I clearly feel that if you're going to make conduct legal that in the past was illegal, you should also then address eliminating those prior criminal records, and so on. You certainly are making a mistake, I think, in not looking at the existing industry and saying we're going to regulate them as opposed to trying to push them out and create a whole new group of people doing it, such as in the Ontario liquor stores.
The whole idea, as I understand it, is to try to eliminate the black market. That's what legalization is. Home-grows will reduce the black market, but stores reduce both home-grows and the black market. Just because somebody has a criminal record or has been convicted in the past, it should not be a bar, in my submission, to their being able to participate in this market. We should take steps to enable them to eliminate things.
The Criminal Records Act is what governs the pardon situation and there have been recent decisions that have pointed out that the ability to get a pardon is determined by the date of the offence. As a result, we've ended up now with a situation where, depending on how old your offence is, different rules apply under the Criminal Records Act compared to what's in the current version of the act.