OTTAWA — The bill to legalize recreational cannabis has been one of the most fought-over pieces of legislation of Justin Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister, but now that it’s taken effect, much of the political opposition seems to have evaporated.
As the new law made its way through Parliament, Conservatives complained that the Liberals were moving too quickly to legalize weed. Tory health critic Marilyn Gladu went so far as to read out a cautionary poem in the House of Commons last December to express her displeasure (“The provinces and police in every town / Have all asked the Liberals to slow this bill down.”)
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“I think everybody got really excited about the idea of constitutional challenges without thinking about how long the practical realities of that were going to take,” said Kyla Lee, a Vancouver lawyer who specializes in impaired driving cases and testified at parliamentary committees about the new laws.
She also said that in her experience so far, police have been giving plenty of warnings and writing tickets under provincial law, but haven’t been aggressively pursuing the new criminal charges.
“My suspicion is that (police) are nervous about the constitutional integrity of these laws and if there’s an effective means of dealing with the public safety issue that doesn’t expose them to the risk of a constitutional challenge … they’re more likely to take that avenue right now,” Lee said.
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