Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate this opportunity to comment on this legislation. I want to start by saying that I’m pleased to see this legislation come forward. This legislation does begin to address the many, many constituent concerns that have been raised from my Weledeh constituents who have had near misses as they’re walking along the road, some in vehicles. This is a real concern and I believe this is a sincere effort on the side of the department to address this.
Unfortunately, however -- and I cite largely the material provided by the department here -- this doesn’t go far enough. Citing from these documents, the first thing I want to note is that a consistent message in the literature is that hands-free cell phone use when driving is no safer than handheld use.
Parsing into that a little bit and looking at the credibility of the research behind that statement, I want to note that the Canadian Automobile Association, the CAA, has argued that it is not enough to ban drivers from using handheld cell phones, because research shows that hands-free devices are just as dangerous. My concern here is that our public will have a false sense of security. I want to basically let them know that this is a good start but they cannot afford to let their guard down when they’re out walking, because of this legislation. There’s no evidence that this goes far enough.
Another example, the most recent study published on January 29, 2010, by the U.S. Highway Loss Data Institute highlights the concern that handheld cell phone bans offer little real safety benefit. The department has also provided me with information research from the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety which has shown that drivers have a false perception that hands-free devices are safer. They point out that the conversation is the primary distraction and not the device itself.
Complicating the use or the matter of parsing this out is the lack of statistics respecting how effective the law is in reducing the number of jurisdictions. So whereas research shows this it’s very difficult to demonstrate it on the basis of statistics, that’s largely because there are no jurisdictions currently collecting specific data on collisions caused by cell
phone use. I want to acknowledge that that is a challenge. What is tragic here is that I have not yet heard the Minister commit to any effort to gather statistics for the basis of an evaluation on which this legislation could be improved, if the evaluation demonstrates it needs to be. Having made this point, I want to ask the Minister again, will the department collect the appropriate statistics to enable them to evaluate the effect of this legislation and return to it to bump it up as that evaluation indicates.