Pubdate: Tue, 17 Jan 2012
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2012 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Chris Selley, Columnist 

IT'S A PERILOUS - AND POLITICAL - ROAD FROM EVIDENCE TO POLICY

Too much is being made of Liberals voting 77% in favour, at this past 
weekend's convention, to legalize marijuana. It is an excellent idea, 
and the resolution ticks all the correct boxes by way of justifying 
it: marijuana's widespread and safe use, revenue savings and 
generation through taxation, and the fact it would make Canadians 
safer from criminal violence. But the Liberals set off down this road 
in government twice, and never even made it to decriminalization. This 
is a non-binding resolution by a third party to do something somewhat 
more ambitious than it declined to do when it was the first party.

The Liberals' second decriminalization bill died with Paul Martin's 
government, and there has been near radio silence on the matter from 
the leader's office ever since. Stephane Dion steered clear of the 
issue. Michael Ignatieff cautiously admitted some interest in 
decriminalization, though he advised an audience of high school 
students in St. John's against "parking your life on the end of a 
marijuana cigarette." Bob Rae opposed the legalization resolution, and 
warned after its passage of "practical questions" in implementing it - 
that's if he or a future leader chose to implement it, of course, 
which he wouldn't have to and likely wouldn't do.

Mr. Rae's reticence is telling, considering his stated belief that the 
War on Drugs is a disaster and considering the Liberals reportedly 
spent much of the weekend discussing the idea of "evidence-based 
policy." It's a pithy phrase designed to distinguish themselves from 
the census-cancelling, criminologist-deriding, climate change-denying 
Conservatives. And it's an entirely worthy goal. The problem is that 
many Liberals present themselves as having already accomplished it. 
Ask a Liberal MP about climate change, harm reduction, crime policy or 
the long-form census, and chances are pretty good you'll hear that the 
Liberals are the party of science.

"I will never knowingly allow politics to trump science," Liberal MP 
and potential leadership candidate Marc Garneau wrote in September.

"Even if a particular policy position supported strongly by the 
evidence is way back in the polls, what's important is a conviction to 
fight for it until the public sees its truth," former Liberal MP Mark 
Holland told Maclean's John Geddes over the weekend.

What absolute twaddle.

This is the party whose health critic, Ujjal Dosanjh, co-authored an 
op-ed last year with fellow MP Kirsty Duncan pimping Paolo Zamboni's 
liberation treatment for multiple sclerosis and demanding the 
government fund clinical trials. They accused the Canadian Institutes 
of Health Research of striking an expert working group that was 
hopelessly biased against the Zamboni treatment, and that contained 
"no experts, no experience, and many undeclared conflicts of 
interests" - presumably with pharmaceutical companies, though the MPs 
weren't courageous enough to specify. (Amusingly, the expert working 
group ended up recommending clinical trials.)

This is a party that did nothing about climate change. But "it was not 
because it didn't recognize the scientific evidence," Mr. Garneau 
protested in September. The "mistake was not acting soon enough on 
what [the government] knew to be the truth." The functional difference 
is difficult to discern. And hang on - isn't it morally worse to do 
nothing in full appreciation of the consequences than in ignorance?

This is a party that ignores the modest crime-fighting case to be made 
for the long-gun registry in favour of shameless, hyper-emotional 
exploitation of the Ecole Polytechnique victims and, with respect to 
falling crime rates, the deliberate misrepresentation of correlation 
as causation. Mr. Holland is a man who, in 2009, stood up in the House 
of Commons and argued that the Conservatives should support the 
registry simply because the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police 
supports it. "To me," he said, "the debate should end there."

For the record, I think the Conservatives are somewhat worse than the 
Liberals when it comes to evidence-based policymaking. But we are 
dealing with levels of badness so far beneath acceptability that the 
distinction barely merits mention. In practice, the best we can likely 
hope for is a return to evidence-justified policy making. As in, here 
is the policy our pollster recommended, and here is some evidence we 
cobbled together to justify it. Sometimes, as with crime policy, the 
Conservatives don't even bother with that.

Chances are, though, that no mountain of evidence is ever going to 
contradict the man from the polling company, in any party, unless and 
until Canadian politics gets a lot less dumb than it is right now. 
Trying to make it smarter would be a welcome and worthy goal for the 
Liberals. But as Mr. Rae illustrated with his comments on marijuana, 
the road from evidence to policy will always be long, perilous and 
political. To pretend otherwise is to insult Canadians' intelligence.
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MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr.