Mr. Speaker, I rise again in this House to speak about Bill C-45, the cannabis act. One would think that once would be enough for a member to stand in this House to speak about it, but it is not. Bill C-45 is flawed. I am appalled that the Minister of Justice would present such an ill-prepared bill and arbitrarily force it on Canadians.
Last night I sat in on the debate on Bill C-46, which deals with impaired driving. If people are going to get high over Bill C-45, I can only say it is not going to happen with Bill C-46. One tends to get depressed dwelling on it.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and I are both former police officers with similar years of service, he an urban city police officer and myself a rural RCMP officer. My hon. colleague must be having difficulty over his party's two bills, and I really feel for him. Making marijuana legal in Canada is wrong. It is simply wrong. Those members across do not understand.
The 2016 report on legalization of marijuana in Colorado should have stopped the Liberals in their tracks, but it did not. Here are some simple facts. We heard a few of them earlier.
Traffic deaths have increased 62% since 2013. That was people using marijuana, by the way.
Use of marijuana by youth increased 20%, yet the American national average declined by 4%.
Do members know that in Colorado youth are ranked number one in the use of marijuana overall in the United States? If we go back to 2005-2006, they were ranked 14th. The education really worked well.
However, let us not blame the youth. Adult use is up 17% in Colorado since they brought the legalizing legislation out, and it has only come up 2% nationally.
Also, adults in Colorado are the number one users in the United States, but if we go back to the same years I mentioned with the younger people, in 2005-2006, they were only number eight. These numbers scare me. They are high.
Did members know that Colorado's adult use increased 63% in the first two years that marijuana was legalized there? That is 42% above the rest of the U.S.A.
I wonder what was causing their numbers to get higher. Oh, yes; maybe it was marijuana.
Did members know that the state of Washington has very similar statistics since it has legalized marijuana?
I have said it before and I will repeat it again. I spent 35 years watching the growth of marijuana use in western Canada from its infancy to what we see today.
Maybe a story or two may help convince our Liberal friends across the way. We all know about second-hand smoke. It is not good. I am just going to give members a scenario.
A group of 18-years-olds went out for a night to some community 100 miles or so from their town. Billy is the driver. He is the designated driver, because Billy does not drink, he does not use marijuana, and he does not use drugs. His carmates are Ralph, Jody, Jane, and Justine. Members might recognize some of these names. I am just using them for certain purposes.
They all celebrated for the night and smoked up a portion of each of their individual 30 grams of marijuana. They continued to do that as Billy drove them home, which was a two-hour drive back to their community. However, what happened was that 15 minutes from home, Billy overcorrected on a sharp corner and lost control, and the vehicle rolled. Billy had not noticed that their speed was at 150 kilometres per hour. None of the five made it home that night alive.
Most people would think that maybe Billy was an innocent person, but the smoke probably made him disoriented. We have not looked at that. The government has not talked about it. I am sorry to be so cynical and depressing, but that is the reality that this legislation will create in this great country of ours.
I have heard people talk about how the legislation will protect our children from organized crime. Well, if I was a drug dealer, all of my street people would be under the age of 17, and I would make sure they never carried more than five grams on their person. It would be a pretty safe way of doing business. That is the shocking part of it. The government has not thought about that.
While I was waiting to speak here, I read a story about an accident that happened in Colorado. It seems strange that it would happen there. A 20-year-old man was turning right on a red light. At the same time, an eight-year-old girl was crossing the intersection with her father. He ran over that eight-year-old girl, and she died under the right and left wheel of his F-250 Ford pickup truck. Actually, the driver never even noticed what he had done. It was only the waving of the father's arms that made him stop. The police arrived and tested him under the procedures that the government is talking about, a legal testing device, although we still do not know if that will be approved. The government is talking about it. We do not know what it will be calibrated to or what the legal limit for THC will be. However, in this particular case, the THC level was at 1.5, which is below Colorado's legal limit of 5.0. However, this person was still charged with impaired driving because the specialists—whom we so lack in this country—came to the scene and were able to verify and prove that this young man was impaired by the drug even though he was substantially under the limit set by the law.
The shocking part of all of this is that this young man was 20 years old, weighed 195 pounds, was on the varsity football team, was in the prime of his life, yet he was so impaired that he did not realize he had driven over a young girl, and he was at less than one-third of the legal limit.
Just imagine, Mr. Speaker, if it was you and your daughter, and the guy driving the vehicle weighed 120 pounds. What would he be at?
I have appeared in courts in British Columbia and given expert evidence as to the effects of alcohol consumption on an individual. I was a breathalyzer operator for over 20 years, and I know how it affects a person and how it is dissipated in a person: the lighter the weight, the greater the effect. However, I do not want to dwell on that too much.
Let us just take a look at one of the most recent studies done in the state of Washington, which states:
The percentage of drivers involved in fatal crashes who had traces of marijuana in their blood has doubled since marijuana was legalized in Washington state....
That has just recently come out.
The researchers also found that 70% of the drivers who failed these sobriety tests and whose impairment was attributed to marijuana by drug recognition experts still had blood levels of THC lower than the five nanograms, which is the level in the state of Washington.
I apologize for doing a bit of shock therapy, but I am appalled by the lack of common sense that I see across the floor, and people bringing legislation out when history shows us what is happening. I do not want to see that happen to my kids, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchild, who was just born.