Two years later, has Canada kept its many promises?
OTTAWA» When Robert was 18, he was arrested by Montreal’s police for possession of a small amount of hashish, an event that would upend his young life.
The charge brought him 30 days in jail, and the conviction ended his part-time job as a translator.
“Back then, you smoke a joint, you would get arrested,” said Robert, who asked that only his first name be used because of the continuing stigma of his criminal record. “Then the cops would put you in a car, then pull over and give you a couple of shots in the head. You get slapped around just because of smoking.”
His arrest in 1988 as a teenager marked the start of a long, unhappy history with Canada’s legal system, with his first jail stint opening up a new trade: burglary.
“It was like school,” said Robert, who spent a total of 14 years locked up, divided between convictions on drug offenses and thefts to buy more drugs.
The recreational use of cannabis was legalized in Canada slightly more than two years ago, and when the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made its legalization pitch to the country, it was stories like Robert’s — a life derailed by a possession charge — that most resonated with many Canadians.
Legalization, the government vowed, would address the inequalities in a criminal justice system where marijuana and hashish penalties and prosecutions had fallen disproportionately on marginalized communities, particularly Black Canadians and Indigenous people.
That promise largely has been kept, with legalization essentially ending what Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who studies race and policing in Canada, called the “heavily racialized” arrests for marijuana possession.
But some other key promises, and hopes, that came with Canada being the first industrialized nation to legalize marijuana remain unfulfilled.
The for-profit industry it created has struggled. Pot sales outside the legal system still thrive. Indigenous communities feel their needs are being ignored. And the injustices that came from criminalizing pot in the past have yet to be remedied fully. Here is a look at the Canadian experience two years into its national experiment.
An emphasis on fairness and equality
Trudeau’s pledge to legalize marijuana was not universally welcomed by Canadians, including some members of his Liberal Party, who feared it would encourage use, particularly among teenagers.
But the prime minister persuaded his party and many voters with an argument based on fairness and equality.
Trudeau illustrated the system’s bias with a family story. In a 2017 interview with Vice, he said that his brother, Michel, was found carrying a couple of marijuana joints by the police in 1998, six months before he was killed in an avalanche.
Their father, Pierre Trudeau, a former prime minister, came to the rescue.
“We were able to make those charges go away,” Trudeau said.
Legalization, he promised, would ensure that not just the connected and wealthy could avoid a criminal record.
The new law has all but eliminated possession charges.
“I’ve got so much against the system”
The legalization effort came with an amnesty program the government said would erase criminal records for possession, but there are barriers to access.
The process, Owusu-Bempah said, is complicated — with as many as six steps involved — and underpublicized, making it more a privilege for the few than a widely available solution.
As of mid-November, just 341 people had succeeded in erasing their records. There are no fees, but applicants frequently must spend money to travel to the place of their arrest to retrieve their records, and they must be fingerprinted.
Even if Robert, who has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, the past 25 years, could afford to return to Montreal, he said it would not be worth it. Removing the possession charges would not alter the theft convictions that followed. “I’ve got so much against the system,” said Robert, who has stayed out of jail the past decade and works for an overdose prevention group.
Indigenous sellers still in legal limbo
When marijuana was illegal in Canada, the Green Mile was a popular place to buy it, with about a dozen mismatched shops along a stretch of highway in Ontario offering every kind of cannabis product imaginable.
Two years after legalization, customers still come to these stores in the Indigenous community of Alderville — although the sellers operate outside the new system put in place to regulate legal sales.
The provincial police in Ontario generally respect the sovereignty of Indigenous communities and take enforcement action against shops like those along the Green Mile only if requested by a community’s leaders.
But with their legal status still unclear, the threat of being shut down hangs over Green Mile shops.
“We’re hopeful, but we’ve never been too confident,” said Laurie Marsden, a co-founder of one of the shops, Healing House, which emulates the provincial system by running a lab that tests for potency and contamination. “We believe in our sovereign rights and that we have the ability to produce, grow and sell the medicines to our customer base.”
Profits and diversity hard to find in legal market
When Trudeau announced his government’s plans for legalization, the creation of a major new source of jobs — or tax revenue — was not in the program.
Two years later, most marijuana producers still are reporting multimillion-dollar losses.
And these companies’ executives are overwhelmingly white, according to an analysis by Owusu-Bempah.
It concluded that 2% of the companies’ leadership are Indigenous people and 1% are Black Canadians.
“African-Canadians and other racialized Canadians that were adversely affected by cannabis prohibition need to be given a chance to benefit from the fruits of legalization,” Owusu-Bempah said. “We had this situation where Black and Indigenous people were being overly criminalized. Now they’re being left out of what is a multibillion-dollar industry.”
“Not just going to roll over and go away”
In addition to a fairer legal system, the government promised legalization would shift marijuana sales out of the black market, parts of which are dominated by organized crime.
“The shift has started, and maybe around half the market has transitioned from illegal to legal retail sources,” said David Hammond, a professor of public health at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who is heading a multiyear study on cannabis use.
With loyal customers and often a competitive advantage on price (with no taxes to pay) and selection, the illegal shops are hanging on.
“They’re not just going to roll over and go away,” said Mike Farnworth, the minister of public safety in British Columbia.
In its latest survey released just over a year ago, Statistics Canada, the census agency, found that 28% of Canadians shopped for marijuana exclusively at legal stores and websites, while 58% used a mix of legal and illegal sources.