Mr. Speaker, I wish to applaud the government on finally coming out with a piece of legislation that in some ways goes back as far as the Le Dain Commission report which was 30 years ago. For all the people who are critics of the concept of decriminalization, this issue has been debated for far too long. I wish to congratulate the government for finally moving on this issue.
Let me go back 30 years when people who were charged with possession of marijuana would end up being incarcerated. They would end up losing their jobs and would have a criminal record that would follow them for the rest of their lives. This is a heavy price to pay for a young person trying to start out in life.
We have had hypocrisy around this issue. All we have to do is look at the former Prime Minister of this country who acknowledged having smoked marijuana, a former minister of justice who said that he has, in the past as a young individual, smoked marijuana, a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, acknowledged having used marijuana and the present President of the United States has also had some indulgence with drugs.
It is critical that we as a legislative body who want to have credibility with the young people in our country modernize the law. We should finally act on something that goes back 30 years and was put forward by the Le Dain Commission.
If I go back 40 years, and I hate dating myself, one of the favourite programs that we used to watch was The Untouchables with Eliot Ness. The reason I mention it is because at that time the Americans were dealing with a prohibition on alcohol. That prohibition on alcohol ended up spawning organized crime in the United States to the extent that it had not been spawned before. There were all sorts of organized cells right across the country involved in criminal activity. They were producing illegal alcohol which gave a tremendous boost to organized crime.
I believe that in any drug strategy that we undertake, one of the underlying pillars must be to ensure that organized crime is not in a position to profit from it. We know of the kind of destabilization when organized criminals get involved in the trafficking of drugs. I only have to point to what is happening in Colombia where the government is actually destabilized. I only have to point to Afghanistan and how drug activity ended up funding the Taliban. Often drug trafficking funds not only organized crime but terrorism as well.
By updating our legislation on the possession of marijuana, are we saying, as the opposition would have us say, that we are recommending its use, and that we are promoting it? No, we are not saying that any more than by having control on alcohol are we saying that we are promoting its use.
One thing we have learned as a society is that for our laws to be respected, they must have legitimacy in the population to which they apply. For too long and too many elections politicians have ignored what happened with the Le Dain Commission report and every other report that followed it. We have in place a law which criminalizes many young people. We have a law that is, in many cases, unevenly enforced across this country. Clearly, that is wrong. The law should be equal whether it is on the west coast, the east coast, central Canada, or in urban or rural areas.
The government must expand its involvement in the whole area of education through the national drug strategy. We have learned one thing in the last couple of decades and I will use tobacco as an example. Education on the harmful effects of cigarettes has resulted in a real reduction of tobacco products.
I believe that this law does not go far enough. I would like to see it go further. I would like to see government being responsible for quality control. If we do not have quality control, then we might be passing that on and allowing criminal elements to decide on the quality of the product.
The way we regulate alcohol could be a good model. There is no question that alcohol consumption has some negative social impacts. We all know that. We have people who end up in detox centres. We have people who become alcoholics. At least we have some resources, when we collect taxes, to deal with some of those problems. We can fund those problems along with some of the fallout from those problems. Unfortunately, that does not exist in the current bill.
In closing, I would like to reiterate that we have moved in the right direction. We have done something that will decrease much of the clogging that we have in the courts, and where police resources, which are scarce and stretched, could be put to better use.
It is time we had this piece of legislation. We must commit ourselves as a federal government to work with the provinces to put in place an education program for people who use marijuana so that they may understand the possible negative impacts and that we as a society also move in that direction.