Health committee  Before I begin, I want to extend my condolences to the family, colleagues, and friends of Arnold Chan, a member of Parliament who passed away this morning. I'm sure he will be greatly missed by his Ontario Liberal caucus colleagues and members of Parliament, who valued his though

Health committee  I have probably about two more minutes.

Health committee  It is always important to be mindful of the changes to come in how colonial legislation includes the impact on the first nations' ability to generate revenues to appropriately govern their nations. In conclusion, there are a lot of unanswered questions about how the legal sale

Health committee  Speaking to the issue of overrepresentation—whether it be in the child welfare system, the criminal justice system, and so on and so forth—we sometimes see society address the surface issues. We know for sure that when it comes to addiction, the addiction itself is only a surface

Health committee  Can you just give me the simple, one-line question, so I can answer it directly?

Health committee  That's a really good question. I want to make the delineation here between indigenous and first nations. It's an important one, as my friend and colleague sitting next to me stated. I must state that when it comes to first nations health, under Health Canada we have the first nat

Health committee  I'm not going to speak to the tobacco issue in that context, because that's not what I referred to in the context of tax. What I referred to was the instrument called CITCA, which is the agreement between Canada and Ontario on the harmonized sales tax and the point of sale tax ex

Health committee  I know the concern is the acceleration of the legislation. The word we're getting back is that, in the event a province or territory is not ready, there will be federal online dispensaries made available, and those will be regulated in their own right. This is going to become a

Health committee  To our knowledge, no, not to any great extent. There have been minimal notifications, but there clearly has not been a meaningful engagement. Let me qualify that. One way that the federal government tried to come in and speak on this issue was from the health perspective. As the

Health committee  No, they haven't, and again, it's going to be really critical. I would ask the committee to visualize where we're at as the Assembly of First Nations. We have been given many assurances by the Prime Minister and other line ministries on a number of fronts. Currently, there's th

Health committee  No.

Health committee  Right now, there are two reasons why people use cannabis. One is for recreation purposes, and the other is to medicate, so health and social. The numbers are glaring. There is obviously more use within first nations communities. Why is that? It is because of the social and legacy

Health committee  That's correct.

Health committee  You can just assume that some of these summary convictions and ongoing addiction problems of our young people, and being charged for breaches and for carrying marijuana, have created many issues in our communities. Because policing programs are not adequately funded, the training

Health committee  I think this year it's just timelines; we're mere weeks away from this legislation. The federal government has started off on a bad foot already. Our communities simply are not ready. There is a lot of education that has to happen at the community level and also in terms of the