Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here, and I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak today. It's an honour to appear before you.
My name is Donald MacPherson. I am the director of a new and emerging national organization, the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. I will keep my comments to those sections of Bill C-10 that are directly or indirectly related to drug policy issues.
The coalition is made up of civil society organizations from across the country that work to reduce harms from substance use and the drug trade in Canada. It includes representatives from the research community, front-line service providers, groups representing people who use drugs, parents, youth, academics, law enforcement, public health professionals, and others.
Our vision is to achieve a Canada that is safe, healthy, and just, in which drug policy and legislation as well as related institutional practice are based on evidence, human rights, social inclusion, and public health.
We applaud the government for making the health and safety of communities a high priority. We are concerned, however, that the government has it quite wrong in thinking that the proposed legislation will achieve these health and safety goals for Canadians.
We feel that this legislation will have no impact on community safety. In fact, it is more likely to create a decrease in community safety as: one, more individuals are incarcerated for longer periods of time and then return to the community with skills and social networks acquired in prison; two, organized crime adapts to the provisions in the legislation by protecting those at the top and sacrificing those lower down the ladder, as they have the resources to do; three, in the case of cannabis growers and dealers, the smaller, local suppliers will be more vulnerable to this legislation, and this in turn will deliver increased market share to the professional organized criminal gangs, increasing their profits and capacity to diversify and elude law enforcement—anyone who has spent time in the interior of British Columbia can tell you this; and four, increased law enforcement against drug markets leads to increased violence and a reduction of safety for Canadian communities.
To provide some context, the recent Health Canada survey in Canada found that 344,000 people in B.C. admitted to smoking cannabis in the past year. Considering an average expenditure of $1,125 per year by this group, this means that $390 million a year is going into the coffers of organized criminals and unregulated dealers from domestic demand in B.C. alone.
I'm going to read a couple of excerpts from an RCMP briefing note, which I have attached to the package I handed the clerk.
The overwhelming majority of crime groups in British Columbia are involved in some aspect of the drug trade, principally trafficking and distribution and activities related to drug trafficking including acts of violence, extortion, and intimidation. In some cases, the profits generated have enabled some criminal organizations to engage in other criminal activities, and [this] has allowed several of them to expand into other criminal enterprises that may have previously been well beyond their reach.
Concerning the outlook for violence:
There are signs of continued levels of influence, inter-connectivity and/or linkages between all the organized crime groups identified in British Columbia and with the criminal groups in other provinces and countries.
The expansion of organized crime groups/gangs to more rural areas of the province is expected to continue, because drug turf takeovers have been, on the whole, remarkably successful and there appear to have been only several rather short-lived clashes with the resident groups.
An overall decreased availability and increased price of cocaine, as well as internal and external disputes, retaliation for drug rips and debts, and competition for drug supply and turf, have been contributing factors to the spate of gang-related violence witnessed in metro Vancouver in recent years. On the whole, these incidents have been committed by, within and/or against the lower level associate ranks and there has been little effect on the criminal operations of upper echelon and higher-ranking organized crime groups.
The officer concludes with this statement:
Ironically, the criminal operations of the upper echelon players have not been...affected by the number of incidents of gang violence. On the whole, rivalry between upper echelon criminal organizations has not materialized and they continue to co-exist, overall, rather peaceably.
I'll conclude my statement by just saying that in the coming years the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition will be moving beyond the prohibition on discussing alternatives to our failed drug policies.
It is clear that we, as a society, are mixed up and do not have a clear understanding of the difference between harms that accrue from drugs and harms that arise from the policies we put in place to try to manage or control these substances.
Convening dialogue and discussion on alternatives to long-held beliefs and practices takes leadership and courage. In the best of all possible worlds, that leadership would also come from our elected leaders. It is the responsibility of parliamentarians—