Cannabis plants in a legal growing operation.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com
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The hippies won
Less than 20 per cent of Canadians smoke pot (Weeding Out The Problems With Legal Pot – editorial, Feb. 15). When the laws and investments are made by the 80 per cent with no understanding of the product or the customer, abject failure is inevitable.
There is no pot shortage. Prices are dropping. Licences are for investors who don’t understand that it will always be impossible to comply with regulations and be cost competitive with the incumbent producers who have no economic reason to disappear.
Investors trying to understand the pot market should ask the customers instead of the accountants. Send young researchers to visit as many bong stores as possible. Staff in these shops have tried the legal weed and discovered that it is high-priced and mediocre.
The young don’t care about the law. They will score from the dealer at the next locker, as they have since Grade 9. Organized crime doesn’t care. They gave up on pot in the eighties when it became a domestic industry they could no longer control (for the same reason government can’t control the market now – it’s too easy to establish a small, commercially viable enterprise).
Pot is not organized crime, it’s already one of Canada’s best small business opportunities.
We’re watching The Revenge of Cheech and Chong. The war on marijuana is over.
The hippies won.
Deal with it.
Alex MacDonald, Toronto
Fight to die
Svend Robinson recently invoked the spirit of his valiant friend Sue Rodriguez, who would have decried the denial of advance requests to persons suffering from dementia, the unduly restrictive “reasonable foreseeability” test, the exclusion of mature minors and persons living with an intractable, severe mental illness (On The 25th Anniversary Of Her Death, Let’s Keep Sue Rodriguez’s Fight Alive – Opinion, Feb. 9).
My dear friend Hanne Schafer, who became the first Canadian to receive a court-ordered exemption for assisted dying (during the four months prior to June, 2016, when Parliament decriminalized MAID), would echo these concerns. Hanne would, I am quite certain, also rail against the forced transfers that have occurred in faith-based units in Alberta that do not permit assisted dying in their publicly funded hospices.
The third anniversary of Hanne’s death this month is once more almost upon us. To honour these pioneers and others who have chosen to die prematurely because of inadequacies in the current legislation, Canadians could let the federal government know that we have waited long enough for legislation that permits those who qualify, choice with respect to when, where and how they choose to die.
Mary Valentich, Calgary
Too close to the police?
Re PCs Look To Expedite Probes Of Police (Feb. 15): So the PCs and Ontario Attorney-General Caroline Mulroney are working toward reducing police oversight. What about the members of the public who are abused, injured or shot by police? Where will they get the help they need to have their right to live without undue harassment, and to have police perpetrators held accountable?
The majority of the police are law-abiding citizens who only want to do the right thing, but there are those who abuse their power. Oversight is necessary; it needs to have teeth, so it can cut through the closing of ranks among officers to find and prosecute the offenders.
Without powerful oversight, some powerful individuals will always abuse the system.
Society cannot be overly worried that a few police officers are kept waiting or possibly made uncomfortable while the process unfolds. If you didn’t know better … you might think that Doug Ford and the Conservatives are a little too close to the police.
David Bell, Toronto
Climate arguments
Re Climate Change A National Threat: Lawyers (Feb. 15): If the federal government feels that it is necessary to have the final say over how climate-change issues are to be addressed in Canada, then there is no partnership between the provinces and Ottawa, as lawyers for the federal government have recently argued. One has domain over the other.
The federal argument that climate change represents a national emergency is unfortunately pretentious, since effective climate change will be decided by larger players such as China and the United States, not by any action that Canada takes.
Richard Murray, Barrie, Ont.
Business: here, there
The experiences of two global, too-big-to-fail companies, SNC-Lavalin in Canada and Huawei in China, seem to be revealing greater similarities than differences in their respective countries. Both companies appear to enjoy substantial financial and political support by their national governments, essential for their employment-creation and success at home and on the world stage.
It is also rapidly becoming evident that “political interference” in the operations and legal status of nationally important enterprises is not unique to the Chinese scene. Prime ministerial rhetoric on the Canadian side may need to be retuned in future to match this new reality.
Will Canada be able to continue to claim the moral and legal high ground in the ongoing negotiations around the fate of Huawei and other Chinese firms in future investment and trade deals? Or are we not, finally, comme les autres?
Judith Nagata, Toronto
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Routine training in dealing with corrupted business climates might be advisable for Canadian corporations doing business abroad.
I once participated in a NATO Advanced Studies Institute workshop on environmental-impact assessment, at the time a novel policy instrument being adapted by governments to evaluate the effects of large development projects. After a week of study, we engaged in a role-playing, mock environmental hearing for a hypothetical dam project in Asia, to give us practice in dealing with “real life” situations.
Three participants acted as members of the administrative tribunal. The rest of us became representatives for the proponents, government agencies, or public interveners.
Things nipped along smoothly until a U.S. participant, acting the role of an environmental NGO, began an impassioned critique of the dire consequences for villagers if the dam were built. Suddenly, one of the tribunal judges stood up, pointed his finger at the man, and barked out, “Arrest him!”
The man broke from his role with a “Whaaat?” The judge, in real life a respected conservationist from Libya, said, “We’re supposed to make this exercise realistic and it just occurred to me that if you dared to speak like that in my country, you’d be locked up.”
We decided it was a good time for a coffee break and some heated informal discussion.
Greg Michalenko, Waterloo, Ont.