Mr. Speaker, my colleague and I served together on the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for a number of years, and he is a very honourable gentleman. However, he is part of a government that believes in policy-based evidence-making.
My colleague from Cariboo—Prince George asked for data, and I wonder why the government, when it legalized cannabis, did not look at other examples.
A CBC article from May 28 reads:
Marijuana grown in Colorado, the land of legal weed, is being smuggled out to states where it is still illegal....
[T]he government's goal was to regulate and tax a drug that was already widely used and to squeeze out dealers and traffickers in the process.
But law enforcement authorities in the state say legalization has done the exact opposite.
It goes on to say that the illegal trade in marijuana, whether it is legalized in Colorado, is “being driven by criminal organizations that grow weed in Colorado”. Furthermore, residents of Colorado are preferring to buy illegal cannabis, because it is often cheaper than legal cannabis.
Can my friend provide any data whatsoever to show that what happened in Colorado will not happen in Canada? In fact, it is happening in Canada right now.