WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN SMOKING?

Liberals will take time-out from going through the motions at their
convention today to debate a genuinely contentious issue - the
legalization of marijuana. Coming two days after the tragedy in
Mayerthorpe, Alberta, it would be a major embarrassment if a majority
of delegates voted in favour of the resolution.

This is unlikely - more than 50% of the delegates in the room at a
morning policy session workshop would have to back the proposal before
it is even eligible to make its way on to the main floor of the
convention. But the timing of the resolution is inauspicious and it
became the main focus of interest during yesterday's meander through
issues like the Lake Winnipeg watershed and port infrastructure.

Sensitivities over Mayerthorpe will likely smother a real debate,
which is unfortunate, given the apparently contagious nature of the
grow-operation problem. Opinion is diverse, ranging from those MPs
like Treasury Board president Reg Alcock who said yesterday he finds
the argument to legalize and regulate marijuana use "compelling";
through to Foreign Affairs parliamentary secretary Dan McTeague, who
is calling for stiffer sentences for grow-ops.

The legalization lobby is not limited to the lunatic fringers like
former Marijuana Party leader, Marc-Boris St-Maurice, who joined the
Liberals solely to further his single-issue obsession. Mainstream
members of the party are convinced that prohibition of marijuana today
is proving no more effective in reducing the role played by organized
crime as the ban on alcohol during the Prohibition era in the United
States. Their stance is backed by a Senate Special Committee on
Illegal Drugs report from 2001, which recommended a legalized system
under which production and sale of cannabis was regulated through licensing.

McTeague, on the other hand, is critical of the steps that the
Liberals have already committed to take in a bill currently before
parliamentary committee -- the decriminalization of possession of
small amounts of cannabis. In addition to decriminalizing possession,
it effectively permits production of three marijuana plants or fewer
and reforms the existing punishment for production by doubling the
maximum penalty from seven to 14 years.

McTeague said yesterday that the Mayerthorpe tragedy should be the
catalyst for a clampdown on grow-ops and the first step should be the
imposition of a minimum mandatory sentence of two to four years for
operators. "But it's taken the lives of several people before people
finally get it," he said.

The majority of Liberals likely echo the position of Transport
Minister Jean Lapierre who backed the decriminalization bill
yesterday, on the basis that possession shouldn't mean a criminal
record. "People not able to become a lawyer because they smoked a
joint. That's not right," he said.

As usual with the Liberals, this position has been carefully
calculated to appeal to the maximum number of voters, but designed to
be flexible enough to respond to the public's ever-changing mood.
Since marijuana use has doubled in the last decade (around 14% of
Canadians admitted to using it in the last year), the
decriminalization bill was in tune with the times.

But those times may be a-changing in the wake of Mayerthorpe. Anne
McLellan, the Deputy Prime Minister, foreshadowed a potentially harder
line yesterday when she said the "judiciary needs to reflect the harsh
realities of illegal grow-operations in the sentences they hand out."

This is long overdue. A recent study of grow-ops in British Columbia
found that prison sentences were handed out in just 18% of cases and
the average length of sentence was four-and-a-half months. Small
wonder that it's a short street in B.C. that doesn't have a Starbucks
on it, and an even shorter one that doesn't have a grow-op. When you
consider that B.C. Marijuana Party leader, Marc Emery, received a
three-month trafficking sentence for passing one joint to a supporter,
our judges appear to be the ones who have been smoking up.

But, while the judiciary has a role to play, it should be the
government that sets the tone. A minimum mandatory sentence amendment
to the decriminalization bill would be a good start in sending out the
message that Canadians are not willing to tolerate the rule of law
being desecrated by drug producers.