Health Committee on Sept. 13th, 2017

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Okay.

[John Conroy]

We've had people doing it for now over 12 or 13 years, and we don't have any bodies.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Under the recommendation, Mr. Dickie, I'm a bit concerned about there being prohibitions on rented dwellings. I don't know this, but I would suspect that some of the more vulnerable communities are renters, not homeowners. It's sort of putting them more out into the market versus being able to do this at home. If the legislation permitted it, would the landlord-tenant things allow collective growing in a storage area, say, in apartment buildings? I don't think the legislation permits that right now, but would that be a way around the concerns of each apartment having its own four plants and the odours that come with it?

[John Dickie]

Yes, it would be an improvement if that could be done.

Again, that would be a way for the demand to be met by.... Landlords are certainly in this business. We provide housing for people, and we do it very cost effectively. But the motivating factor is, frankly, to make money. If the customers want to be able to grow, and the landlord has unused space in the basement or can throw a chain-link fence around a plot on the outside, in many areas of Canada, then that would be a way to allow it to be done at the building without being done in the unit and bothering the neighbours.

Again, it's come up today. Mr. Conroy raised it with me before we began. Yes, I like the idea.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Your time is up.

We're moving now to our three-minute round, with Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Dr. Page, my research indicates there are three basic strains of marijuana: indica; sativa; and ruderalis, or hybrid.

Interestingly, sativa is the strain that grows tall and thin. Indica is the type that tends to be shorter and bushier. My research indicates that it's the indica, the shorter bushier one that produces the higher yield than the sativa, which grows tall and thin. Ironically, it seems that by putting a 100-centimetre limit on a plant, we are actually enshrining the type of plant that will produce more yield, based on this arbitrary notion of height, than the indica plant, which will grow taller and produce less. Am I missing anything there?

[Jonathan Page]

I hadn't thought of it that way. Yes, in general, as I mentioned before, the science is still out on this indica-sativa split and how it relates to the effects of the plant. Generally, yes, this taller, lankier, open-flowering sativa type can be lower potency than the dense, squat, wide-leaved indica type.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

There seems to be a pretty clear connection between height and yield. I'm just talking about yield.

[Jonathan Page]

Yes, and indica—that type of short, squat plant—is the backbone of the commercial cannabis industry, legal or otherwise. So yes, by enforcing a height limit, there will be potentially a higher yield in that area than these taller plants, though you can get high-yielding indica types as well.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

I thought you gave very interesting testimony on the issue of research. We're restricting home cultivation to four plants. I've got your testimony that you think it should be more than that, perhaps 10. Then we have the producers who will be applying for licences, I presume for commercial growing. But in terms of researchers at universities who may want to be growing plants for research and experimental purposes, would you suggest that we amend this legislation to provide a clearer section on that, to make sure researchers can actually get access to grow the kind of cannabis they need to do the research we all want done?

[Jonathan Page]

Yes, adding that to the legislation would be beneficial. Some of these things have been treated in regulations. Currently, under the narcotic control regulations, licensing and exemptions for research are delineated, but it has been the case that we just don't have the research that we need. Dr. Mark Ware indicated the same thing around clinical studies.

Enshrining it in legislation and being very clear in the act that access to the cannabis plant, be it for the plant science side or the constituents for research purposes or trials, is necessary. I agree it should be amended; that would be beneficial.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

The last word to you, Mr. Conroy. Is there anything you would like to add?

[John Conroy]

We don't have time for anything I'd like to add.

As I say, where are the bodies? After all these years we don't have any of these problems that many people have talked about. For a long time now, we've had many people producing for medical purposes. We've managed to iron out some of the kinks as we go along, and that's what we're going to have to do here.

Certainly, the act doesn't address all of the issues, and you have a problem in terms of source regarding the 12- to 17-year-olds, even though I agree completely that it is a good thing in order to avoid them being stigmatized for the rest of their lives as a result of cannabis.

If you look at the big picture in terms of how many people have been involved in this over the years, sure, we have a legitimate basis to be concerned about certain things, but we don't have many of these problems occurring on the ground. We've been able to sort them out, and I think we can sort them out in the future.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

That completes our official round, but we have 20 minutes left. We have time for a first round with five-minute questions if that's the wish of the committee. Is that the wish of the committee? All right. We'll start again with four questions, and the questions will be five minutes, starting with the Liberals. Is there any Liberal who is ready for questions? Everybody's good? Okay.

We now go to the Conservatives, to Ms. Gladu.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I have a couple of questions. I share the concern that Mr. Oliver raised earlier about the potential of having 600 grams in a home-grow operation. I'm not so concerned about kids eating. I'm more concerned, especially with the 12- to 17-year-olds, that they're going to try to dry it, roll it, and smoke it.

There are no provisions that I can see in Bill C-45 about protected storage. Mr. Page, are there best practices in terms of how you would recommend storing this material to keep it out of the hands of children?

[Jonathan Page]

One of the things about the experience Mr. Conroy referred to in medical cannabis is that people have now been receiving cannabis or producing it themselves and there are lock boxes and other sorts of small safes that can be put in people's houses. Certainly, with the opiate epidemic that we hear so much about, there has been a move in households to make sure teenagers can't get access to pharmaceutical drugs in medical cabinets. The same thing may apply to alcohol and liquor cabinets in someone's home, that there should be some control over them. I think cannabis is very similar to those two areas that we already deal with. I think it's up to each family, and the age of the children in the household, how they deal with security. Certainly, best practices could include a small safe with a combination or a key to make sure, and there's also childproof packaging.

Outside of personal cultivation, receiving samples, whether it's LCBO or online via producer, in packages—the same as a pill bottle—obviously a teenager can open childproof packaging but younger kids can't.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

My second question is for Mr. Conroy. It is about the time it will take for the provinces to introduce legislation. We've heard concerns today that in Ontario and Quebec, the landowner or landlord will not have any right to prohibit somebody from having a grow-op or smoking marijuana on their property if the provinces don't introduce legislation.

Similarly, if we talk about trying to make sure there are regulations that keep the smoking of cannabis in the same light as the smoking of tobacco, where it's allowed and not allowed, how long do you think it will take provinces to get that kind of legislation in place, if they started today?

[John Conroy]

It shouldn't take them very long. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic process in terms of passing regulations.... You don't need to go through the legislature or Parliament to pass regulations. It's always a puzzle to me how long it takes for them to do things. We heard them go on about how they're not going to be ready and they need more time. The provinces have said the feds have to tell them more about road safety. I know you're talking about that next week in terms of the impaired. On taxation, we have examples of how we tax tobacco and alcohol, HST, GST, and so on, so I don't understand what the difficulty is.

The training of distributors, they said. Well, we've got existing distributors who know what to do, and that's why we need to bring them in and regulate the existing market instead of trying to reinvent it.

Public education was the other one the provinces raised. As I said, there's more information about cannabis out there than any other drug in history, given all of the royal commissions of inquiry and other things that we've had, as well as evidence in court cases. In R. v. Malmo-Levine; R. v. Caine, the Supreme Court of Canada heard all the evidence that came from three cases that went all the way up, and there were findings of fact by judges after hearing expert witnesses, like you've heard, and them being examined and cross-examined, and made findings of fact, one of them being that marijuana is not addictive. That's because of the scientific definition—

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

I think I've got the answer on the amount of time. It'll take a lot of time.

[John Conroy]

But it shouldn't take a lot of time. The defect or the problem is in the process as opposed to the subject matter.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Very good. That's it for me, thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Dr. Page, I want to ask you your opinion on what production policy would look like in an ideal world. I've heard concerns from a number of people that they don't want to see production limited to so-called “big weed”, big, mass, corporate growers, but that they want to see space in the production world for the small growers, the boutique growers, the craft growers, as it were, to make an analogy to craft beer. As a person who has done a lot of research into the different kinds and strains of cannabis, what's your view on that?

[Jonathan Page]

Some of the information we have around this is from the current medical system, where we have some very large producers licensed and also some small mom-and-pop-style producers under licence. There's a general feeling that the illicit world, which includes many small growers, primarily in British Columbia but elsewhere, has been excluded. The fact is that they don't have the wherewithal to produce the security or they have legal issues that have been held against them, and there have been delays in licensing that have led mainly to the large producers with very deep investment funds to build facilities.

What we need to do in the commercial sense, outside the personal cultivation subject of this hearing, is to have an ecosystem in the same way we have with beer or wine, where you can have Molson and that type of thing as big ones and also have smaller producers that are equally well regulated, with testing applied and securities around there, that we also have regulations and legislation that encourage those small ones to get involved in this industry and not make the cost of start-up so steep or the regulations so strict that we exclude those small producers.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thanks.

Mr. Conroy, we're calling this bill the legalization of cannabis, but what we're really doing is making it less illegal.