Justice committee  If I understand what you're talking about, it is that their defence is that they consumed after driving.

Justice committee  The challenge, I think, for the police officers, in terms of being able to deal with that offence, is that they're not necessarily aware of that until the person gives evidence at trial. There's not necessarily disclosure or awareness beforehand that this defence is going to be raised.

Justice committee  There are certainly those types of issues. There's the last drink defence. There are different concerns around those types of technical defences or behaviours. The difficulty is in coming up with a solution that doesn't create a whole host of other problems.

Justice committee  Potentially, yes.

Justice committee  I think the reality is, and I'm certainly not a lawyer, but I think the courts recognize, that the technology removes the doubt and human frailty. So the more we can rely on technology to provide accuracy, whether it's on impaired driving or whether it's DNA, in the long run it's an investigative aid and in fact reduces the time that's applied otherwise for investigation.

Justice committee  No, not at all. I mean, really, we're discussing the goal here, which is to reduce the number of impaired drivers on the road. It's also the police officers who are going to these horrific accidents and seeing the consequences of people making the wrong choices.

Justice committee  In our view, if you look at the evidence from some of the other jurisdictions that have random breath testing—most of the European Union countries now have it, as the EU has recommended that it be applied to all their member states—the deterrent effect will in fact address the workload problem.

Justice committee  I was probably the most surprised when somebody would blow under. Sometimes the symptoms of a less experienced driver blowing only 0.90 and being behind the wheel of a car were quite frightening. So it does vary, based on a person's size and also their tolerance. I did about 400 tests over 20 years ago when I was a breathalyzer technician.

Justice committee  From our perspective one of the first issues is streamlining the approval process so that as the new technologies come forward, we have the opportunity to get them into the system quicker. I don't believe the equipment that is currently generally being used in Canada will provide a roadside reading, but that technology is available for the roadside screening devices.

Justice committee  Regarding the 0.05, I think you can assure the brewer in your riding that the 0.05, which, as we discussed earlier, would effectively be enforced at 0.07, given the margin of error that is used by the courts, for most people--given that essentially each person is going to burn off about 0.015 milligrams or percent per hour--it's equivalent to having roughly five drinks in their system plus any drinks that they actually burned off for the period of time that they were drinking.

Justice committee  I was going to say it takes three hours to process at the time, and—

Justice committee  Then if you add in the time of attendance in court and everything else, it goes up exponentially. In fact the London, Ontario, police did a workload analysis and a productivity analysis of the time spent on these types of investigations, and over the last 20 years the amount of time spent doing the paperwork and complying with all legislative requirements has gone up incredibly.

Justice committee  Again, I'm not a scientist and I don't profess to be an expert in this, and certainly I think it's going to vary for individual characteristics and individual people, but certainly the concerns are that the person is probably a little bit more happy-go-lucky, is going to be less attentive to detail, maybe fumbling for a cigarette when he or she should be paying attention to what's ahead on the road, cranking up the radio, mildly euphoric, and as you go up that scale, presents a higher risk than somebody else.

Justice committee  One of the recommendations we have is that if there's a motor vehicle accident, that should be adequate reason for an officer to administer a random roadside test, as opposed to having to go through the process of collecting the evidence to get that test, along with the roadside testing.

Justice committee  Okay. This morning we discussed the issue of 0.05 versus 0.08. When I was a Breathalyzer technician, we would have a session as part of our training where we were all taken into a room and we would measure alcohol in scientific measuring beakers. Each day, different students would be the drinkers and other students would be testing them.