Stop, all of you. It’s my turn.

The Premier is spending a lot of money—

Interjections.

This Premier is spending a lot of money and prioritizing spending a lot of money, whether it’s $225 million, whether it’s half a billion, whether it’s a billion—there are lots of numbers out there—to break a contract to get beer and booze in the convenience stores faster so that people can grab a roadie, which is the Premier’s plan, I guess, for re-election. I don’t know. That’s not something I would vote for, however.

We’re supposed to believe that impaired driving is a concern for the beer Premier. His priority is selling—what do kids call them these days? Is it a “traveller,” a “roadie,” “one for the road”—at the convenience store in cute packaging. But this government is going to rain down if you get caught.

Speaker, another part under this act—currently, under the act, a driver’s licence may be administratively suspended for increasing periods of time if the driver is found to be driving while having a specified level of alcohol or drugs in their body. The bill increases the periods of time from three days to seven days for a first suspension, and from seven days to 14 for a second suspension. So stronger, stiffer penalties—there’s no argument here.

But in the MOMS Act, didn’t we try to deter criminals with penalties? I don’t know if it has been successful. We were talking a lot in this House about stunt driving and how stiff the penalties were going to be if they got caught. So my question is, what has that looked like? I don’t know the answer, which is why I’m asking. Has that been a roaring success? Did you catch them all? Have they all stopped? Why are we here talking about stunt driving again if it was effective? Let’s do this, but what else could we be doing?

I will say, though, that it’s one thing to say we’re going to crack down, but during COVID, the government lowered the charges for impaired to help with the backlog—we’re still seeing lesser penalties for impaired. So what is the message here?

The police chiefs in discussion with the government over impaired driving downgrades—this bill proposes to get tough on impaired drivers, but when the government has a policy allowing impaired drivers to plead down to non-criminal offences under the Highway Traffic Act, avoiding criminal convictions, what message is that sending?

While the bill proposes to get tough on impaired drivers, many impaired drivers can avoid those criminal convictions thanks to this government’s policy that allows drivers to plead guilty to lesser, non-criminal charges. This policy was put in place during COVID, during a pandemic, in an effort to relieve court backlogs. The policy remains in place, as does the court backlog, resulting in even more serious criminal cases being tossed out due to unconstitutional delays, including sexual assault cases, which we have been talking a lot about in this House—not enough, but some.

The bill hopes to deter car thieves by threatening longer licence suspensions but does not address the Ford government’s failure to verify VIN identification numbers—I’ll come back to that—and it is unclear that the risk of a suspended driver’s licence would be much more of a deterrent for a prospective car thief as compared to the existing penalties under the Criminal Code. If a car thief is not deterred by the prospect of spending 10 years in prison, are they going to be deterred by the prospect of spending 10 years taking the bus? I don’t know.

There are new sections in this bill that provide for the suspension of a person’s driver’s licence if the person is convicted of motor vehicle theft under the Criminal Code and the circumstances of the theft include certain factors such as violence, weapons or the pursuit of financial or material gain. The suspension is for 10 years upon a first conviction, 15 years upon a second conviction, and there is an indefinite suspension for a third subsequent conviction.

Okay. Again, and it’s sort of the obvious question, if people aren’t deterred by a 10-year prison sentence or jail sentence, are they going to be deterred by the prospect of 10 years of public transportation, or having somebody drive them and dropping them off at the car theft location?

I have to be careful because I don’t want to mock this because I do want people to get in trouble for doing terrible things. People are living in fear of having their cars stolen. As the government has talked about—is it every 14 minutes that someone in Ontario is having their car stolen? That’s the number I’m repeating, I think, from the minister. That is not okay, but we do have to be creative in approaching this, in solving it. Because, after the fact, once you’ve had your car stolen, are there other things we could do to deter it so that you don’t get your car stolen?

The penalty is important. Again, the prevention also needs to be important, and we don’t see that. Car theft is huge. It’s also driving up insurance rates, so there’s the fear—no one needs the fear. I mean, be fearful if we’re at risk. But we’re also having people not be able to be insured when they accidentally buy a stolen vehicle because it’s been re-VINned. There are all sorts of things going on. We’re creating market conditions here in the province—or we’re allowing a very lucrative scenario for would-be car thieves to become car thieves.

Telling them that if they get caught, they’re going to lose their driver’s licence for 10 years, maybe somebody who’s a rookie—look, I don’t know anything about organized crime, but I imagine that a low-level person who wants to make a name for themselves, if they lose their licence, they’re going to get a driver, aren’t they? So if you lose your licence, someone is just going to drop you off. Then, you don’t have an extra car to deal with? I don’t know. So the logistics beg a few questions.

Interjection: Use an e-bike.