I think we should go further than that. If I were in charge, I would put GST on cannabis and for the first few years, I'd put that money into a fund to make reparations to those Canadians who have been unjustly imprisoned or had their lives negatively affected by cannabis prohibition.
I really think that the legalization of cannabis should begin with an apology to the cannabis culture and to cannabis users for a hundred years of punishment and incarceration and harassment and demonization that were entirely undeserved. Not for me personally but for the people in Canada who have suffered from this, I would like to see not only a pardon but an apology and some kind of restitution made. These laws have been unjust from the beginning and they remain so today. We've known for decades that these laws do not work and that they're a failure, and it's a real shame that people are still being arrested every single day.
A guy spent three nights in jail recently for a couple of grams of cannabis in Canada. It should be shocking to the conscience of parliamentarians that laws are in place that put people in jail for three days for a couple of grams.
They say that the time of greatest growth of cannabis use in Canada was in the 1960s, at a time when there was a six-month mandatory sentence for possession and a seven-year mandatory minimum sentence for growing or importing any quantity of cannabis. That was the time of the highest increase of cannabis use in our country's history. The idea that these laws have an impact on people's behaviour, and that if you say that you can't smoke cannabis anymore, we're all going to stop is entirely backwards. Now we're living under mandatory minimums that were passed by Stephen Harper in Canada. Those haven't stopped the proliferation of dispensaries at all.
I think you need to acknowledge the limitations of what Parliament and the police can do in this kind of a situation and write laws, craft laws, that acknowledge those and take those into consideration.