Pubdate: Thu, 15 Nov 2012
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2012 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Chris Selley
Page: A6

TRUDEAU SHIFT ON POT BOLD, NOT CRAZY

Tells students he's in favour of decriminalization

It's not clear when Justin Trudeau had a change of heart on marijuana.
In January, he told an online news outlet that while he understood the
arguments against prohibition, he worried a lot about the social
impact of reforms. But on Tuesday in Prince Edward Island, he was very
clear to a group of high school students. "I think we have to
recognize first and foremost that the war on drugs, as it exists right
now, doesn't work," he said. "So I am a huge supporter of
decriminalization."

With that, the Liberal heirapparent has boldly realigned himself with
the Chretien-era Liberals of nearly a decade ago, and forsaken the
strange waffling of Michael Ignatieff - who once warned another high
school audience against "parking your life on the end of a marijuana
cigarette."

But then - are you sitting down? - Mr. Trudeau went even further.
While he didn't call for legalization outright, the Charlottetown
Guardian reports, he nevertheless articulated the case for it: If we
treated cannabis like tobacco or alcohol, he said, we could regulate
its content, tax the living bejesus out of it, remove criminal
organizations from the market at a stroke and prevent minors from
getting their hands on it. Well, exactly. For that matter, perhaps Mr.
Trudeau didn't have a change of heart. Perhaps he always felt this
way, but worried about articulating it. In any event, it's certainly
easier than ever before to oppose the status quo. Polls show a
majority Canadians are up for decriminalization - an Ipsos survey in
July found 66% in favour nationwide, and as high as 72% in the
Atlantic provinces. So from a strategic point of view, it should be a
reasonably attractive policy.

Meanwhile, to our south, 15 American states are effectively daring
President Obama to stop them from decriminalizing - and in the case of
Colorado and Washington, as of last Tuesday, outright legalizing -
marijuana. For progressive Canadians, this should be embarrassing on
principle. But it also partially neutralizes the hoary old platitude
that we can't decriminalize or legalize because the Americans would
freak out. Those 15 states include five border states, comprising 65%
of the frontier. If liberalized drug laws heighten the risk of
smuggling, Ottawa should be more worried than Washington.

These sorts of arguments are bland common sense to a great many
people, but as members of a third party at rock bottom, Liberals are
now free to accept them as epiphanies. Martha Hall Findlay, who threw
her hat into the ring this week, has been known chiefly since her
defeat in the 2011 election for two things: struggling to pay off debt
from her 2006 leadership bid; and authoring a paper demolishing the
case for supply management in Canada's dairy industry. That paper also
demonstrated that the political risk to parties proposing to end
subsidies was minimal.

This always made some sense, intuitively: Even in the dairy-rich
ridings, the vast majority of people are not dairy farmers, but rather
people who pay considerably more than they would otherwise for dairy
products. What kind of sad-sack campaign can't sell an end to that?
Likewise, marijuana decriminalization needn't be an especially bold
position, but rather a matter of giving the people what they want.
Properly managed, the Conservatives' fulminating opposition would be
an effective illustration of their mad crime policies.

Really, these two issues are low-hanging fruit. For a remodelling
centrist party, they should be no-brainers. But for the Liberals,
beholden as they have been for so long to so much conventional wisdom,
it feels like a reasonably promising beginning.
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MAP posted-by: Matt