Reform in Canada Pretense & Perils

users. A competitive process for securing licenses to manufacture and sell can be
expected. Following that, there is the acquisition of financing and properties, acquisition,
installation and testing of production equipment, establishment of supply chain logistics,
and preparation of staffing for both production and retail. Security will also be an issue
in all aspects of the supply chain. The Final Report of the Task Force acknowledges
these complex post-legislative challenges:
“Success requires federal leadership, co-ordination and investment in research and
surveillance, laboratory testing, licensing and regulatory inspection, training for law
enforcement and others, and the development of tools to increase capacity ahead of
regulation.” (p 7)
8) It is also important to mention that there are international treaties that restrict
legalization of recreational cannabis among signatories of which Canada is one (Room
2012, p129). The treaties may very well be archaic, not evidence-based, and possibly
even counter-productive, at least in the case of cannabis. Nonetheless, they may
present a challenge for a prime minister who is a relative novice among world leaders,
and hopeful to secure a seat for Canada on the UN Security Council. Given this
aspiration, the prime minister may need to be concerned about the optics of ignoring
treaties – particularly treaties that (with the lone exception of Uruguay) have not been
challenged by his peers. Despite Canada’s bold statement of intent at The United
Nations General Assembly Special Session 2016, the meeting ultimately provided no
tangible progress in changing the prevailing international regime of prohibition that is
maintained by the treaties (Glenza, 2016).
What all this means is that recreational users will probably have to wait for quite some
time for the opportunity to purchase their cannabis legally. The rest of Canadians,
regardless of their specific interests in the issue, will also have to be patient. The actual
amount of time is difficult to estimate. In 2015, the Prime Minister acknowledged that it
could take up to “a year or two” (CBC, 2015a). In late 2015, Rehm (Rehm & Nutt, 2015),
probably more realistically, estimated that the wait could be as long as four years. If
correct, this would establish legal retail in late 2019. A very similar estimate has been
provided by an unidentified senior federal government official in a recent Globe and Mail
report (Leblanc, 2016). This report will now turn its attention to why a delivery date in
2019 poses a serious problem.
Our government’s campaign to reform cannabis law should be guided by a principle
borrowed from emergency medicine: first, stop the bleeding. The bleeding, in the case
of cannabis law reform, is the significant number of mostly young Canadians who
continue to obtain criminal records for simple possession of small amounts of cannabis.
Data from Statistics Canada (Cotter et al., 2015) suggests that in each of the years that
legalization is delayed, approximately 59,000 criminal charges will be laid for simple
possession of cannabis. The number of actual convictions that result in a criminal
record will be at least 22,000 per year. The continuance of prohibition could therefore
result, over the next three years, in a number approaching 70,000 before there is a legal
alternative to acquiring cannabis. The consequences are potentially devastating,
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