Health Committee on Sept. 12th, 2017

[Len Webber, Conservative, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Concerns with youth having access to homegrown plants....

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

I think alcohol is a very good analogy here. We know that most young people can get access to alcohol. It's said that it's easier to get access to cannabis today than it is to get access to alcohol, so I asked my first-year students last week in class. I was curious. I would have to say that the overwhelming majority of them said, no, it's much easier to get access to alcohol.

Again, I think this is a drug that can be regulated and can be integrated into our culture. The criminalization of something that is much less harmful than some of the drugs that most of us use every day seems to me to have been a long-standing problem.

[Len Webber, Conservative, Calgary Confederation, AB]

But as for the developing brains of the 18-year-olds and 19-year olds, you know that brains are developing up until the age of 25.

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

Yes. I don't think we're going to solve this problem through aggressive law enforcement. I think we're going to solve it much the same way we solved the tobacco problem, through aggressive public health education, through aggressive regulation of non-smokers' rights. To the extent that young people recognize the risks involved, they're going to be much more careful.

I come from an era in which when we used to get on planes we were asked if we wanted to be in smoking or non-smoking. I'm glad those days are behind us.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

The time is up.

Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Whenever this bill becomes law, whether it's July 1, 2018, or not, there will be tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are walking around with criminal records for offences that this bill will no longer make an offence. I'm talking about simple possession.

Michael Lacy, who is the vice-president of the Criminal Lawyers' Association, said it would be very easy for the government to amend the Criminal Records Act to automatically pardon any convictions for an offence that is no longer an offence. To you, Ms. London-Weinstein, should Bill C-45 be amended to do that?

[Anne London-Weinstein]

I can't really speak to what the legislators should do or what the intention is in the act, but clearly, at some point it should be contemplated that for behaviour which is no longer criminal, it would be in the interest of all Canadians that a pardon be made more readily available.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

The topic of edibles has come up, and in clause 7 this legislation sets out a number of goals of this bill. In fact, one of them that has been advocated repeatedly by the Prime Minister has been to get cannabis out of the hands of organized crime. I'm trying to measure this legislation to see how successful it will be in meeting that stated goal and I want to focus on edibles.

Frankly, I've heard three different positions from the government in the last day about what this bill does with edibles. I've heard them say that it will be dealt with later because there are some difficulties in issues around that. I've heard that the bill takes care of edibles now and it just could be promulgated by regulation at any time. In fact, I think that was said last night on TV by Mr. Blair. I've heard them say that it's in the works. What I do know is that schedule 4 lists the classes of cannabis that an authorized person may sell and it is restricted to dried cannabis, cannabis oil, fresh cannabis, cannabis plants, and cannabis plant seeds. This bill does not legalize edibles. We have heard that about one-third of the market—and this is the best evidence that we have—is customers who are choosing non-smokable forms of cannabis that are edibles or concentrates in some form.

My question to you, Mr. Boyd, is this. If we leave those products—and they're a growing segment of the market—to the illicit market once we legalize these other products, will this bill meet its goal of taking those products out of the illicit market? Where will Canadians get those products from?

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

I think if edibles are not added to schedule 4, obviously you're going to risk a continuation of the illicit market. I think that's particularly regrettable because the people who want to consume edibles are often people who fall within the medical realm rather than recreational realm. I think that's something we ought to be concerned about and to be more focused on.

Again, the experience with Colorado is that they had a lot of problems to begin with in terms of packaging and so forth, so I think you have to be very careful about how it's packaged so that it doesn't fall into the hands of children. Colorado has demonstrated that the dose can be titrated, so it's actually much safer than the illicit market. One of the problems is that people who are seeking edibles in the illicit market and consuming quantities of cannabis in the illicit market are likely to overdose and have very unpleasant experiences unless this illicit market is....

Certainly over the last 40 years that hasn't been the experience of that illicit market, and in Colorado the experience has been quite different. There's been much less difficulty within the last year given the regulations that have been put in place.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Professor Boyd, you've anticipated where I was going next, because actually Colorado, Washington, and Alaska have all legalized edibles in some form now, so there's plenty of experience with best practices and the errors that have been made for us to know what those are. But from a health point of view, it was suggested that this act will legalize cannabis oil, so Canadians will be able to bake their own edibles at home. From a safety and health point of view, would it not be preferable for the government to legalize, stipulate, and regulate all of the issues around edibles than to leave it to the black market or to Canadians baking or cooking their own edibles, where you can't control concentration and you don't know exactly what's in it perhaps? The products obviously aren't labelled.

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

Yes, I think that's right. I have some faith in Health Canada that this will ultimately be its position, because these experiences are relatively recent. I have confidence that there will be a change in schedule 4 and that edibles will be part of the licit market. I hope I'm not wrong on that.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Boyd, you've said in your submission that mail-order access for recreational cannabis will appropriately be a critical part of the system of cannabis distribution. Canada is a geographically large country, with many remote or relatively remote communities, yet Bill C-45 does not have a permanent national e-commerce distribution system, that I can detect, in the bill. Would it be your advice that we should be looking at constructing such a national distribution system?

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

I'd have to say in some respects that the issues of e-commerce, and how we roll this out in terms of the banking system, all of that, is somewhat beyond my area of expertise, but I would agree that's going to be critical to its success. I would think that there are many small communities across the country where you're not going to have any form of retail, and there are many municipalities, too. Where I live, it's pretty clear to me that Richmond is not going to have any form of retail and Vancouver is. That's not a great bar, in terms of motivating the black market, because those municipalities are essentially adjacent to one another. But I agree with the general point, yes.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

To the Barreau du Québec, given that those who sell tobacco to minors in Canada are not criminalized but are subjected to substantial civil fines, what is the logic of applying such extreme penalties to cannabis possession, distribution, or production?

[Pascal Levesque]

That's why we are in doubt and that's why we recommend having the same kind of philosophy toward youth—to penalize without exposing young persons to true penal consequences, namely, imprisonment.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Is that opinion shared by Ms. London-Weinstein and Professor Boyd?

[Prof. Neil Boyd]

Yes.

[Anne London-Weinstein]

Yes, but I also think that if you want to raise the overhead for organized crime, crippling fines would be one way of doing it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you.

Dr. Eyolfson.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for coming.

Professor Leuprecht, I understand you're in Brisbane. I envy you. I was there in early August, a lovely city.

There were a couple of points you made. First of all, you said you favour decriminalization over legalization. That would have no effect on the black market, though. Would you agree that the black market would be unchanged if you simply decriminalized it but it was still illegal?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

We'd still have behavioural change by virtue of decriminalization. It would have some impact on the market, but not as significant an impact.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Would you not agree that there would be more of an impact on the black market if you had legal producers so that people who wanted this product would have a legal way and a sanction-free way of obtaining it?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

I guess that depends on how this goes. If we take as an analogy the cigarette market, about which I've written in great detail, we'd create different outcomes across the different provinces. I think Professor Boyd made an important point. How this is rolled out and how it is enforced in different provinces is ultimately going to determine what the black market looks like.

If you have a province that makes a concerted effort, as Quebec likely would, based on the precedent with contraband cigarettes, you're more likely to get a contained market. If you have a province such as Ontario where, currently with regard to contraband cigarettes, there's relatively little coordinated effort, we're going to get a [Technical difficulty—Editor]. Everything depends on the laboratory of experimentation across the 10 provinces.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

You made a statement that a large percentage of crash victims have detectable amounts of cannabis in their systems. Was any of this correlated with the amounts, or with the level of intoxication? We've had this controversy with workplace drug-testing in the United States over the years, because the presence of detectable amounts or metabolites can persist for days or weeks after intoxication. These stats that you talked about with accidents, was this simply detectable amounts that they had consumed, or was it something correlating with intoxication?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

You'll have to ask Statistics Canada how exactly those data were collected. That's why we created these data. It's true that it'll be difficult to disentangle what other drugs might have been present in that person's system, but what is irrefutable is that in those circumstances the drug that was most present consistently was cannabis. No other drug was more present than cannabis in drug-related driving occurrences.