Thank you all for coming.
This legislation, I've always believed, long before I was in politics, is a long time in coming.
I practised emergency medicine for 20 years in Winnipeg. One of the things I found, in my experience, was that in one respect, cannabis was a very dangerous drug, and it does kill. How I found it kills is through the criminal activities of those who market it. I saw an unconscionable number of gunshot wounds, stab wounds, and fatal beatings. The vast majority of them were due to the drug trade. I was once evacuated from an apartment building that was firebombed over a bad drug deal, back in the late eighties. It was not my apartment but the building I lived in. I know the extent of the violence of the current regime and how thriving the black market is, so it's important that we make a change to this.
In regard to some of the concerns I've heard brought up.... The provinces may set their own ages. We know that the Canadian Medical Association suggested 21. Our legislation says a minimum of 18. There was an experience in the United States a number years ago. They increased their drinking age to 21 across the board, but before that, there was a variation in ages. They had the experience that if there was a drinking age of 19 in one state, and a neighbouring state had 21, they had a lot of people travelling over to drink and a lot of accidents. They used the term “blood borders”.
If there were too much of a disparate age restriction between provinces, would you see that kind of public safety issue?