Evidence of meeting #65 for Health in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cannabis.
A video is available from Parliament.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Is the current process just limited to criminal background checks? Is that what you're saying?
9:25 a.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Investigation and Organized Crime, Ontario Provincial Police
Yes.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
I'm wondering about that. If somebody wants to invest in a plumbing shop, or something where you can make a lot of money, we don't do extensive background checks for legal businesses. If this is a legal business, I'm wondering why we would do that in this respect.
9:25 a.m.
Deputy Chief, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police
That's a great point, sir.
Currently, in legal businesses like a plumbing shop, we may not already have 300 criminal organizations established in an illicit industry, which is what we have today. We also have organized crime groups that have embedded themselves in a medical marijuana framework. This is an opportunity to enhance the current security clearance process to try to identify those organized crime elements and mitigate the impact they're having.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Thank you.
I'm going to move on. I don't know who mentioned this, but there was some concern expressed that the limit for young people was five grams and that this wasn't low enough. Below that level, it would be in the realm of what the provinces could do in terms of restricting access. It would be a non-criminal matter. So the five-gram limit is not saying it's okay to have less. It's simply saying that we only enter the criminal regime at five grams.
Currently in Ontario, for example, you might ticket someone for underage drinking under the provincial rules. Why would this be different from that?
9:25 a.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Investigation and Organized Crime, Ontario Provincial Police
I think we're basically saying we recommend the same. It's just like the Liquor Licence Act. If you're not allowed to possess it because you're underage, then you receive a ticket, or there's an option to give a ticket. It doesn't criminalize or do anything of that nature. That's what we're recommending in Ontario, that it be the same type of process as now exists under the Liquor Licence Act. We've talked about this extensively and we'd love to see a system where there's some education required, maybe even instead of a ticket we could refer a person, depending on their age and the number of times we've encountered their issue, to an online forum to learn about marijuana and what it does to your developing brain when you're 15 years old.
We'd love to divert that way. It would be even better than a ticketing system, but the reality is that it would take a lot of time to get organized and figured out. So in the first place, we believe that youth don't need to possess it, and we could provide a ticket system if they're caught with three, four, five grams, whatever.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
So it's certainly within the purview of the provinces to establish those kinds of things.
9:25 a.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Investigation and Organized Crime, Ontario Provincial Police
Yes, sir.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
It seems to me that it is a far more effective approach than criminalizing youth. I would ask you whether the five-gram limit, at which point the criminal justice system could be activated, should be raised so that there's more range for provincial intervention in terms of seizures, training, and ticketing for youth.
9:25 a.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Investigation and Organized Crime, Ontario Provincial Police
Do you want to take that?
9:25 a.m.
Deputy Chief Constable, Drug Advisory Committee, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police
From our perspective, we agree that, for small amounts of possession, we do not want to see it criminalized. We certainly have to advocate to our provinces to ensure that we have a system in place where we can seize marijuana from children and we can prevent it from being socially shared in large volumes in schools, so we're very allied to that. Unfortunately, that's something that we don't have the answers to in most provinces, other than Ontario, and how that will be effectively managed.
In regard to raising the five-gram limit, we would be opposed to that. We think that part of the importance of this act is protecting youth. It's one of the key objectives of the act. The message that we send to our youth about marijuana possession is critical. If we make that limit higher, I think we send a message. I think it is vitally important that youth know that this is not a healthy substance, as you've heard from medical experts. We need to start an education program immediately to ensure they understand that. We would be opposed to increasing that. We're certainly advocating at the provincial level to give us the tools in order to ensure that no youth are in possession or socially sharing marijuana at all.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
You do see some value in being able to charge young people criminally for possession.
9:30 a.m.
Deputy Chief Constable, Drug Advisory Committee, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police
We would certainly want to see that the courts have some options in that regard. As my colleague stated, we are very supportive, for first-time offences, etc., of finding diversion-type programs. We think that is incredibly important for these types of offences. That being said, certainly anybody, whether it be a youth or not, who traffics to other youth, is seen as a very serious offender. If we're going to get a hold of or manage youth consumption in this country, we need to take it very seriously. Certainly, regarding somebody who is possessing, say six grams for personal use, we would certainly look to the courts to look at different types of opportunities that they have at their hands, such as diversion, to manage this effectively.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bill Casey
Time is up.
That completes our seven-minute rounds. We'll go to our five-minute rounds starting with Dr. Carrie.
9:30 a.m.
Conservative
Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I really want to thank the witnesses here today. It's a real concern for me that we're not going to get to spend a lot of time with you. I know the Liberals are rushing this through, but being that you're on the front line and you care deeply about the health and safety of Canadians, especially our kids, like we do, it's unfortunate we won't have a lot of time with you.
It's also emphasized, I guess, that we're having a bit of a theoretical conversation today because it really emphasizes that, on the ground, there's no certainty for you yet because it still has to go through the process. It's interesting. From some of our questioning yesterday, the government members think that you should be planning already for this and have everything worked out because we've been talking about it for two years since the Prime Minister made this surprise election promise.
Anyway, I do want to see how this is filtering down to the ground. We have asked provinces and territories to come, and only one decided to come, Saskatchewan. Ontario did announce that they have a plan. Because Ontario didn't want to come, I thought, deputy Commissioner Barnum, you could give us a couple of ideas on your initial thoughts on Premier Wynne's plan.
I was wondering if you could tell us what you were glad to see, things that weren't in the bill, and specifically how you plan to address homegrown.
9:30 a.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Investigation and Organized Crime, Ontario Provincial Police
Well, I do like my paycheque, so I'll be careful on my comments.
9:30 a.m.
Conservative
9:30 a.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Investigation and Organized Crime, Ontario Provincial Police
No, I understand that.
I can't elaborate much more on what we talked about already this morning on what we think is vitally important. Again—
9:30 a.m.
Conservative
9:30 a.m.
Deputy Commissioner, Investigation and Organized Crime, Ontario Provincial Police
I haven't seen it. I'm not saying it's not there, I'm saying it hasn't been shared with us exactly what the Government of Ontario plans to do with home-grow. What we've seen is essentially what's been released publicly.
9:30 a.m.
Conservative
Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON
Okay. I haven't seen anything either.
I want to talk a little bit about the rationale of the Liberals. Initially it was a promise. It was a surprise for everybody, but they've developed a rationale. One of the points was that the status quo is not working. We had witnesses yesterday. This is not true. They've refuted it with publicly available statistics that there is a trending down for youth marijuana use.
The second narrative they're coming up with is: keep the problems from organized crime. Again, the RCMP said yesterday that's not true. Even, Deputy Commissioner Barnum, you mentioned that, and I think, Mr. Carrique, you said you're not going to get it out of organized crime.
I want to talk about the third thing they keep saying, that this is going to keep it out of the hands of kids. The bill before us has zero repercussions for youth between 12 and 17. You mentioned social sharing. You talked about the problems with home cultivation, the potential for crime, and even youth being targeted by organized crime for distribution. We're talking about 12-year-olds here and, in public school, they're the old kids. When I was in public school, everybody looked up to the older kids.
Is there anything in this bill that you see that's going to help keep marijuana out of the hands of kids?
Maybe we could start with Mr. Serr.
9:30 a.m.
Deputy Chief Constable, Drug Advisory Committee, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police
In regard to this bill specifically, we've seen the penalties for trafficking to youth, and the seriousness of that is imposed. That is important to us.
In regard to us being able to effectively manage it, no; we're having to advocate to the provinces to give us the ability to, first off, seize marijuana from youth. Then there's what type of mechanism will be put in place, whether it be a ticketing mechanism or not. We don't know the answer to that.
Under this bill, as I said, the trafficking to youth has been identified as a significant penalty, but beyond that, we don't have a lot of tools for specifically addressing youth in it.
9:35 a.m.
Conservative
Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON
Yes, I'm not seeing it either. I'm looking at their rationale, and really it's been deconstructed here just in the first couple of days of witnesses.
Another question has been brought to my attention. How do you determine the difference between legal and illegal cannabis, especially considering that home cultivation is allowed under the bill in its current form?
9:35 a.m.
Deputy Chief Constable, Drug Advisory Committee, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police
The short answer is that we can't.
9:35 a.m.
Conservative
Colin Carrie Conservative Oshawa, ON
Okay.
Do you believe, given the timeline proposed by the Liberals to have marijuana legal in Canada, that enough is being done to address public education? We heard from a witness yesterday that for marijuana education they put aside I think $9 million. For tobacco it's $38 million. We already know a lot about tobacco. Most people who smoke, as I think a witness said, know it's a bad thing, and we're spending $38 million on that. Do you see $9 million making much of a dent in an educational program?