Public Safety committee  When they are arrested, some people may have committed other, more serious offences. But the police can choose to charge them with marijuana possession because the consequences for them are less serious. Those kinds of negotiations go on. Now that cannabis is legal, how are we going to make it so that people who have committed more serious crimes, but have the opportunity to get out of them by being convicted only of marijuana possession, do not slip through the net by applying for a pardon?

Criminal Code  To reduce this to a conviction of less than two years or a fine is totally unacceptable, especially from a government that legalized marijuana, knowing that Colorado and Washington saw a doubling of traffic deaths due to impaired driving. This is a step in the wrong direction and should be reconsidered. There is another one in the bill that talks about polygamy, and I am not sure why this one made the list.

Criminal Records Act  The Liberals said they were legalizing marijuana to take this money out of the pockets of organized crime and put it in the government's coffers. However, this was a false argument and a public relations exercise. We know that organized crime continues to sell marijuana.

Federal Trades Strategy  In 2016, they imposed conditions on health transfers. Then, they rushed ahead with the legalization of marijuana even though the provinces wanted more time. Then, they imposed the carbon tax on provinces like New Brunswick, which had already closed a number of coal-fired plants and significantly reduced its greenhouse gas emissions.

Expungement of Certain Cannabis-related Convictions Act  A case that makes this point is that of the Prime Minister's brother, Michel Trudeau, who escaped prosecution for marijuana possession 21 years ago because of the intervention of his father, who at the time was himself a former prime minister. Here is how our current Prime Minister put this in a speech two years ago.

Questions Passed as Orders for Returns  With regard to the use of prescribed medical marijuana by clients of Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC): (a) how many medical marijuana users are there, broken down by year from 2015 to present; (b) how many VAC clients are prescribed, on a daily basis, (i) three grams or less, (ii) four grams, (iii) five grams, (iv) six grams, (v) seven grams, (vi) eight grams, (vii) nine grams, (viii) ten grams, (ix) any other amount; (c) for each of the prescriptions in (b), what is the form of the marijuana being dispensed, namely (i) dried, (ii) oil, (iii) cream, (iv) suppository; (d) how many VAC clients are permitted to grow their own marijuana for prescribed medical use; (e) what evidence, reports, scientific studies or other studies have been used as a frame of reference to evaluate the use, prescription or denial of the prescription of medical marijuana; and (f) have any of the studies in (e) been used as justification for the government's proposed reduction of the maximum allowed amount of medical marijuana prescribed to VAC clients to three grams per day in cases where there is no medical approval for prescribed amounts of medical marijuana of over three grams per day?

Criminal Records Act  With a view to fairly implementing the new legislation in what should have been lockstep with the legalization of marijuana, the Conservatives are going to support this piece of legislation, but, as I said before, like so many other pieces of legislation that the Liberals implemented, we will fix it and clean up the mess.

Criminal Records Act  I think, in the case of cannabis possession, it is clear that our ancestors, those who came before us, did not make it legal because they felt it was morally wrong to ingest or use marijuana. They thought it was the best way to protect people from their own unwise instincts. It was a wrong move. It did not work. It ruined a lot of lives, but those people were not put in prison because they had done something that was evil or wrong or would harm the rest of society.

Criminal Records Act  If there is no reason to worry about that criminal record and it has nothing to do with their job, it should not matter to the employer whether they have a criminal record or not, but let us be honest: When a company is receiving 200 applications and notices there is a criminal record, it is very easy to put it into the “later” pile, because those are issues it does not want to deal with. Companies do not know that it may be a simple possession of marijuana, but it is a simple way of separating the good from the bad, even though the best employee may be lost in that later pile. Those are some of the things we have to understand. One of the key elements to this issue is poverty reduction.

Criminal Records Act  I have broken no Canadian law.” If the border agent asks it differently and asks if the person has used marijuana before, the person should also not lie. When I cross the border, I have the advantage of never having used marijuana. It comes in handy to be able to tell truth. However, everyone I have spoken to thinks that the danger is much greater for the scenario I am describing than the one the member is describing.

Criminal Records Act  Mr. Speaker, if we look back, the whole idea for legalization was to take marijuana out of the hands of kids and the profits away from organized crime, which we have not seen happening so far. In Oshawa, we had a horrible situation of kids taking marijuana edibles to school, and it was a big issue.

Criminal Records Act  Would my friend agree that we need to have some discretion in the application so that with administration charges along with simple possession of marijuana, someone might also be able to obtain a pardon under the bill? Would that not be a welcome change for those Canadians we are looking to help out?

Public Safety committee  The second part, where it becomes complicated with the human factor, is when you're trying to relate your charges to the possession of marijuana. The marijuana offence can always be gone with a button. We don't want to deprive everybody.... [Technical difficulty--Editor] Then it's up to the government to decide whether they're going to look further into filtered or peer-filtered compliance, and so on.

Public Safety committee  One of the things the officials told us last week was that there are about 250,000 Canadians, according to their estimates, who have a record for minor possession of marijuana and who might be eligible for these suspensions, yet only about 10,000 of these people might consider this process. Do either one of you have any thoughts on the accuracy of those numbers, based on your experiences?

Criminal Records Act  Madam Speaker, there has been a lot of debate about the question of the legalization of marijuana, but even many of those who supported legalization in principle identified the fact that the devil was in the details of this legislation. There are many problems with the way the government approached it, and residual concerns about impacts.