What a rush
It’s some of the most significant legislation to be addressed by the House of Assembly in years, and it’s going to be dealt with in days. Here’s provincial Finance Minister Tom Osborne on Monday: “This legalization of cannabis for recreational use is one of the most significant policy shifts for Canada since we joined Confederation.”
In all, four bills will make their way through the House of Assembly — a House of Assembly which is supposed to close for the summer tomorrow.
You have to wonder if the legislation will get the serious, thoughtful and thorough review it deserves.
Here’s Justice Minister Andrew Parsons answering the opposition’s question on why the government waited to introduce the legislation: “Because if we did it earlier they’d say we rushed it.”
Saving legislation till the end of a session is a tried and true method to get it to move quickly through the legislative process. But haste makes waste — the House is supposed to review legislation, not merely rubber-stamp it.
As past experience in this province shows, haste (and a lack of proper review) sometimes ends up with the government doing things like accidentally expropriating a contaminated paper mill site it had no intention of seizing.
Even now, a crucial part of the province’s cannabis legislation is still up in the air. While the legislation has been introduced to the House of Assembly, regulations under that legislation have not been completed. Here’s Minister Osborne again: “(Officials) with the Department of Justice and Public Safety, the Department of Finance and the Newfoundland Liquor Corporation are working now to finalize the regulations. Those regulations will be in place in due course, once this legislation is passed, but as we are debating the legislation, the regulations are being worked on.”
In other words, there’s still a lot of work to be done, and not much time to do it. The current date for legalization is supposed to be the beginning of July, though the federal government is expected to delay that.
Politicians, caught up in the gamesmanship of party politics, sometimes forget that the end result is supposed to be creating and passing the best legislation possible. It’s not about scoring political points.
Yet the political games are clearly afoot. When an opposition member asked if people in personal care homes would be allowed to grow marijuana, Minister Parsons couldn’t resist belittling the question, quipping, “They’re certainly asking the pressing questions today.”
He then admitted that the opposition is asking about rules that haven’t even been contemplated yet. “But as it relates to personal care homes, we’ll have to see what the qualification relates to, and again all of these will be tested as we move forward.”
That’s a fistful of words. Here’s another: a stitch in time saves nine.