Madam Speaker, among its young people, Canada has the highest rates of cannabis use in the world. As a former teacher, I know that the member opposite would be well aware that the student drug usage studies indicate that close to 35% of young teenagers in high school are using this drug occasionally or frequently. This has been the situation for decades on our highways. What has been missing, what has been absent in the law and in the tools available to law enforcement has been the legislation, the technology, the training, and the resources necessary to deal with this situation.
As the government, we have made a commitment to law enforcement and we have met very extensively with law enforcement agencies. They have had legislation since 2009 that authorized drug recognition experts, but no funding was ever made available by the government of the day to support that. We have made a commitment to make sure that they have the technology, the training, the legislation, and the resources to do the job.
As this has been a problem for decades, I would ask the member opposite why he would be concerned that taking action now is not appropriate.