Health committee  Good morning. Thank you very much to the chair and to the committee for inviting the Criminal Lawyers' Association to speak this morning on this very important act. I'm a former director of the Criminal Lawyers' Association, and I'm president of the Defence Counsel Association o

Health committee  I think the ticketing idea is a good one, as long as there are no criminal or quasi-criminal consequences. That's really what I would be concerned about: people incurring criminal consequences from a product that, in my view, should be subject to regulatory legislation governing

Health committee  Possibly in the regulations, and what I would like to see are some guidelines as to how officers are to exercise their discretion, particularly in the early days of the act until they become comfortable with moving into this new regime. Obviously I don't speak for the police, but

Health committee  Mr. Levesque, did you want to speak to that?

Health committee  It's really the quantum. Five grams for a young person will expose them to criminal liability, and for an adult it's 30 grams. An adult who is arguably more morally culpable is entitled to possess more; it sort of takes them further from the reach of the law. Admittedly, a young

Health committee  I can't really speak to what the legislators should do or what the intention is in the act, but clearly, at some point it should be contemplated that for behaviour which is no longer criminal, it would be in the interest of all Canadians that a pardon be made more readily availab

Health committee  Yes, but I also think that if you want to raise the overhead for organized crime, crippling fines would be one way of doing it.

Health committee  Sure. Just briefly in response to your earlier comment, Mr. McKinnon, our Supreme Court has recently made it easier for officers to testify as drug recognition experts without requiring a full litigation, a full voir dire, or a trial within a trial as to their qualifications. O

Health committee  If we're moving away from criminalization into what is essentially what I view as a regulatory model, it would be helpful to have some sorts of indicators within the statute itself as to how that discretion should be exercised.

Health committee  I wouldn't want the limit to be raised. I want to say that I'm a mom and a grandma, so really what I'm concerned about is kids getting caught up in the criminal justice system. I understand, by reading the act, that it is there because they don't want kids to be used by organized

Health committee  Those are excellent points that Mr. Levesque raises, but my concern about the ticketing provision was also echoed by him earlier. I want to know how those records are going to be kept before I endorse that position and whether they're going to affect.... Say the family is going t

Health committee  I think the bill is getting it largely right. My concern, and what I understand, is that the bill is trying to legalize cannabis use for ordinary Canadians. It also has a two-fold purpose of trying to eliminate organized crime, which until this point, because cannabis hasn't be

Health committee  That's an arbitrary example. The intent of the act is to eliminate the influence of organized crime. By trying to achieve both purposes, there's going to be a slight compromise. That's what concerns me, because some of that flows into criminalizing ordinary possession.