Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on Bill C-17, which has now become known as the bill to decriminalize marijuana. In its brief title alone it sends the wrong message to anybody who hears it, because obviously the bill is not to decriminalize marijuana. It is subject to certain conditions and amounts.
It leads me to phrase my comments in this sense. Since this is a brief debate to refer the bill to committee before second reading, where a lot more work will happen, I want to lay out a few of the questions I might have and hope that members of Parliament will consider the answers at committee.
I oppose the bill. I oppose the decriminalization. If we were to take a step here, let us not be coy. If 15 grams is okay, why do we not decriminalize it and let us deal with it. It really is almost like a step. Let us take a little step and maybe later on down the line we will see.
There are too many other questions that we have to ask. I have spent a lot of time with my own police chief talking about this. We are very concerned that this is the wrong message to send to our young people. This is the basis for my concern about the bill.
Here are a few points The Tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, content of marijuana today is about 10 times higher than it was 25 years ago. People talk about experimenting with it when they were in university. We could smoke a whole field of the stuff and it would not have any impact. Today it is different. We have to ask ourselves this question. Is a few grams of something with low THC the same as the same number of grams with a high THC? It seems to me that the level of THC content in terms of how many grams it is okay to have and then smoke really is relevant. I do not know why we have not talked about that. We know it impairs one's ability to operate machinery, et cetera.
Bill C-16, which is coming forward, deals precisely with how do we determine whether someone is impaired when driving a car, et cetera. We will probably spend about 75% of policing costs trying to find who is 15 grams below and those who are above. What a waste of money in my view. Let me pose that rhetorically. I cannot say it is a waste, but it seems we should find out whether it would be a waste.
What about customers versus the criminals? It seems to me that a young person in high school who wants some marijuana has to get it from somewhere. Under the law it will still be a crime to produce or to distribute. Therefore, anyone who will be using marijuana has to have obtained it from someone who is committing a crime. Most of it is coming directly and indirectly from grow houses which are controlled substantively by underground criminals, the Hell's Angels and the like.
The marijuana dollars will not go to finance fancy lifestyles for bikers. It will go to finance prostitution rings, loansharking and all kinds of criminal activities. We do not have to talk about the terrible situation we have around the world with this crime element. It is very concerning. A lot of things that are happening in the bill are on the backs of grow ops. It is like saying that we will deal with grow ops.
The bill is trying to deal with far too many questions and it is trying to resolve far too many issues. Maybe somebody at committee will ask this question. Why do we not come up with a bill that is focused and targeted solely toward addressing the issue of grow ops? Let us deal with it. Are there tools that are necessary to deal with it? I know we talked about infrared technology to detect heat in houses, et cetera. An important privacy issue comes up on that. It is an important debate and I think it would be lively.
There are 50,000 grow houses in Canada. Our objective should be to deal with that in a separate bill, not bury it in a bill with a bunch of other things. It is an important issue.
Is marijuana an entry level drug? I do not know of any expert who has ever discussed this who would deny that marijuana is an entry level drug. Do hon. members think that pushers just sell marijuana? Do they think maybe they could also sell some hard drugs? Absolutely.
I know a little about this. I chaired a committee for a couple of years that was studying Bill C-7 on controlled drugs and substances. I heard the RCMP and the various police agencies. I heard some of the proponents for the legalization of marijuana. I heard all this stuff over a two year period of my life. I came to the conclusion that people were not being honest with the facts.
What is going to happen? Even the former justice minister said that if we were to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana there would be a significant spike in marijuana usage. We need to find out whether that would be temporary or a reflection of the fact that we really were sending the wrong message and all of a sudden a whole bunch of other people are engaging in so-called recreational drugs. I do not know what recreational drugs are. It is just a fancy name that people use. It is drugs, drugs that impair one's ability. It is drugs that lead to other drugs that can harm not only that person but others. It harms all of society. There are some very serious questions here.
People talk about not wanting kids with records because they would not be able to get into the U.S. if they have a criminal record for the simple possession of marijuana. However I know what the facts are. Many of these people who have been convicted of simple possession of marijuana, those charges are also in conjunction with other criminal charges. It is not just people being charged because they had marijuana. It is because in the act of a crime other things were found. How much of that is there?
In a survey, which I read in the paper this morning, 10% of Canadians said that they had tried marijuana at least once in the last month. Well, excuse me, even if that is correct, that means that 90% of Canadians have not. Is 10% the threshold for us to say that we should decriminalize it for everybody? What is this arbitrary thing about 10% being socially acceptable? I do not accept that at all. I would challenge that. I do not think behaviour should be driven by a minority. Behaviour is the consensus. Consensus in our place does not mean 10%. It means the preponderance, the majority.
Drugs are in the schools in my own community. The teachers are concerned but they do not have the tools to deal with this. This is not going to help them. Our police chief needs to have his officers spending all their time trying to deal with these things. They cannot keep up with it because we have not enforced the laws. We have cases now where policing authorities are not enforcing even the current laws. Some courts have stopped opining on these cases because somebody sent them the signal that it would be changed, so why would they want to deal with those case. We have put ourselves in such a mess that I think it is time to question whether we are doing the right thing.
What would this do to our anti-smoking program? If people are going to smoke marijuana I suppose they could start smoking cigarettes too even if they are not smokers. It could happen. What are the numbers? We should find out.
I have heard a lot of people talk about a national drug strategy. This is something we have had for a long period of time. It covers a broad range of stuff, not only drugs but alcohol and tobacco. If we look at the programs, we have spent an enormous amount of money with a fundamental theme of healthy lifestyles, healthy choices. This bill leads us on another step of abdicating our position on healthy lifestyles, healthy choices. It creates some concerns. Where do we get a foothold on this whole question of decriminalization?
I would have much preferred, quite frankly, if the bill had been split where we could deal with grow houses and some of the serious issues and then be able to deal with the marijuana issue, but not decriminalize, because nobody understands the difference between decriminalize and legalize. It has confused the heck out of Canadians. We should have come forward with a bill to legalize marijuana and watched the House defeat that bill.