NEW WEED RULES BY NEXT SPRING
On a day when cannabis culture is celebrated, Ottawa announces next step in the march to pot legalization
OTTAWA — As thousands of people were preparing to gather in the sunshine on the lawn of Parliament Hill for the annual celebration of cannabis culture — and smoke a little, too, in plain view of the police — the Liberal government formally announced its plans to legalize and regulate marijuana.
“We know it is impossible to arrest our way out of this problem,” Health Minister Jane Philpott said Wednesday in New York during an impassioned speech to the United Nations General Assembly at a special session on global drug policy.
The timing of the announcement on April 20 — or 420, as pot activists and connoisseurs call this calendar day — was a coincidence, more than one government source insisted, but still a fitting day to reveal plans to make good on a major campaign promise to legalize, regulate and restrict access to marijuana.
“Our approach to drugs must be comprehensive, collaborative and compassionate. It must respect human rights while promoting shared responsibility, and it must have a firm scientific foundation,” Philpott said in her prepared remarks.
The legislation to be introduced next spring and the regulations that follow it will be designed to keep marijuana away from both children and organized crime, said Philpott, whose speech drew upon her experience as a doctor in Africa as she spoke about the impacts of ineffective drug policies.
“While this plan challenges the status quo in many countries, we are convinced it is the best way to protect our youth while enhancing public safety,” Philpott said.
“Canada will continue to modernize our approach to drug policy. Building on our successes, such as (safe injection sites), our work will embrace upstream prevention, compassionate treatment and harm re- duction,” she said.
The Liberal government will be launching a task force within the next few weeks to closely examine and evaluate every aspect of their goal to legalize, regulate and restrict access to marijuana.
“We will task them with a very specific set of questions around how it will be produced, where it will be accessed and sold and around questions of taxation,” Philpott told the CBC in an interview from New York.
The draft regulations, which will govern everything from standards for packaging and labelling to exactly how to prevent it from being sold to minors, will be open to comment from Canadians.
Clive Weighill, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, said he hopes his organization will be invited to sit on the task force.
The current period, however, leaves the police in a bit of a “grey zone” — police know marijuana will be legalized eventually, but they also need to enforce the law as it stands now.
“It’s a tough time for us to be in right now, because people are expecting it to be legalized. I’ve never in my career come up against a law that we know is imminently going to be changed and is causing this much consternation,” said Weighill.
“We’re trying to work with the Canadian public on this. We understand it is going to be legalized, but we really are in a grey zone right now and we are really just asking the public to bear with us,” he said.
“We are going to do our job and we’ll get through it.”
That strange interim period had NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair calling for immediate decriminalization, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rejected as irresponsible.
“The fact of the matter is decriminalization, as the member proposes, actually gives a legal stream of income to criminal organizations. That is not what anyone wants in this country,” Trudeau said during question period.
Quebec Conservative MP Gerard Deltell, however, said the Liberals were the ones putting children and youth at risk.
“That’s one of the worst things you can to the Canadian youth, to open the door to marijuana,” he said.