Mr. Speaker, I thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health for his good work on the health files and for his interest with respect to addictions.
As I indicated, with respect to the production of scheduled drugs, such as cannabis and marijuana, which is what I think the member for Western Arctic was most concerned about, aggravating factors have to be present.
Those aggravating factors, as I indicated, would be that the person used real property that belonged to a third party to commit the offence; the production constituted a potential security, health or safety hazard to children who were in the location where the offence was committed or in the immediate area; the production constituted a potential public safety hazard in a residential area where the person placed or set a trap.
With respect to trafficking, often rental properties are converted into grow operations. When those grow operations are dismantled by law enforcement, or simply because of the amount of electricity and humidity that are required to grow cannabis--I have read about this; I do not have any direct experience--often there is serious damage to the drywall and often to the structural foundation. When there is damage to real property, that is an aggravating factor that causes the aggravating sentence provisions to kick in.
Just to clarify, possession is not punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence; it is possession for the purposes of trafficking.