Angry Plante blasts CAQ’s cannabis bill
After their disagreement over immigration and the proposed Pink Line métro, Montreal and the new Coalition Avenir Québec government have a new spat on their hands: cannabis. In deciding to increase the legal age to buy and consume pot from 18 to 21 and banning the smoking of cannabis in public places, including on the street, in parks and at summer festivals, the CAQ has ruffled the feathers of the more liberal cosmopolitan metropolis again. What the provincial government wants to stop from becoming commonplace (the CAQ’s word) is just that for many Montrealers who welcomed the previous government’s approach to pot even if the Liberal law was considered the most conservative in Canada.
The CAQ’s vision goes even further down that path; trying to stop what they think is a runaway train or, in the CAQ’s parlance, when it comes to the Liberals: laxness. “They are saying to youth, go and get your stuff from organized crime,” an angry Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante told reporters Wednesday responding to the CAQ government’s Bill 2 tightening the regulation of cannabis. “Sixty per cent of Montrealers are renters,” she added, referring to the existing Liberal law’s provision allowing landlords to forbid cannabis smoking in leases. “The message they are getting is cannabis is legal but you cannot consume it at home or in public spaces.” Yet a little over one month after marijuana consumption became legal in Canada, the city has not seen any problems with people consuming in public places, she said. That all will change with the CAQ’s bill, which takes away the right of cities to decide in which public areas consumption will be allowed, a move Plante said is a direct attack on the principle of municipal autonomy. And she said it is outrageous that the city might have to devote police resources to patrolling parks for pot instead of fight real crime. Far off in Quebec City on Wednesday, the man responsible for the bill, Quebec Junior Health and Social Services Minister Lionel Carmant, the former head or neurology at Ste-Justine Hospital, was in the hot seat. He told reporters that Montreal renters whose leases prohibit smoking have a choice when it comes to consuming in the privacy of their own homes, since you will no longer be able to smoke on the street or in the park: edibles or oils. As for public places where people can consume, he said the previous bill resulted in a hodgepodge with the rules different from one city to the next. “Now we’ve made it stable throughout the different cities so there won’t be any confusion for consumers, police forces or anybody,” he said. “The new law simplifies.” While the previous Liberal minister for cannabis, Lucie Charlebois, considered the cannabis question a matter of public health, the CAQ said it does too. But Carmant rejected the idea that raising the age to 21 will drive youth back into the hands of organized crime. “I refute this fatalist argument,” he said, insisting his new public education programs will make as much of a difference as they did in curbing youth smoking. “We produced a compromise between science and social acceptability,” he said. “Had I been the only one to decide I would maybe have set the age at 25.” To drive home the point, Carmant, who held his news conference in a Quebec City elementary school where students stood smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk, brought in a fleet of doctors to talk about the known dangers cannabis poses to young brains. The list included the heads of Quebec’s medical specialists, the general practitioners, the association of Quebec’s psychiatrists and the Fédération des comités de parents du Québec. At hearings into the old Liberal bill last session, all four groups called for age 21 and tough restrictions. And Premier François Legault waded into the debate himself during a brief encounter with reporters shortly after the bill was tabled in the National Assembly. “I want to send a clear message to all young people,” Legault said. “Please don’t use pot. It’s not good. It’s dangerous. “I’m against (pot smoking) and I want to be very clear. Please, young people, don’t do it.” The bill, which will be the toughest in Canada with Quebec the only province to opt for age 21, is not law yet. It has to be examined by a committee of the National Assembly some time in 2019. Besides forbidding cannabis consumption in CEGEPs and university-level institutions — except university residences — it bans consumption on public roads, parks, playgrounds, sports facilities, bus shelters, tents and terraces. It also prohibits the Société québécoise du cannabis from operating a retail outlet within 250 metres of any college or university (150 metres in Montreal). The previous Liberal bill only specified elementary and high schools. The government was nevertheless criticized by the opposition parties. Noting 31 per cent of Quebecers aged 18 to 24 consume cannabis, Liberal health critic André Fortin said the bill will drive youth away from SQC stores exposing them to black market pot with much higher levels of THC. “The government has to stop pretending it cannot hear the experts,” he said. “Organized crime is delighted with this announcement,” said Parti Québécois interim leader Pascal Bérubé, adding the bill puts the CAQ’s ideology ahead of common sense. “It is an ideological bill which smacks of prohibition,” added Québec solidaire MNA Sol Zanetti. “We are far from the CAQ’s pragmatism. Let’s stop putting our heads in the sand.” By slapping restrictions on where Quebecers can consume, the CAQ is trying to do indirectly what it can’t do directly: ban cannabis, he said.