James Moore

[Gasoline Prices, May 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, this Liberal government has no grounds, as this is the same Liberal Party and this finance--

[Gasoline Prices, May 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are wondering who to blame for the price of gas, which is up to almost a dollar a litre. The answer is obvious: the Liberal government.

A study by the Minister of the Environment says that the tax increase required to achieve the Kyoto protocol objectives would double the price of gas from roughly 54¢ a litre to $1.40 a litre.

Is that not the true Liberal agenda: to have Canadians pay $1.40 for a litre of gas? Is that not the true Liberal agenda?

[Criminal Code, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, if I misrepresented the direct statement from the member for London West, I apologize. That was not my intention.

When it is tougher to convict people for drunk driving than it is to convict them of murder, as the former attorney general for Manitoba has told this place, that is a serious problem. That is a red flag that we should all notice about the system. When we find out that there are people who have been convicted of 19 drunk driving offences and they are still behind the wheel, our heads start to spin.

It is a question of odds. How many times do people have to drive drunk before they are caught? How many times are drunk drivers charged before they are convicted? If only 11% of impaired drivers taken to B.C. hospitals were convicted and drivers who have been convicted 16 times are still behind the wheel, that just shows how strong the odds are in a drunk driver's favour.

The government tells us that roughly 71% of drunk drivers were convicted, but if it told us that only 71% of murderers were convicted, the country would enact tougher laws. A 71% conviction rate against people who were charged with drunk driving is not good enough, especially when the biggest single reason why they were not convicted was not that they were innocent, but that they managed to exclude the evidence that proved that they were in fact drunk.

Research has shown that the vast majority of drunk driving trips, 87% of them, are taken by just 5% of drivers. Drunk drivers get behind the wheel of a car 12.5 million times every year in Canada. Only about 70,000 charges of drunk driving are laid per year in these car trips. Of these, 71%, or roughly 49,700 are convicted. That is 49,700 convictions for 12.5 million offences. That is a true conviction rate of roughly 0.4%. Like I said, the odds are very much in a drunk driver's favour.

Bill C-452 is an attempt to swing the balance back. When drunk drivers are pulled over, they are given a blood roadside breathalyzer test and if they have a blood alcohol concentration, BAC, of over 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood, or .08, they are charged.

Then at trial the accused typically relies on one of two defences: the Carter defence or the last drink defence. The Carter defence relies on experts to rebut the evidence produced by the breathalyzer. The last drink defence claims that the accused was at a party, quickly chugged three or four drinks and then got into the car to get home before getting over .08 alcohol absorbed in the blood rate.

Bill C-452 aims at dealing with both offences. On the Carter defence, subclause 1(4) of C-452 introduces a new paragraph to the Criminal Code that would require any accused wishing to rebut the breathalyzer evidence to show on a balance of probabilities that: first, the analyses were improperly made; second, the procedures were not followed; third, the equipment malfunctioned; or fourth, the accused consumed alcohol after the alleged offence but before taking the samples.

The legal director for Mothers Against Drunk Driving Canada, Professor Robert Solomon of the law faculty of University of Western Ontario, supports Bill C-452. He writes that requiring the accused to establish on balance of probabilities that the breathalyzer result is inaccurate is no different to requiring him to prove claims that he was not in the driver's seat, as per the existing paragraph 258 (1)(a) of the Criminal Code.

On the last drink defence, subclause 1(2) replaces subparagraph 258(1)(c)(ii) of the Criminal Code with new text increasing the time allowed for the taking of breath or blood samples from an accused to three hours from the current two hours. It would extend the window from which we can catch people for breaking the law. Here, Professor Solomon notes that this change is entirely consistent with the three hour period in which a police officer may demand a sample under subsection 245(3) and describes as inexplicable Parliament's failure to make corresponding changes to that section, as this bill does.

When this bill was first debated on March 24, some Liberal MPs pointed to its shortcomings and proposed to vote against sending it to committee. It is precisely this Liberal focus on the shortcomings of legislation proposed by other parties that is paralleled in law where 29% of persons charged of drunk driving are acquitted, not because of their innocence, but because of artful reliance on technicalities. That is just not good enough.

Bill C-452 is a serious attempt to deal with a serious problem. Drinking and driving is an issue that is a concern for all Canadians. I encourage all members of the House to vote in favour of sending Bill C-452 to committee for examination to strengthen our law, protect families, protect kids, and get in their face and tell drunk drivers that what they are doing will not be tolerated in this new and better Canada.

[Criminal Code, May 11th, 2004]

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.

[Criminal Code, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I notice an irony here. The NDP were chiding the official opposition, the Conservative Party, for not having speakers on a supply day motion that is non-votable, just a rhetorical gabfest in here right before an election campaign. Here we have Bill C-452 that will actually save lives if it is put in place and there is no New Democrat here to speak about it.

[Supply, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I do not believe that George Bush is actually the premier of British Columbia. Perhaps the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle could address his answer to the question about the province of British Columbia for once.

[Supply, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly agreed with one thing in the comments of my friend from Regina—Qu'Appelle. That is the idea that the fiscal reality that came from Ottawa that choked off health care spending in the mid-1990s was certainly a detriment to the delivery of health care services in this country.

There is a flip side to that coin which is that the delivery of health care services in Canada is provided by the provincial governments. We all know that. One side of this equation is that on the one hand the cut in transfers to the provinces by the Liberals in Ottawa certainly damaged health care delivery services.

As a member of Parliament and a citizen of British Columbia I have to say that the NDP has far from solid ground to stand on when it comes to chiding other levels of government about responsible fiscal management and what that means to the delivery of health care.

The member talked accurately about the $250 million sponsorship program and how that money might have gone to help health care. I agree with him on that but what was missing from his rant was his equal condemnation of the $500 million wasted on the fast ferry project in British Columbia. That money could have gone a very long way to helping the people who are dying while on waiting lists in the province of British Columbia. The quality of life and standard of living is being damaged in the province of British Columbia because of the dramatic fiscal mismanagement of his own party, the NDP.

The cutbacks that came from Ottawa did not help, but it is utter hypocrisy for any New Democrat to stand in the House and say that the NDP has solid ground to stand on. The NDP has utterly no ground to stand on when it comes to proper fiscal management, when it devastated my province of British Columbia and caused a total financial meltdown, that caused people's lives to be in jeopardy in British Columbia.

[Supply, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have a quote from a Liberal member of Parliament. The Prime Minister has authorized this person to become a Liberal member of Parliament, a Liberal member of Parliament sitting on that side of the House; this person is going to be a Liberal candidate in the coming campaign and this person wrote the following newspaper article when he joined the Liberal caucus. He said:

One option the provinces should consider is to allow private facilities to operate completely independently from the public system. The money to pay for these services would come from private hands, not the government.

That was said by a Liberal member of Parliament.

I want to know from this member, is the current Prime Minister going to sign this Liberal candidate's nomination papers, yes or no--

[Airline Industry, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, as the cost of fuel goes up, it is not just consumers and drivers who are hit. It is also the air industry that is hit. Fourteen per cent of Air Canada's overall net costs is the cost of fuel and this government is doing nothing whatsoever about it. We have heard nothing from the Minister of Finance and nothing from the Minister of Transport at all.

Over 30,000 jobs are at stake with Air Canada and this government is completely silent. It is silent on excise fuel taxes and it is doing nothing about eliminating the air tax and nothing at all about landing fees.

Why does the government not have anything at all to say about helping the air industry by lowering fuel taxes so that more people will fly and the air industry will be safe and ready to go for the future?

[The Environment, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps I can get the environment minister to answer a question here. Almost half the cost of a litre of gasoline is taxation. Half that taxation comes to Ottawa. Virtually none of it goes back to municipalities at all.

What I want to know from the Minister of the Environment, the minister for Victoria, is this. Does he not believe that perhaps giving some of those gas tax dollars back to the city of Victoria might help it clean up the over 80 million litres a day of raw sewage pumping into the environment minister's own riding?