Cannabis: The CAQ Party Adopts A “Crack Pot” Policy

As we are about to legalize cannabis in Quebec on July 1st, 2018, the government must soon decide how this product will be sold legally.

With regards to its specific regulation, left-wing parties such as Quebec Solidaire and the Parti Québécois were expected to recommend granting the distribution and legal sale of cannabis to a state monopoly.

Indeed, these parties have an innate distrust of the private sector and a favorable bias towards the public sector, regardless of its shortcomings, its inescapable inefficiency and the shameless waste it creates.

It was also expected that the CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec), a center-right pragmatic party, would take up the opposite position of the spectrum and favors the private distribution of cannabis or at least be open to it.

However, on September 13, the CAQ caught everyone by surprise by unveiling an incredible “crack pot” policy: not only did it join the parties on the left, but to stand out more, it positioned itself as the most radically anti-cannabis of all parties.

It’s worth listening to the press conference given by MPs Simon Jolin-Barrette and Lise Lavallée of the CAQ that we inserted at the bottom of this article (in French only). The viewing may remind you of the cult TV series “The Outer Limits”.

Here are some highlights of what the CAQ Ayatollahs now recommend as a regulatory framework for cannabis:

• Entrust the distribution and legal sale of cannabis to the SAQ (Quebec Crown corporation with a monopoly on the sale of alcohol) through a subsidiary to be created (curiously, the SAQ is a crown corporation that the CAQ otherwise wants abolished);

• As in Ontario, selling cannabis in retail outlets other than liquor stores, but in limited numbers, during reduced hours of operation, and away from schools and daycares (as such, it is specified that municipal zoning laws should be reviewed);

• Increase the legal purchase age for cannabis to 21 years (while almost everyone agrees for 18 years);

• Ban any online sale of cannabis (despite the fact that there is no way to enforce that, but so what);

• Reduce the legal quantity of cannabis someone can own from 30 grams (federal law) to 15;

• Prohibit anyone from growing plants at home (federal law allows four plants of one meter in height each);

• Impose high criminal penalties on anyone who sells to young people who buys them without being of legal age or grows at home;

• Allowing landlords to prohibit the use of cannabis in leases;

• Adopt bland packaging for all cannabis products;

• Prohibition of any promotion and advertising of cannabis;

• Prohibition on the transportation of cannabis by any means between provinces;

• Repatriate all federal taxes collected for this product in Quebec.

First reaction: this plan is almost more repressive to cannabis than the current regime, which is no small feat.

Second reaction: to the alarmist, fateful and funerary tone used by the two CAQ MNAs, one wonders for a second if they did not confuse cannabis with fentanyl.

How many deaths did cannabis cause last year? Is it not zero or close to zero? And the alcohol sold by the SAQ? And the tobacco sold legally?

Faced with this fireworks of fines, prohibitions, controls and monopolies of all sorts, DepQuébec can’t help but offer some suggestions of its own to enhance this great program:

• Opening of the POT-SAQ stores from noon to noon to 5 only, that is to say, five minutes per day maximum, one day only in the year, ie February 29th.

• Maximum quantity sold per person is one leaf per month;

• Smoking a joint within a radius of 10 km from any potential child can get you a jail sentence of 99 years.

Joking aside, it is appalling to see how easily the CAQ is ready and eager to sacrifice fundamental liberties based on their moral precepts.

Did they realize that at the present time, cannabis is the illicit drug most often consumed by high school students? According to the Quebec Institute of Statistics, 23% have used it in the last 12 months of 2013 (ETADJES 2013). That is a quarter of all students. As for tobacco, a product sold legally but only to adults, the prevalence is at just 12% in 2013, or half the prevalence for cannabis!

The CAQ should know all this, but the party has gone astray, victim of the sirene songs of subsidized lobbies of hygienic purity of which it became the official mouthpiece and whose program it adopted word for word, like bland packaging.

And this is a pity for all Quebeckers who hoped to see in the CAQ a credible alternative to Philippe Couillard’s Liberals.

Because of this new “crack pot” vision, many people will judge them henceforth unfit to govern.