Pubdate: Fri, 11 Jul 2014
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2014 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Chris Selley

IT AIN'T EASY BEING THE 'CHANGE' CANDIDATE

Remember when Jodie Emery, partner-in-activism and wife of Marc
"Prince of Pot" Emery, was going to run for the Liberals in Vancouver
East? "They approached me," she told The Georgia Straight last month.
(It wasn't clear who "they" were.) "I am officially a member of the
Liberal Party of Canada and I have been asked to put my name in to
take a shot at it."

"The Emerys are synonymous with marijuana legalization, so this would
be like an endorsement," she explained. "It would basically be to say,
'The Liberals support legalization.'"

"We'll be trying to get young people out," Mr. Emery
added.

The idea was daft, and the Liberals - excepting the aforementioned
"they" - clearly know it. Justin Trudeau is trying to sell
legalization to and from the abstemious political centre, not the
heavy-using, scofflaw one-issue fringe. If they're going to nominate a
prominent candidate to get slaughtered by Libby Davies, it probably
shouldn't be someone with a bunch of "big bong hit photos from the old
days" (as Ms. Emery put it to the National Post this week) just
waiting for the Conservatives to plaster on their mail-outs; someone
who posed in a bikini, lying seductively on a couch, in a Ron Paul for
President endorsement ("Liberty turns me on!" it says); someone whose
jailbird husband in 2012 wrote the following: "The two greatest
cultures ... that have done most to enhance the lives of people of the
planet in the last 100 or so years are the Jewish culture and the
cannabis culture, two historically demonized and persecuted peoples."

Indeed, the Liberals proactively disavowed the idea immediately. Ms.
Emery hasn't filed her nomination papers. And she's aware the
Liberals' famous "Green Light committee" will be casting a critical
eye over her when she does. I suspect it might produce an actual red
light.

But the Liberals have a problem here regardless. They can't stop "the
Emerys," as Ms. Emery calls them, from urging Canadians to vote
Liberal. They'll to stop them, if they're smart, but it's probably
already too late: The Conservatives won't hesitate to pin every
halfway controversial thing "the Emerys " have ever said or done on to
Mr. Trudeau. It could hardly play more perfectly into their existing
mantra that the Liberal leader, above all else, wants to ensure your
kids are baked from the moment they awake.

There's little to suggest that's working. But in an election campaign,
when more people are paying attention, the Devil You Know can gain
some allure. What Mr. Trudeau really needs is a pithy rejoinder that
says "marijuana is not as dangerous as Stephen Harper would have you
believe; nevertheless it's not good for you and our plan would make it
harder for children to obtain; and we'd rather be talking about other
things, because this isn't a priority for us." That's no mean feat in
a country that thinks of change in roughly the same way cats think of
rocking chairs.

And that brings us to prostitution, where the Conservatives have
another political advantage: Whereas Bill C-36 won't by any means
satisfy the prohibitionists (and any remaining libertarians) among
their supporters, it enjoys the ultimate benefit in Canadian politics:
As the bill's opponents keep telling us, it wouldn't really change all
that much in practice, for better or worse.

Given the divisions in the party, the Conservatives may not want to
campaign particularly hard on prostitution. But the opposition
leaders' positions on the file must make a tempting target. Mr.
Trudeau has in the past referred to "prostitution itself " as "a form
of violence against women," and said his party wasn't closed-minded
towards the Nordic model on which C-36 is loosely (some say badly)
based. But the Liberals are voting against the bill. Mr. Trudeau says
it doesn't do enough to protect prostitutes from violence, which was t
he Supreme Court's primary concern.

So what would he do differently? "We're looking forward to debating
and trying to push this government into improving [the bill] according
to what research and what citizen and advocacy groups across the
spectrum have talked about," he said recently. NDP leader Thomas
Mulcair has struck a similar note, urging the Conservatives to send
C-36 straight to the Supreme Court, so "we can all know whether we're
on solid ground." But what if the Supreme Court said it was
constitutional? Would all the bill's impassioned, placard-wielding
critics just shrug and go for coffee?

"Let the experts sort it out" isn't always an untenable position. But
it is on prostitution law. As Justice Committee hearings this week
have underlined, you can find research and advocacy backing up almost
literally any position on the matter. If this bill passes in its
current form, then Mr. Trudeau could conceivably be Prime Minister for
years before the Supreme Court tells us what it thinks of it. Surely
he wouldn't just leave this widely deplored law on the books in the
meantime, as Liberal and Conservative governments have done for
decades. He's supposed to be an agent of change, isn't he? That's not
all smiles and sunshine. In Canada, it's a heavy burden.  
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D