Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to this bill because it is important. While I do support it, I have some reservations, and we need to ask a lot of questions.
Why is the government choosing to do this?
The member for Vancouver Centre said clearly in her speech that unlike alcohol or tobacco, using cannabis could be justified for certain medical conditions.
I do not understand why the government did not decide to make marijuana an over-the-counter drug instead of legalizing it for recreational use. That option could have been studied, but apparently it was not. It could have been safer for people to go into a pharmacy if they wanted to buy marijuana and speak to a pharmacist every time. Marijuana could have been an over-the-counter drug.
This substance can interact with medication and other health conditions. Speaking of recreational usage, the government is trivializing the possible side effects associated with the drug. This approach and word choice is unfortunate. In a good many cases, recreational usage is not limited to having fun. Many people have told us that they use marijuana without a prescription because they have a hard time sleeping and it helps them fall asleep.
These people are not using marijuana for fun. They are using it to treat a health problem. They are self-medicating. “Recreational use” implies that anyone who uses marijuana without a prescription is assumed to be doing so for fun. That trivializes marijuana consumption and causes a problem.
Some of the bill's provisions will be difficult to act on because they are so vague. They lack clarity. For example, the bit about people being allowed to own four plants up to 100 centimetres is not very clear.
First of all, who is going to go into people's houses and measure those plants? Second, what if the plants are two centimetres too tall? Will the offending centimetres have to be cut off? Is there a fine per centimetre?
There are a lot of factors to consider here, and a bunch of measures that will be hard to implement because nobody has come up with concrete ways to implement them.
I mentioned the plant height, but who is going to be responsible for going to people's houses to see if they have four plants or not? How is that going to be monitored?
This is very complicated, and it downloads a lot of responsibility onto the provinces. I mentioned the $74,000 paid to an outside consulting firm to find out what marijuana sells for on the street so some kind of pricing scheme can be developed. The government gave a consultant a contract and then ended up telling the provinces to set their own prices.
That is a pretty strange way to do things. There is going to be a lot of pressure on the provinces even though they were not necessarily consulted during the process. The government put all of this out there expecting the provinces to do all the work.
The biggest problem was that a health problem was being treated as a crime problem.
This resulted in young people having a criminal record. It also put pressure on the judicial system, which is ongoing, because we were still prosecuting people for simple possession of marijuana for personal use. The biggest problem is that we are clogging the judicial system. In light of the Jordan decision, it is even more important to eliminate from our courts cases that should not be prosecuted and could be handled differently.
In my opinion, drug use should be viewed as a health issue. We must provide the tools to fight addiction, do screening tests, provide support for prevention, and provide clear guidelines to health professionals so they know what to do.
At present, we do not have a lot of information about marijuana and medical marijuana. For example, we still do not know the exact profile of drug interactions. We know that cytochromes affect metabolism, but we do not know which ones. Although we know something about it, the profile of drug interactions is still not completely understood. We often look to past cases rather than a complete biochemical analysis. Thus, there is a lot information missing.
The most serious shortcoming of the Liberal bill is that it does not leave enough room to do an about-face. Once it becomes legal, the product will be on the shelves, companies will have been set up, and there will be an important lobby. We will not have the breathing room to gradually move forward with the bill. We go straight to legalization whereas we could have gone step by step, with the first step being the decriminalization. Then, we could have gradually moved forward if legalization were required. At present, we are heading straight for legalization, a commercial legalization that is going to create companies and lobbies. It will not be easy to reverse this legalization.
Even though I support the bill, I think the government's approach does not leave a lot of room to manoeuvre. We will be stuck with this decision without really knowing if it was the best way to proceed, when what the government could have done was simply decriminalize marijuana immediately and stop treating a health problem like a crime problem.
What we have here is a bill that raises a lot of concerns. Unfortunately, there are some answers we will not have until well after the bill is passed. Once the law has been in force for a few years, we may start to realize that legalizing marijuana too quickly caused some problems, but by then it might be too late for a do-over.
Globally, we do not know exactly what the impact will be in jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana because the measures have been in place for just a few years. Some of these measures may be re-evaluated in 10 or 20 years, but by then it may be too late to take action.