Thank you.
Good evening, Mr. Chair, and members. My name is Annamaria Enenajor. I am a criminal defence lawyer and the founder and campaign director for the Campaign for Cannabis Amnesty.
The Campaign for Cannabis Amnesty is a not-for-profit advocacy group focused on righting the historical wrongs caused by decades of cannabis prohibition. It was founded in April 2018, not too long ago, in response to the absence of federal legislation addressing the stigma of previous convictions for offences that would not longer be illegal under the Cannabis Act. Since then, the campaign has been calling on the government to enact legislation to delete criminal records relating to the simple possession of cannabis. We believe that no Canadian should be burdened with a criminal record for minor, non-violent acts that are no longer a crime.
It is an honour to appear before you today, and I offer you some observations and modest recommendations with respect to Bill C-93. The campaign supports the implementation of measures to remove the stigma of past cannabis convictions that disproportionately impact marginalized Canadians. As it is currently drafted, however, Bill C-93 does not go far enough.
The story of enforcement of cannabis possession offences in Canada is one of historical injustice and inequality. Canadians of different backgrounds consume and possess cannabis at comparable rates. In fact, Canada has one of the highest rates of cannabis consumption in the world. In 2017, 46.6% of Canadians—almost half of Canadians—admitted to using cannabis at some point in their lives.
Despite this widespread consumption, a growing body of social science evidence has shown that not all Canadians face the same consequences for these actions. Racial profiling and suspicion of specific groups on the basis of stereotypes means that some Canadians are more likely to be closely scrutinized by law enforcement than others. Black Canadians, indigenous people of Canada and low-income Canadians are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated for cannabis possession offences than white Canadians. This is not a tragic and accidental phenomenon. This is a historical injustice and a systemic charter violation that cries out for redress.
The equality provision of the charter was intended to ensure a measure of substantive, and not merely formal, equality. The Supreme Court of Canada has consistently held, beginning with the case of Eldridge, 1997, that a discriminatory purpose or intention is not a necessary condition to finding a violation of the equality provision of the charter. It is sufficient if the effect of the legislation, while neutral on its face, is to deny someone equal protection and benefit of the law. To the extent that the government seeks to draw distinction between laws that are discriminatory on their face and laws that are discriminatory in their effects, a distinction is illegitimate for the purpose of our constitutional protections.
While historical cannabis protection laws were not discriminatory on their face, they most certainly produced discriminatory effects in their enforcement. They perpetuated disadvantage on the basis of race, ethnic origin and colour, all of which are prohibited grounds under the charter.
The unequal and disproportionate enforcement of cannabis-related offences on this scale and of this magnitude encourages distrust and resentment of law enforcement, cynicism towards the administration of justice and an understandable sentiment that the promise of substantive equality under the charter is a myth for many Canadians. An appropriately powerful response to this shameful history is therefore also necessary to maintain the integrity of our justice system.
While the campaign applauds the government's willingness to recognize the disproportionate stigma and burden that results from the retention of conviction records for historical simple cannabis possession, we believe the bill does not go far enough.
Given the serious consequences of a cannabis possession conviction on the lives of Canadians and the legacy of inequality through disproportionate and discriminatory enforcement, the federal government must respond to this historical injustice with a measure sufficiently powerful to denounce a shameful history. People with simple cannabis possession records should be put in the same position as those millions of Canadians who did and who continue to do the exact same thing.
While it was criminal, they did not face any consequences because of factors that have no bearing on their moral culpability or criminality—factors such as their race, income, family connections and their neighbourhood of residence. As a result of that, they were never arrested and never convicted and were able to proceed through their lives with opportunities that were not available to other Canadians. As a result, Bill C-93 should be amended to provide for free, automatic, simple and permanent records deletions for simple cannabis possession offences.
If the government is not willing to go that far, then we suggest that there are other aspects of that kind of regime that the government could tap into that would still be satisfactory. For example, the government could incorporate aspects of an expungement scheme that could improve the bill's utility and allow for the implementation in a way that would benefit as many people as possible.
For example, on Monday when this committee met last, we heard that because of our decentralized and often archaic record-keeping practices, attempting to find and then destroy all relevant records would simply be too arduous. Just because we can't do this for all records doesn't mean we can't do it for some, and in fact, for the most important. As the honourable Ralph Goodale mentioned on Monday, while records relating to criminal offences do not exist in a single national database, records for convictions that have the greatest impact on jobs, volunteering and travel, in fact do.
The Canadian Police Information Centre, CPIC, is a national database maintained by the RCMP. If someone is arrested, charged and convicted of a crime, this record exists in the CPIC database. When an employer asks for a background check, for example, and requests it from the RCMP, the RCMP doesn't dispatch agents to rummage through courthouses to get all these disparate court records and information about an individual. They scan CPIC. When Canada discloses conviction information about its citizens to the United States, it also doesn't send photocopies of papers in boxes that are all across the country in disparate jurisdictions. It shares one database: CPIC.
Whereas we can't delete all records, what we can do is target one extraordinarily important database. Automatically removing all simple cannabis possession offences from CPIC would go a long way to alleviate the impact of a conviction from the lives of Canadians, even though this would not constitute a full expungement.
The automatic deletion of CPIC entries in relation to simple cannabis offences is also a cost-effective way to provide immediate relief to Canadians. An application process involving the collection of records from provincial, territorial and local police databases involves delays and hidden costs. Even if Bill C-93 eliminates the $631 application fee ordinarily required for record suspension applications, applicants may still need to pay for fingerprinting, court information and local police record checks, which can add up to hundreds of dollars.
There has been some discussion in this committee about whether record suspensions assist Canadians when crossing the border to the United States. I'd like to speak very briefly about that, and I could be asked more questions about that later. Record suspensions do not assist Canadians seeking to cross the border to the United States. The United States does not recognize any foreign pardon, irrespective of the effect of conviction. In fact, neither foreign pardons nor foreign expungement are effective in preventing inadmissibility to the United States. They are essentially equally useless.
I have provided to this committee fulsome submissions in writing that outline further recommendations, points and observations about this law. However, I wish to conclude with our primary recommendation, which is this: Bill C-93 should provide for the permanent and automatic deletion of all conviction entries for cannabis simple possession in the CPIC database.
Our subsidiary recommendations are outlined in our written briefs.
We hope that the recommendations that we proposed would increase the bill's utility, assist in achieving its stated goals and allow for implementation that would benefit as many people as possible.
Thank you for your time.
