I can't talk about this bill specifically, but what I can tell you is that I teach advocacy. The first thing I teach my advocate students is why we need advocates in the first place. Why do we need organizations such as this? If governments were doing their jobs properly and passing the right policy and right legislation, there would be no need for advocates within our society. The fact that we need advocates tells us something is not working.
One of the projects my graduate students did last year was to present to the Government of Alberta what they should do if they're going to go ahead with legalization. Their answer was very simple, that 100% of the revenues generated provincially and federally should be going towards mental health, addiction, and injury, because those dollars are not going to come from anywhere else.
You're going to create the greatest addicts in this country once that revenue starts coming in from cannabis. The treasury department is going to love that revenue. If you put that revenue into general revenue, the people who need it will not see it.
You cannot advertise your way out of this problem, because the bud producers of the world you'll see will have very slick campaigns that are going to try to normalize it. With the very fact that we have Ontario picking age 19 and Alberta picking age 18. I don't care what the other provinces pick. They're all picking them for political reasons. They're not picking them based on science.