Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand today to speak to Bill C-93.
I played a fairly significant role in the debates on Bill C-45 in 2017, because at that time I was serving as my party's justice critic. I recognize that the issue of cannabis reform has occupied the public sphere for quite some time.
I listened to my Conservative colleagues during the debate on Bill C-45 and in today's debate, and I note they favour a strong criminal justice approach. They admit that the problem in question has to do with concerns over mental health and youth getting inappropriate access to large amounts of cannabis. As we know, too much consumption of cannabis can have consequences.
I have always believed that the criminal law approach to drug reform and drug policy is in a sense like using a sledgehammer to hit a nail. I believe that if we want to talk about social and health problems, we really need to focus our policy tools and levers on making sure that our health and social services have the tools to provide not only education regarding the possible harms of over-consumption of certain substances, but also support services to people who feel they have a problem. We should remove the stigma of criminality and of being an outcast among a group of friends or family and community, so that people have the ability to get the help they need. I believe policies like this have been shown to be very effective.
With respect to the harshness of other drugs, especially given the opioid crisis and the heroin crisis, we can look to countries like Portugal, which have moved to a more social- and health-related policy for their drug problems. They saw significant results from that. Portugal went from being a country that used to have one of the highest rates of opioid deaths per capita in Europe to having one of the lowest.
When it comes to cannabis, I believe we had this debate, in large part, with respect to Bill C-45. Bill C-45 did not necessarily legalize cannabis, but rather made it less illegal, because in the provisions of Bill C-45, the consequences for stepping outside the boundaries of the law are in fact quite severe.
I come from a part of the country where attitudes toward cannabis possession and use are quite liberal. Many people on Vancouver Island, and indeed in British Columbia, have long regarded the crime of cannabis possession and use to be outdated and belonging in the previous century. Of course, we are very much looking forward not only to seeing the law reformed but also to seeing the injustice of the criminality addressed.
Unfortunately, when we look at the timeline, it is quite obvious that the Liberal government has not treated this particular issue of Bill C-93 with the seriousness it deserves. As my colleagues will remember, when Bill C-45 was introduced, it was already April 2017. I believe that particular bill received royal assent later that year. However, it was not until October 2018 that it had its provisions for coming into force. In other words, we were well into the third year of the government's mandate before Bill C-45 came into effect and cannabis use and possession were legalized.
Another problem is that police in different jurisdictions in Canada have different approaches. I have spoken to members of the police forces in Vancouver Island, whether in the RCMP or in municipal police forces, and they always tell me that with their limited resources, they have always had far bigger problems to go after than cannabis possession. By and large, when they have caught people with cannabis, they have usually just seized it and told them to please go on their way and not do that in public. However, we know that in other parts of Canada, the full force of the law has been brought to bear on people who possess even tiny quantities of cannabis.
Despite the record and the fact that the government has admitted this is a problem and has acknowledged the injustices, it is only now, in the dying days of the 42nd Parliament, that we are actually dealing with a bill that could have a substantive effect.
The government still has a very heavy legislative agenda before it. The House has just recently passed a motion to extend its sitting hours. We know that the other place, the Senate, is certainly showing true to its form as a new independent body. There is a lot of government legislation that is really up in the air right now, and I am not quite sure that Bill C-93 is going to have enough time to reach the finish line. Moreover, I think it does far too little.
The member for Victoria had a perfect blueprint for the government to follow in the version of Bill C-415. Rather than going through the pardon process, as Bill C-93 is doing, his bill would seek to expunge all previous crimes of personal possession from the record.
I like the word expungement, because it has an air of permanence about it. Expungement basically means that the crime never occurred. It is completely erased from the record. We have something that is now legal in Canada, and we have acknowledged the injustice of it, so it should be expunged from the record of any person who may have been charged with that crime back in the 1970s and 1980s. Such individuals could truthfully state to any official that they have never been charged with or convicted of such a crime.
The problem with a record suspension or a pardon, and we use those words interchangeably, is that the record is going to be set aside but would still exist. Moreover, when travellers go to other countries, such as the United States, which has very harsh drug laws, there is nothing in the bill that would actually tackle the problem of the United States still having those records on its systems. That, indeed, is a big problem.
The major criticism I have of the Liberal government is that instead of going all the way, it often resorts to half measures. We had a beautiful opportunity before us in this Parliament, through Bill C-415, to substantively tackle this issue.
My party, the NDP, has a long history of fighting for this issue. Just in this Parliament, if we go back to June 2016, we used one of our opposition day motions to fight for decriminalization. The Liberals have always argued that decriminalization is not an effective policy, but we always argued that it should be a policy that is employed as an interim measure as we went on to legalization. If we had had that in place for those three years, a lot of Canadians could have avoided those run-ins with the police and with the criminal justice system, which I think many in this place can agree has far bigger problems to deal with using its limited resources. We raised this, as I mentioned, in the debate on Bill C-45 and, of course, through Bill C-415.
I can recognize that there are parts of this proposed legislation that will certainly have a benefit for some people. However, that is precisely the problem: Not everyone is actually going to take advantage of the provisions. It is nice that the fee is going to be waived and that there is an expedited process, but still there is the problem of going through that, and the fact that some people have greater resources than others and will be able to benefit from this much more. I still think expungement would have been the better route, and I will remind my constituents that there was one party in the House of Commons that was fighting for expungement.
I cannot give my support to a half measure, not when we had a better option before us. Therefore, on principle, I will vote against this legislation. I will vote against it because there was a better way, and I am not going to let the Liberal government get away with another half measure without firmly standing in my place on behalf of my constituents and voicing my displeasure at the loss of what was a beautiful opportunity.