Justice committee  We will both present, Mr. Chair.

Justice committee  Once again the Criminal Lawyers' Association is honoured to have the opportunity of appearing before this committee to help with the very important work that it does. With me today is Jonathan Rosenthal. He is a lawyer of almost 20 years' experience in defending drinking-and-dr

Justice committee  I just wanted to say one thing. Mr. Lee's example demonstrates the illogic of it. You're in possession because you didn't use the drug, right? The point is that if the whole point of the section is to stop people from driving while drugged, possession is actually counter-intuiti

Justice committee  I guess it begs the question of why we have a criminal offence of impaired driving or drinking and driving. It's to prevent the risk of harm that anyone who has consumed alcohol and then drives poses to other drivers. The whole idea of the “two-drink defence” or “last drink defen

Justice committee  Let me simply say that I don't think I can speak to that. Something like 34 jurisdictions in the U.S. have the DRE approach. They're 25 and zero, or something like that, in terms of the challenges, but my understanding is that you are quite right, that almost universally they hav

Justice committee  One of the things about DRE analysis is that it has to be administered almost perfectly by the officer. That's one of the reasons they talk about having to videotape the process. Forget about the response of the test subject, if the officer doesn't administer the test in the perf

Justice committee  No. In individual cases they still do challenge the reliability, very much so. In fact, they have full-blown jury trials on this stuff in the U.S., but on a case-by-case basis. That's where the American defence part takes a run at the reliability of this. It is not to say the law

Justice committee  Except for one thing: there's no evidence before you that the guilty people are being acquitted because of the current law you have. In other words, if there's a body of social science that says--

Justice committee  Because you'd have reports by crowns or police. And I'm not talking about people who get off on a technicality. I'm talking about people to whom the judge has said, “I believe you are not guilty.” Where's the suggestion that people are coming before you and saying that we have

Justice committee  You made two points, sir, about surely we must be able to come up with a system where we can get to the blood test and that would provide reliable evidence of conviction and isn't that going to essentially help reduce the incidence of drug-driving through the deterrence. I want

Justice committee  I think that question is actually aimed at me. Sir, it's not that we're suggesting that people should smoke and drive. The concern about section 253.1 isn't about using drugs while driving, it's just while having them in your pocket. As far as driving while you're impaired by a

Justice committee  Mr. Chair, on behalf of the Criminal Lawyers' Association, I want to thank this committee for the opportunity to comment on this very important issue. It's personally a privilege and a pleasure to once again appear before this committee. My name is Paul Burstein. I'm the immedi

Justice committee  The problem with trying to do something for victims of mentally ill persons or mentally disordered offenders is that they start being victims long before an actual offence has been committed. If you look at the Crocker study, the vast majority of actual victims, that is the peopl

Justice committee  Other than being invited here, no.

Justice committee  That's an excellent question. Part of the concern of the high-risk offender designation is that it really is overly broad. By incorporating the definition of “serious personal injury offence” in, and I can't remember the section, but it's the one that's in proposed section 202.