need to make sure we have very tight legislation to both test for those impairments and to make sure that we have strong penalties to convict those who are found guilty of this crime.
We all have a personal story to tell. When I was eight years old, I had my very first experience with death as a result of a drunk driver. An eight-year-old kid on my swim team was biking home from practice, turned left on Sainte-Jean in my colleague from Lac-Saint-Louis' riding, coming back from the Pointe-Claire pool, and was hit on the overpass by a drunk driver. The other kids on the swim team and I went to his parents' house to give our condolences and that was our very first experience in dealing with any kind of death. It was caused by someone who killed an innocent eight-year-old because they were operating a motor vehicle while under the influence.
We all have stories to tell from our own lives, and we all want this to be a crime. I am looking forward, as chair of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, to sending the bill to our committee to look at the various provisions of the bill and to determine where there need to be tweaks and where there need to be improvements.
I concur with what my colleague from London previously said. If it were up to me and I was starting from scratch, there would be zero tolerance for anybody driving with any drugs or any alcohol in their system, because 0.08% is way too much for me. There should be a much lower threshold for alcohol in people's blood. Whether we create a summary offence as we are doing with drugs at a lower level, there should be a criminal offence for someone driving with less than 0.08% alcohol, and I certainly will bring that perspective.
I think the way the law works to create three levels of conviction for drug offences, a summary conviction for the lower levels and then hybrid offences for the combination of drugs and alcohol and drugs alone is a sensible approach that should also be replicated at the very least with alcohol. If people are below 0.08%, there should be some type of an offence. I am very much willing to work with my colleagues on all sides on that issue of what the right thresholds should be.
I am also very much interested in looking at the issue of mandatory screening. I personally, as an attorney, have looked at everything I could possibly read on this subject and I believe that mandatory screening is indeed a logical and constitutional measure. I think it has worked well in Europe, in Australia, and in New Zealand. The number of fatalities in Ireland dropped by almost 25% in the first year after mandatory screening was implemented. In Canada today, drunk driving is our leading criminal cause of death or injury. There were 72,000 incidents reported by police in 2015. That is 72,000 too many. If mandatory screening is going to help us get impaired drivers off the road, I am all for it.
I concur with Peter Hogg. I heard my colleague from Saskatchewan had concerns about the constitutionality of mandatory screening. I would encourage her to read the legal opinion that was issued by eminent constitutional scholar Peter Hogg to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who stated that he believed that mandatory screening would not infringe section 8 of the charter, which is the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and while it may infringe section 9 under arbitrary detention and section 10(b) under right to counsel, they would both be saved under section 1 of the charter, which guarantees that we can pass laws that reasonably limit the rights set out under the charter if they were demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
I would submit that with respect to the huge number of incidents of impaired driving that have taken place in Canada and the number of people who have been killed, harmed, and injured, making sure that we do our best to give police the tools necessary to get impaired drivers off the roads falls within that reasonableness test of section 1 to allow mandatory screening. Again, I look forward to hearing witnesses at committee who will offer testimony on that subject.
I am also pleased that we are taking away some of the loopholes that have been created over the years when it comes to impaired driving.
Members who have seen this field evolve know that the current law has become quite unwieldy and that various loopholes have been created that make absolutely no sense. Ergo, the bolus defence, which basically is when people say that they rushed to drink a lot just before driving so that they did not yet reach 0.08% by the time they stopped driving. We absolutely need to get rid of that. I completely concur with the proposal in the legislation that includes someone reaching the impairment level within two hours of ceasing to operate a motor vehicle, because that ensures that nobody can get away with saying that the person tested at 0.13% but was not drunk at all when he or she drove the car and killed someone. It makes absolutely no sense to allow it, and I am very glad we are getting rid of it.
The same is true with the intervening drink defence, another brilliant concoction of legal minds. This basically happens when someone stops driving when he or she was drunk, but then hides it by rushing to have five other drinks and down a bottle of Scotch after ceasing to operate the motor vehicle, so that the individual can get away with it by saying he or she did not drink until he or she stopped driving. I am very happy with those modifications.
I look forward to working with the member for Niagara Falls and the other members of the justice committee to make the legislation even better.