Canada introduces long-awaited legislation to fully legalise marijuana
Canada introduces long-awaited legislation to fully legalise marijuana
Two bills, which plan to legalise recreational marijuana by July 2018, divvy up regulation, distribution and sale between federal and provincial governments
By Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian, April 13 2017
‘Canadians ... continue to use cannabis at among the highest rates in the world,’ said Bill Blair, the MP who has been tapped to lead government’s plans for legalisation. Photograph: Chris Roussakis/AFP/Getty Images
The Canadian government has introduced highly anticipated legislation aimed at regulating recreational marijuana use by July 2018, paving the way for the country to become the first in the G7 to fully legalise the drug.
On Thursday, the Liberal government tabled two bills designed to end more than 90 years of prohibition. “Despite decades of criminal prohibition, Canadians – including 21% of our youth and 30% of young adults – continue to use cannabis at among the highest rates in the world,” said Bill Blair, the MP and former Toronto police chief tapped to lead the government’s plans for legalisation. “The proposed legislation, which is introduced today, seeks to legalise, strictly regulate and restrict access to cannabis.”
The legislation divides the responsibilities of legalisation between the federal and provincial governments. Ottawa will regulate production, including licensing producers and ensuring the safety of the country’s marijuana supply. It will be left to Canadian provinces to decide how the drug will be distributed and sold. The federal government has stipulated that buyers must be at least 18 years old, but provinces will be able to set a higher age limit if they wish.
Dried and fresh cannabis, as well as cannabis oil, will be initially available with edible products to follow. Medical marijuana is already legal in Canada.
Strict guidelines will be set on how marijuana can be marketed. The government is currently weighing whether producers should be required to use plain packaging, with endorsements banned and child-proof packaging required. Any marketing that could appeal to young people will be prohibited, as will selling the product through self-service display cases or vending machines.
Those who want to grow their own marijuana will be limited to four plants per household. Canadians will be allowed to carry up to 30 grams of dried cannabis for personal use while those who sell or give marijuana to minors or who drive under its influence will face stiff penalties. The government is proposing a system of roadside saliva tests to ferret out drugged drivers.
No information was given on how the product will be priced or taxed; these details are expected to be announced by the country’s finance minister in the coming months.
Since becoming the Liberal leader in 2013, Justin Trudeau has argued that the decriminalisation and regulation of marijuana would help keep the drug away from children and ensure profits don’t end up in the hands of what the prime minister described as “criminal elements”.
Thursday’s legislation included a stipulation that those under the age of 18 found with up to five grams of marijuana will not face criminal charges.
Approval of the legislation is probably months away; once it makes its way through parliamentary committees, the federal government will have to negotiate the bills with the country’s senate and provinces. Some have argued that the timeline of legalisation by mid-2018 is overly ambitious, suggesting that 2019 is a more likely date.
Despite analyst predictions that the industry could eventually be worth somewhere between C$5bn and C$7bn annually, opinions remain divided within Canada. The provincial government of Saskatchewan has been vocal about its concerns, questioning the effectiveness of the government’s plans to tackle the issue of drugged driving.
“We don’t really have a way of monitoring or at least of detecting people who are driving on the roads who may be impaired by marijuana,” the province’s justice minister, Gordon Wyant, told reporters this week. “There’s people that are out there operating heavy machinery and we need to make sure that our workplaces are safe.”
Others worry that legalisation will put Canada on a collision path with Donald Trump’s administration south of the border. While eight US states and the District of Columbia have voted to legalise recreational marijuana, the White House has suggested that the Department of Justice will do more to enforce federal laws prohibiting recreational marijuana, raising concerns over how Canada’s approach will coexist with a potential US crackdown.
Canadian officials were in close touch with their American counterparts as they drafted the proposed law, Ralph Goodale, Canada’s public safety minister, said on Thursday. “It will be very important for people to understand that crossing the border with this product will be illegal,” he said.
Nearly 400,000 people a day cross the border between Canada and the US. Since September, Canada has been pushing the US to change a policy that bans Canadians who admit to having used marijuana from travelling to the United States.
Goodale argued that the Canadian approach would ultimately prove to be the better one. “If your objective is to protect public health and safety and keep cannabis out of the hands of minors, and stop the flow of profits to organized crime, then the law as it stands today has been an abject failure,” he said. “Police forces spend between $2bn and $3bn every year trying to deal with cannabis, and yet Canadian teenagers are among the heaviest users in the western world ... We simply have to do better.”
He stressed that until the legislation is passed, recreational marijuana remains illegal across Canada – a point underscored in recent months by a series of police raids on marijuana dispensaries across the country. “Existing laws prohibiting possession of cannabis remain in place and they need to be respected,” he said. “This must be an orderly transition. It is a not a free-for-all.”
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Besides the health care, now there's another reason to move back to Canada.
You'll have to buy your weed at the MCBO, right next door to the LCBO! I wonder if this will relieve the tax burden on individual Canadians or if it will just allow the government to create more departments to regulate the life out of Canada? Maybe the taxes collected in Ontario could go to reorganize the Hydro Industry to make it affordable for Canadians to use electricity again?
Thank you for your opinion.
If it's too heavily regulated the black market will continue to thrive as it does here in Colorado. I'm sure the government wasting the taxpayers money will do nothing to keep it out of the hands of seventeen year olds.
Surely it will not be regulated any more than the sale and use of alcoholic beverages, and that doesn't cause any huge deprivation to anyone except perhaps alcoholics (who need therapy for their illness anyway). i believe that taxation of the sales of weed is a great benefit for Canada and Canadians, and if you don't want to pay taxes on it, grow your own 4 plants (which hopefully would be "per person" rather tban "per household").
Ooops. I just saw this. Okay maybe for a person living alone, or an empty-nest couple, but not so good if more residents:
"...caps the number of plants per household at four and the legal height at one metre;"
I can just see the "Pot Police" sneaking into back yards with a measuring tape.
Any marketing that could appeal to young people will be prohibited
Maybe the labels should have math problems on them.
Personally I'm not in favor of making marijuana legal. Although not a resident of Canada I see that some of the arguments against it do make sense. Driving while stoned will get a lot of people killed.
I'm probably in the minority when it comes to marijuana, but from experience while I was working, I did see the result of a person stoned and operating heavy equipment.
Well, surely you know that if a person does not have the common sense to limit their use so as to not deprive their ability to drive or operate machinery, they are probably the same individual who would be capable of doing even greater harm with other substances such as alcohol or other inebriants. You are not going to stop the inevitable use by banning the substance, as has already been proven by Prohibition and the actual statistics of common use.
Buzz, I know that marijuana will not be banned. It seems that it's going to be with us, legal or otherwise.
It's simply my personal opinion regarding marijuana.
Then I assme you should have the same attitude towards alcoholic beverages.
I don't drink alcohol Buzz, so yes it's pretty much the same.
Driving while stoned will get a lot of people killed.
Most people driving while stoned are going a short distance, and slowly in the slow lane.
I knew that, but I'm glad you pointed it out. I never saw an aggressive person stoned on MJ (and...back in the 60s and 70s I saw a lot of persons stoned on MJ).
Most people driving while stoned are going a short distance, and slowly in the slow lane.
I always did. Just down to the local convenience store for more munchies...
My craving for peanut butter has lasted all my life - and I know you like it too (peanut butter and banana sandwiches).
I don't like peanut butter and banana sandwich...I LOVE THEM! Especially on raisin bread!
Right on. Freshly baked white raisin bread.
Toasted! The bread and me!
Haven't tried it toasted yet but I'll take your word for it and try it - toasted sandwiches that is.
Make it legal after 6pm.
I think it would be difficult to enforce that.
Buzz, I don't think it makes any difference. If I could bottle up all the pot I smell during the day I could stay stoned all the time.
BIG MISTAKE!!!
Over and over it has been proved that prohibition doesn't work. I say good on Canada. Worried about public safety, then tighten up the rules of the road.
Driving under the influence of marijuana is inherently dangerous. The only thing that would keep it safe is the fact that people get used to it, just like they get used to driving when drunk. I know someone who has been a heavy drinker for 40 years. He has literally driven while 'drunk' hundreds of times and never had an accident. When he was younger he often would nor remember driving home from the bar the night before, but there was his car parked in front of his house. He had gotten so used to driving while 'drunk' he got good at it.
Same thing with driving under the influence of pot. It is not safe, but people get practiced enough at it they can do it.
I admit that I drove several times (OK, many times) while stoned when I was younger and was lucky I never ran across a cop, because I was so paranoid that I was always going about 5 an miles an hour under the speed limit and concentrating on being in the exact and I do mean the EXACT center of the lane. I always used my turn signals and always stopped at stop signs (probably for a suspiciously long time) and lights and parked in the very center of parking spaces (usually at a convenience store). In short I drove like a little old lady. Any good cop would have spotted me as high in a heartbeat.
I feel that we should enforce all laws about operating a vehicle to the max. As for either alcohol or pot, if you are caught stoned/ drunk... throw the book at you. I see no difference between the two.
Well one of the biggest problem advocates of legalizing pot (of which I am one) is the problem of determining the level of how much THC is too much to safely drive. We have a Breathalyzer and a blood test that determines, according to various state laws, when a person is legally impaired and is subject to arrest. However we do not yet have a corresponding test that shows the same for THC.
Also no one has yet determined just how much THC in a person's system is safe. I mean if a person smokes a joint 12 or 14 hours before they are pulled over they may still have THC in their system, but that does not mean that they are impaired. We need to nail these down otherwise it just comes down to an individual officer's opinion and that should not be allowed to stand up in court without chemical proof of intoxication. Without a determinate type of blood test proof that the THC level constituted impairment.
I'm not a fan of legalizing marijuana. I had plenty of experience smoking it myself and I've seen its affects firsthand. Some people handle it well; some don't. Can you drive under the influence without killing anybody? Yep, I did it all the time. But I'm a good driver. It can make a bad driver worse because it tends to negatively affect attention span and concentration. Plus, it can make someone feel over confident. A young sport bike riding friend of mine used to say that smoking made him a better rider. I told him you just feel like a better rider because I'm riding with you and you're riding has not improved. BTW, I stopped smoking and drinking many years ago.
The problem I see is at the border. Canada is real big on refusing Americans entry for having misdemeanors on their record. Canada will admit the person if the misdemeanor is not a crime in Canada. Drug use here is illegal in most states and under federal law. I really don't see why we should relax our rules barring Canadians who smoke (a misdemeanor) while Canada continues to use misdemeanors as a basis for denying Americans entry.
A little off topic, but then why not? I posted this article.
However, it probably only takes one joint.
I find it ridiculous that mj legalization discussions always go straight to driving. Nobody is advocating for that to be legal. Millions of people smoke it already, regardless of whether it's legal or not, and the number of them causing problems on the road is minuscule compared to alcohol. I don't see how making it legal to smoke is going to change driving statistics. Not to mention how cars are becoming more and more autonomous. I was in a friend's subaru yesterday, and it's loaded with features that make getting into an accident difficult. Eventually, the driver will become nothing more than the passenger.
Unlike alcohol, there is no recognized level of intoxication for marijuana or a way to test for it. The more available the drug is, the more people will use it. The more they use it, the more likely it is that they will drive under the influence . . . which increases the risk to everyone else.
Anybody who has smoked consistently knows damn well that you can smoke enough to be impaired. As factcheck points out, it's not easy to unpack the statistics but what we do know is that marijuana "related" deaths significantly increased in Colorado after it was legalized.
BIG MISTAKE. I KNOW TWO PEOPLE, IN THEIR 30'S THAT SMOKED POT (HEAVY USERS) THAT DIED FROM LUNG CANCER.
Did they also smoke cigarettes?
By the way, it's really not necessary to post with bolded capital letters. Some people consider that to be shouting, but then maybe that's what you want to do.