Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak in the report stage debate on an act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, which pertains mainly to the establishment of mandatory minimum sentences related to drug trafficking and the drug trade.
We are debating a specific motion that was moved by my colleague from Vancouver East, which would delete clause 3 from the bill. This section deals with nine mandatory minimums, eight of which deal specifically with marijuana.
It is pretty important that we talk about this because many Canadians have great difficulty with our existing marijuana laws. It has been an area where there have been many suggestions over many years about necessary changes to our laws, especially with regard to marijuana. Going into the area of mandatory minimum sentences around marijuana is something with which many people will have difficulty.
One aspect that I am particularly concerned about is the effect this law, should it pass and should this amendment fail, will have on compassion clubs that provide medical marijuana to thousands of Canadians. When other drugs, and more dangerous drugs, have been ineffective in treating their medical condition, the use of marijuana in various forms has been successful and extremely helpful to them.
I have visited the Green Cross Society in Vancouver and I have had friends who have dealt with the Compassion Club in Vancouver. I know of many instances where the use of marijuana has been extremely important to the successful treatment of a range of diseases. It has allowed people to get on with their lives in ways that other therapies and other drug therapies have been unsuccessful or more dangerous for them. It is very concerning to me how this law will complicate the services provided by compassion clubs.
What I find most disconcerting in this debate, however, is the inability of the government to provide any evidence whatsoever that mandatory minimum sentences will have the kinds of effects that it says they will in controlling the drug trade, for instance. The Conservatives have been asked numerous times to provide one study, any evidence of that.
When the minister appeared before the standing committee reviewing the legislation, the member for Vancouver East asked the minister this question and she received no response whatsoever. In fact, the member for Vancouver East asked the Minister of Justice no less than six times to provide evidence that mandatory minimum sentences were effective in dealing with drug crimes, that they actually worked, that they would have any of the benefits that he proposed. Six times he did not answer the question.
He did say that Canadians supported this approach, but he offered not one shred of evidence that mandatory minimums would have any effect on the drug crime situation in Canada. Probably he was unable to do that because such evidence just does not exist.
Why is the government hell bent on following this course of action when there is no evidence that what it has proposed will actually address the concerns of Canadians in this regard? It is unfortunate that we are going down this road when we cannot prove there is any efficacy whatsoever that the measures will have any effect on the situation at all.
On the other side of the argument about the ineffectiveness of this kind of regime, there is scads of evidence. In fact, at committee, Craig Jones of the John Howard Society talked about 35 peer reviewed published studies that showed mandatory minimum sentences had no effect and were completely ineffective in dealing with drug crime. He tabled 17 of those studies.
There is a whole body of evidence that shows this is the wrong approach in dealing with drug crimes. It is completely ineffective to deal with drug crime.
We have had many examples. We have seen the example of the United States, which got heavily into mandatory minimum sentences around drug crimes. The Rockefeller laws, as they are called, were introduced in New York state in the seventies. They have had exactly the opposite effect and have been completely ineffective in dealing with drug crime.
Other states moved away from mandatory minimum sentences because all they did was fill their prisons and they had no effect on the social conditions and on crime statistics. It has been tried in many jurisdictions and it has been a failure.
It is inconceivable that the Conservatives would go down this road at this point when there is such a body of evidence to the contrary of the effectiveness of this kind of legislation. As I said, the government and the minister have not provided any evidence whatsoever that this is an appropriate approach to deal with drug crime in Canada.
There are other options. Other countries have taken different approaches. One clear example is Portugal. In 2001 Portugal, in a nationwide law, decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. It was a decriminalization, not a legalization regime. Portugal remains the only European Union state with a law that explicitly declares drugs to be decriminalized.
Recently a study was done by Glenn Greenwald, for the Cato Institute, on Portugal's drug laws. I would recommend it to all members and to anyone else listening in on this debate to see exactly what has happened in Portugal.
One of the things that Mr. Greenwald does in his recent study is analyze the empirical data around this change. This is what he had to say about Portugal:
—the...empirical data...indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although postdecriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug-related pathologies—such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage—have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens—enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization.
Here is a different approach of decriminalization to drug laws, a far different approach than the Conservative government is taking in Canada, which has had success. The empirical data has shown this to be a successful approach to all the goals we seek for Canada such as decreasing drug use, crime, deaths from drug use and sexually-transmitted diseases, all kinds of positive value out of taking this kind of approach.
Others have done the analysis. They have compared alcohol prohibition to our drug prohibition policies. They have shown that the alcohol prohibition, which we know to have been a huge failure in North America, had all the same problems that drug prohibition has today. The measure that we are debating today falls clearly into a prohibition category of legal approaches.
We need to take that history seriously. We need a government that is willing to look at that history, to analyze it and act in light of what we already know in terms of how these kinds of policies affect drug policy and drug crime.
We know we will not change drug crime and gang crime in Canada unless we go to the profitability of the drug trade in Canada. There is nothing in the legislation that addresses why people make so much money selling drugs in Canada. There is nothing in it that says that somebody we put away for a minimum mandatory sentence will not return to the drug trade after that. In fact, a lot of them do return to the drug trade afterward, with a better network and with more skills from having been in prison.
However, the other reality is the person we send to prison on a drug trafficking charge is replaced almost immediately by another person who is willing to be involved because the profitability is so high. Until we grapple with how we address that issue, we are not going to make progress on dealing with drug crime in our society and dealing with the other issues that stem from it.
The government can show not one scrap of evidence that the approach to using mandatory minimum sentences is going to improve our society and is going to meet any of its goals, let alone the goals of Canadians, with regard to drug crime. That is the key reason I will not be supporting the legislation.