Mr. Speaker, the answer is yes. That is what usually happened, especially with marijuana after about four or five years. It did not make sense. I remember people coming back from Acapulco with a small amount of marijuana because it was a lot better than what they could get here. Suddenly, they discovered they were facing a minimum sentence of seven years.
I think it perverts the legal system. The agreement was: “That is right, you will not be accused of possession even though it is for your own use. You will be accused of possession for the purpose of trafficking”. I remember it had become virtually automatic by a certain point. I evidently took the Crown by surprise when I said that someone had brought back a small amount of hashish from Morocco and had been accused of possession for the purpose of trafficking. I said I wanted to have a jury trial. I was told, “You cannot do that; we are not going to have a jury trial, because it is about possession for the purpose of trafficking”. I was convinced, though, that it was for this person’s own use.
Personally, I have never liked plea bargaining. I practised criminal law for over 30 years and I think it perverts the legal system. One of the things that plea bargaining leads to is not just the difficulty of introducing evidence but also situations like that one. Things like that will happen, inevitably.
Here is another example. When I started practising, there was a very strange charge in the Criminal Code of taking a motor vehicle without the owner’s permission. Fresh out of university, I innocently said to myself that taking a motor vehicle without the owner’s permission was theft and I wondered why this provision existed. It was because, for this offence, there was no minimum sentence of one year in jail. For automobile theft, a minimum sentence of one year in jail had been introduced. But then a problem had to be solved because it did not make sense to send too many people to jail. So another offence was created. It was exactly the same thing, except that in this case, there was no minimum. That is another harmful effect of provisions like these. They pervert the legal system.