Pubdate: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 Source: National Post (Canada) Copyright: 2014 Canwest Publishing Inc. Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286 Author: Chris Selley IT AIN'T EASY BEING THE 'CHANGE' CANDIDATE Remember when Jodie Emery, partner-in-activism and wife of Marc "Prince of Pot" Emery, was going to run for the Liberals in Vancouver East? "They approached me," she told The Georgia Straight last month. (It wasn't clear who "they" were.) "I am officially a member of the Liberal Party of Canada and I have been asked to put my name in to take a shot at it." "The Emerys are synonymous with marijuana legalization, so this would be like an endorsement," she explained. "It would basically be to say, 'The Liberals support legalization.'" "We'll be trying to get young people out," Mr. Emery added. The idea was daft, and the Liberals - excepting the aforementioned "they" - clearly know it. Justin Trudeau is trying to sell legalization to and from the abstemious political centre, not the heavy-using, scofflaw one-issue fringe. If they're going to nominate a prominent candidate to get slaughtered by Libby Davies, it probably shouldn't be someone with a bunch of "big bong hit photos from the old days" (as Ms. Emery put it to the National Post this week) just waiting for the Conservatives to plaster on their mail-outs; someone who posed in a bikini, lying seductively on a couch, in a Ron Paul for President endorsement ("Liberty turns me on!" it says); someone whose jailbird husband in 2012 wrote the following: "The two greatest cultures ... that have done most to enhance the lives of people of the planet in the last 100 or so years are the Jewish culture and the cannabis culture, two historically demonized and persecuted peoples." Indeed, the Liberals proactively disavowed the idea immediately. Ms. Emery hasn't filed her nomination papers. And she's aware the Liberals' famous "Green Light committee" will be casting a critical eye over her when she does. I suspect it might produce an actual red light. But the Liberals have a problem here regardless. They can't stop "the Emerys," as Ms. Emery calls them, from urging Canadians to vote Liberal. They'll to stop them, if they're smart, but it's probably already too late: The Conservatives won't hesitate to pin every halfway controversial thing "the Emerys " have ever said or done on to Mr. Trudeau. It could hardly play more perfectly into their existing mantra that the Liberal leader, above all else, wants to ensure your kids are baked from the moment they awake. There's little to suggest that's working. But in an election campaign, when more people are paying attention, the Devil You Know can gain some allure. What Mr. Trudeau really needs is a pithy rejoinder that says "marijuana is not as dangerous as Stephen Harper would have you believe; nevertheless it's not good for you and our plan would make it harder for children to obtain; and we'd rather be talking about other things, because this isn't a priority for us." That's no mean feat in a country that thinks of change in roughly the same way cats think of rocking chairs. And that brings us to prostitution, where the Conservatives have another political advantage: Whereas Bill C-36 won't by any means satisfy the prohibitionists (and any remaining libertarians) among their supporters, it enjoys the ultimate benefit in Canadian politics: As the bill's opponents keep telling us, it wouldn't really change all that much in practice, for better or worse. Given the divisions in the party, the Conservatives may not want to campaign particularly hard on prostitution. But the opposition leaders' positions on the file must make a tempting target. Mr. Trudeau has in the past referred to "prostitution itself " as "a form of violence against women," and said his party wasn't closed-minded towards the Nordic model on which C-36 is loosely (some say badly) based. But the Liberals are voting against the bill. Mr. Trudeau says it doesn't do enough to protect prostitutes from violence, which was t he Supreme Court's primary concern. So what would he do differently? "We're looking forward to debating and trying to push this government into improving [the bill] according to what research and what citizen and advocacy groups across the spectrum have talked about," he said recently. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has struck a similar note, urging the Conservatives to send C-36 straight to the Supreme Court, so "we can all know whether we're on solid ground." But what if the Supreme Court said it was constitutional? Would all the bill's impassioned, placard-wielding critics just shrug and go for coffee? "Let the experts sort it out" isn't always an untenable position. But it is on prostitution law. As Justice Committee hearings this week have underlined, you can find research and advocacy backing up almost literally any position on the matter. If this bill passes in its current form, then Mr. Trudeau could conceivably be Prime Minister for years before the Supreme Court tells us what it thinks of it. Surely he wouldn't just leave this widely deplored law on the books in the meantime, as Liberal and Conservative governments have done for decades. He's supposed to be an agent of change, isn't he? That's not all smiles and sunshine. In Canada, it's a heavy burden. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D