Mr. Speaker, as the justice critic for the official opposition, I have the honour of rising in the House on this Friday afternoon to speak to Bill C-590 on behalf of both my riding of Gatineau and my colleagues in the New Democratic Party. First of all, I would like to say that we too support Bill C-590, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (blood alcohol content). This bill seeks to establish more severe penalties for offences where the offender has a blood alcohol content that exceeds 160 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood and where driving under the influence results in serious consequences, such as bodily harm or even death.

I heard a number of my colleagues in the House mention that impaired driving is still a scourge even today in 2015. It is still a problem. People go out and they still think that they can drive a vehicle, which can actually be considered a weapon. A vehicle can cause considerable damage. Nevertheless, some people seem to think that they can get behind the wheel of their vehicle after they have been drinking, no matter how many drinks they have had.

The New Democratic Party obviously has a zero tolerance policy for impaired driving. We believe that even more can be done. Members may ask if I think that Bill C-590 will solve this problem. When members introduce a bill, they usually want to make sure that it accomplishes what it is supposed to. In this case, the member obviously wants to send a clear message, but I hope that the bill will do more than that because it does not seem that people really understand. There are many repeat drunk drivers who unfortunately do not seem to care about the Criminal Code.

Is Bill C-590 going to make every single Canadian understand the concept of zero tolerance once and for all? I highly doubt it. First of all, I doubt that this bill is that well-thought-out. Whether the Conservative member introducing this bill likes it or not, it definitely should have been fine-tuned a little more. For now, with this parliamentary session coming to an end and time running out, it is a half measure. Clearly, the person who introduced the bill had good intentions in relation to its objective, but he is not a legal expert. Few witnesses appeared before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to talk to us about Bill C-590, so the member left many questions unanswered.

We realize, and people from the Justice Department also realize, that this bill has a few gaps in it that should have been fixed before it was introduced. This is perhaps another reason why these kinds of files do not usually come from backbenchers, but rather the government, because they involve complex policies. Certain sections of the Criminal Code can lead to disputes as well as some confusion.

The main confusion here relates to a question I asked my colleague across the way when he first introduced the bill. When most offenders are first stopped by a police officer on the side of the road, they are asked to take a breathalyzer test. Knowing the penalties for someone who has more than 160 millilitres of alcohol in their blood, would the person not be better off to simply refuse to take the breathalyzer? Of course, refusing the test carries its own penalties, but, Mr. Speaker, since you are a lawyer like me, you know that those penalties are much less harsh than the penalties that would apply under Bill C-590 if it passes.

Someone who is very drunk would certainly have greater incentive to refuse to take a breathalyzer test, rather than giving the Crown evidence that they are above the new limit that comes with this new sentence.

As justice critic for the New Democratic Party, I have always believed that when we are drafting bills it is not a matter of taking a tough-on-crime approach—as the Conservatives love to say—but a matter of taking an intelligent approach. We need to ensure that the measures we take will truly achieve what we claim they will.

For example, if Bill C-590 passes, we could see games being played. As I mentioned in committee, in January or February this year, a judge in the riding of Gatineau dismissed some 30 impaired driving cases because the cases had not been tried within a reasonable amount of time. This made the news, and many people were shocked.

On occasion I go through my riding to talk about drunk driving and how, despite all of the awareness campaigns and the harsher sentences in recent years, people still do not seem to get the message. The problem is that the Conservatives have made all kinds of amendments to the Canadian Criminal Code.

Criminal justice experts, such as crown prosecutors, defence attorneys, police forces, judges and all stakeholders, tell me that there are so many delays in these cases that the Crown and the defence end up playing games.

Since sentences are more severe, the defence is less likely to negotiate a plea bargain with the Crown and more likely to go to court in all cases to avoid certain new sentences. This creates a tremendous backlog in our courthouses. Gatineau is not alone in this. We see it all across Quebec and Canada.

This backlog should not be the one thing preventing us from taking action. However, as we in the New Democratic Party often say, if the government wants to introduce new sentences and a new way of doing things, it has to give the police the tools they need. For example, there should be more officers on the ground so that offenders can be arrested. The government also has to ensure that our justice system can handle these people and hold their trials within a reasonable period of time instead of allowing unreasonable delays due to a shortage of judges, crown prosecutors and courtrooms.

Taken together, these elements result in an extremely dysfunctional system. Courts are begging for help, but nobody is responding. All the government does is give them new laws that they have to adapt to and interpret within the context of other laws. This complicates legal situations and sometimes results in the opposite of what the Conservatives are trying to achieve. Lots of people manage to slip through the cracks in the system. How many times have I read in the paper that somebody has been caught for the fifth time and been sentenced to the equivalent of a slap on the wrist?

One serious problem that the Conservatives have not yet fixed is the fact that criminal records are not always up to date because the RCMP lacks resources. We know there is a way to emphasize recidivism before the courts, but the criminal record and the history have to be properly identified. If they are not, the Crown cannot work miracles. It cannot say that a particular conviction has not yet been entered on the record but that the individual was convicted in such and such a year. That is not how it works. Sometimes there are more basic problems to fix.

This will not stop us from supporting Bill C-590, which is well-intentioned. Unfortunately, it certainly is not the answer to all our problems when it comes to zero tolerance for drunk driving.

Françoise Boivin

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