EVIDENCE

Standing Committee on Health NUMBER 066 1st SESSION 42nd PARLIAMENT Wednesday, September 13, 2017 Le mercredi 13 septembre 2017 Standing Committee on Health CANADA [Recorded by Electronic Apparatus] EVIDENCE September 13, 2017 Committee Edited Evidence * Table of Contents * Number 066 (Official Version) Official Report * Table of Contents * Number 066 (Official Version) Témoignages * Table des matières * Numéro 066 (Version officielle) 66 13 09 2017 2017/09/13 08:35:00 House of Commons Comité permanent de la santé Standing Committee on Health HESA Chair Mr. Bill Casey 42 1

(0835) [ English ]

The Chair (Mr. Bill Casey (Cumberland—Colchester, Lib.)) :

Good morning. Welcome, everybody, to meeting 66 of the Standing Committee on Health. I'm looking forward to an interesting day today. Our first panel is on household cultivation of plants. It's one of the more interesting and controversial topics we have on this subject, so we certainly welcome our panellists to help us through this. Our guests today are, from Anandia Labs, Jonathan Page, who is the chief executive officer; as an individual, John Conroy, a barrister; and from the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations, John Dickie, who is its president.

We'll ask you to make a 10-minute opening statement, and limit it to 10 minutes, after which we'll ask several questions. I'm going to start with Mr. Page, to open with a 10-minute statement.

Mr. Jonathan Page (Chief Executive Officer, Anandia Labs) :

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the committee for the invitation to speak on this important topic. It's really an honour for me to be here. I'm a scientist who has worked on the cannabis plant for more than 18 years. My research is mainly on the biochemistry and genetics of this very fascinating plant, and I'm very familiar with its cultivation, both in a scientific context and then in the new commercial industry we have in Canada.

I'm also an adjunct professor in the botany department at the University of British Columbia and am the founder and CEO of a cannabis testing and biotechnology company in Vancouver called Anandia Labs. There's a lot to speak about, but I've confined my comments specifically to the subject of cultivation of cannabis, hopefully to educate and eventually answer some of your questions. I think it is fundamentally important that this legalization include the ability to grow cannabis for personal use. I was happy to see that Bill C-45 included some provision for this.

The cultivation of plants is a foundational aspect of human culture. In fact, the advent of agriculture via the domestication of plants has been one of the key forces in the creation of human societies. Cannabis has been grown by humans for thousands of years as a source of food, fibre, and drug. Given the long-standing relationship between humans and cannabis and the fact that we will soon be allowing adults to consume it legally, it is important that the cannabis act allows Canadians to grow the plant.

The absence of personal cultivation from the act, as for example might occur if the provision were stripped from Bill C-45 in response to pressures from law enforcement, would surely lead to Canadians facing fines or charges for the simple act of planting seeds. I also think we are dealing with a relatively small number of people who may choose to cultivate, since most consumers of cannabis would rather purchase from a store. This is the same situation as with the home-brewing of beer or making wine. I suspect we will not see apartment buildings overrun by cannabis gardens.

The fact that Bill C-45 includes allowances for personal cultivation doesn't mean everything is fine. There are a number of points that cause me concern. Bill C-45 restricts the number of plants that can be grown for personal use, with a limit of four plants per household. I see the purpose of this restriction in that the ability to grow larger numbers of plants might result in diversion into an illicit commercial market. Indeed, all the limits of plant cultivation, including plant height, plant number, and seed possession limits, appear to have reduction in diversion as their main goal.

However, these limits expose the awkwardness of applying strict legal

definitions to a living organism, a plant, and might criminalize Canadians who are simply gardening. The proposed limit of four plants per dwelling doesn't take into account the practical challenges in growing plants or the biological characteristics of cannabis. As I think every gardener or farmer knows, plants are difficult to grow and might fail to thrive or might succumb to disease. In growing tomatoes, one might sow a dozen seeds on a windowsill and select the foremost robust plants to transplant to the garden. Cannabis plants may be male or female, with the male plants unusable as a drug.

Without cross-seeds, which are a proportion of the seeds that are available, 50% of the plants will be males and therefore discarded. In many cases, cannabis cultivators maintain so-called “mother plants” to be used as a permanent source of cuttings, producing so-called “clones”, which are vegetatively propagated cuttings to be used for growing, and then have one or two plants in flower at one time. In my opinion, the cultivation limit should be adjusted to account for these non-flowering and non-producing plants required for normal cultivation practices.

In fact, Bill C-45 already distinguishes between non-flowering and flowering plants. Therefore, I would propose that the act be amended to allow adults to grow perhaps 10 plants in total, of which four may be in flower. This allows cultivators the flexibility to grow for personal use without running afoul of the law. I also want to address the limit on plant height of 100 centimetres, or about three and a half feet. Cannabis is a highly variable species, and I have seen plants of 30 centimetres that are flowering, and others that are several metres tall.

The limit of 100 centimetres is potentially problematic from the perspective that cultivators might break the law simply by providing fertile soil and water and then going away for a week's vacation. Their plants might grow from 95 centimetres to 105 centimetres during that time. I wonder what the goal of the 100 centimetre limit is, which was also contained in the legalization task force report. Is it to reduce the amount of cannabis that each Canadian is capable of growing so they don't go on to sell it, or is it to reduce the visibility of plants grown on private property?

If it is the latter, I think this is best dealt with by municipal bylaws. If it is the prevention of diversion to the so-called black market, I would suggest that achieving this through enforced pruning is quite silly, and that the 100-centimetre height limit should be removed. I also wanted to comment on the awkward treatment of cannabis seeds in Bill C-45 . Cannabis seeds are individually smaller than a peppercorn, weighing about 15 milligrams each and are devoid of cannabinoids such as THC. Yet

schedule 3 of Bill C-45 indicates that one seed is equivalent to one gram of dried cannabis. One gram of dried cannabis may contain up to 250 milligrams of THC and is fully usable as a drug. Bill C-45 proposes that this is equivalent to a single small seed that is not useable as a drug at all. The possession limit in public is therefore 30 seeds or about a thimbleful. Since there will be limits on the number of plants that can be grown, this equivalency factor seems very arbitrary. Cannabis seeds for the purposes of personal cultivation should not be restricted at all.

The cannabis act also makes a distinction between illicit and licit products, which also applies to seeds and plants. Under the ACMPR, our current medical regulations, patients and licensed producers may only purchase seeds and clones from licit sources, yet most of the patients choose to source their seeds and clones from the Internet, store displays, and trade with other growers. All of these are considered illicit. Licensed producers are also under very tight restrictions on the access to cannabis genetics used for starting their commercial operations.

As any plant breeder will tell you, genetic diversity is important. The genetic diversity of cannabis is important for its future breeding and improvement. We need to make sure that the regulations—I respect the fact that this may not be in the act itself but in regulations arising from it—need to allow broader access to sources of cannabis genetics without criminalizing growers who use their own heirloom seeds as starting materials. On the commercial side, licensed producers also need to access a rich supply of cannabis genetics, which now exists in Canada and around the world.

I have a brief comment on quality-control testing. My laboratory in Vancouver does a lot of this work. Cannabis can be safely grown at all scales, and the cannabis produced by home-growers is no more dangerous than the tomatoes, basil, and lettuce that others grow at home. There are always hazards inherent in gardening, and careful application of fertilizers, manure, and pest control products is always advisable. That said, allowing everyone access to accurate quality-control testing by certified testing labs will help to ensure the safety of the product.

This is currently the case for patient growers under the ACMPR, and access should be continued and expanded under legalization. The last point I'd like to make is from my perspective as a scientist who has done research on cannabis for many years. My request to the government as legalization and regulations are crafted is to allow our scientists to work on cannabis. Cannabis is a plant that in many ways has been left out of mainstream science because of prohibition and restrictions on research. As far as I know, there are currently no Canadian university labs licensed to grow drug-type cannabis or marijuana.

So we have more than 200,000 authorized patients as well as 56 or 58 licensed producers, and yet our universities are lagging behind. On Monday in this panel, Dr. Mark Ware made a strong statement about Canada's leadership in cannabis research from plant science to clinical trials and epidemiology. I echo his thoughts and add that if we allow cannabis to be grown in our homes and sold in our stores while keeping it out of our university, government, and private-sector labs, then we will not maximize the benefits and reduce the negatives arising from legalization. Mr.

Chair, I conclude by saying that I support this bold policy move. The time for legalization has come. Bill C-45 is not perfect, but I am sure your committee will recommend changes for improvement. Thank you very much.

(0840) The Chair :

Welcome, Mr. Conroy. We're anxious to hear your opening remarks.

Mr. John Conroy (Barrister, As an Individual) :

Good morning. As a lawyer, it's always hard to confine oneself to 10 minutes; I'll do it. To use the metaphor yesterday of travelling on the plane, I've been on this plane for almost 45 years. There have been a number of times when I thought we were going to run out of gas, with various other proposals that have come up in that 45 years, but I think we are coming in for a good landing. It's certainly not a perfect landing, from my point of view, but I think it's going to be a safe landing. We will have some bumps, obviously, along the road.

My experience with this started not long after I was called to the bar in 1972, when the interim Le Dain commission report was tabled. It recommended that the government hybridize, create

summary conviction and indictable offences for trafficking back then. It's only just being proposed now, some 45 years later. It recommended the maximum penalty be five years imprisonment, not 14, as you are proposing now, some 45 years later. In terms of the public education issue, there are studies that go back to 1894, the Indian hemp drugs commission, and you can take seven or eight royal commissions that led up to Le Dain before that. There is more information out there about cannabis than any other drug, if you want to use it for public education, which I understand is one of the concerns.

I was born in Montreal, but after a couple of years, my father, who got a degree in agriculture from McGill, went out to the colonies, so I grew up in central Africa. It wasn't long before I realized that some of the Africans smoked something called dagga, which was cannabis. Years later, my father told me that if he saw a marijuana plant up in around the tobacco plants, he would pull it up and throw it on the ground, as he was a consultant on the growing of tobacco. I grew up in a situation where there wasn't this concern about cannabis as a problem.

When I came back to Canada and started practising law in the early seventies, it wasn't long before I was in front of judges who would drink booze after court and pop Valium, but they would actually sentence people to prison for simple possession of cannabis and lecture them about it. The hypocrisy of what was going on, at that period of time, was something that certainly motivated me, in terms of the cases I was doing. In those early days, we didn't have people growing marijuana. The market was coming in from Los Angeles, as Arlo Guthrie said, or we used to get it from Thailand, Colombia, and so on.

They were all big import cases. It was only over time, with the ingenuity of Canadians, people figured out how to grow it indoors and create something called B.C. Bud, which became popular. We became an export economy after we had been an import economy for years. I can remember one of my first growing cases was a young man who decided to grow a few plants out in his yard in Clearbrook, B.C. The police didn't know how to operate their own camera, so he helped take the pictures for them.

When we went to court, they were actually dragging the plants along the floor and people were scooping up the material behind them. That was in the mid-seventies. That was the nature of what was going on, in terms of the production of cannabis in those early days, which has of course changed substantially ever since. In those early days, I used to have drug squad, other police officers, and fellow lawyers come up to me and tell me I was trying to ruin a good thing by speaking out and that saying it was crazy for us to use prohibition on this subject.

Now, at least I have the police coming up to me often, saying that they hope we win. Things have changed considerably since those old days. I was counsel in R. v. Malmo-Levine and R. v. Caine, which was the challenge to prohibition, which went to the Supreme of Canada in about 2003. I incorporated the BC Compassion Club Society about 20 years ago and it's had senators, members of parliament, and many others go through it and compliment it on the way it operates, including the recent task force. I was also counsel in Allard.

(0845) You should have a five-page

summary that I put together, as well an appendix, which are the excerpts from the court on the issue that you've asked me to address, which is the household cultivation. I should step back and give you history, which some of you are probably aware of. When the BC Compassion Club Society first started, the patients had an authorization under

section 53 of the narcotic control act, which at that time authorized practitioners to give, sell, administer, or prescribe any narcotic to a patient for a medical condition that they were treating them for. That was the basis for the Compassion Club, which was checked out by the police and everything in those days, and allowed to continue. Subsequently, there was the Parker case here in Ontario, which determined that a medically approved patient had to be given reasonable access.

When the government of the day ultimately determined that the marihuana medical access regulations, MMAR, was the way to do that, and that compelled people to.... The only source was for them to grow for themselves or have someone grow for them. While we attempted to convince the government in those days that they should allow somebody to grow more so we would have fewer grows, they said you can grow for two, instead of one. We went back to court to say we should be able to have more in one place than just one or two grows, and they said you could have four.

We did make efforts to try to have people grow for more people so we'd have fewer home-grows, but the number of home-grows went to some 38,000 by March of 2014. That was the situation we were faced with when a new government decided it would introduce the marihuana for medical purposes regulations and take away that right to grow or the designated grower, which had existed for some 10 years. We went to court and got an injunction from Justice Manson in March of 2014.

That basically allowed those who had a grow licence under the MMAR to continue to do so, as long as it was valid on September 30, 2013, and their authorization to possess had to be valid on the date of the injunction, which was March of 2014. We then continued with the case, and ultimately Justice Phelan, in the Federal Court, ruled that indeed the new regulations were unconstitutional because they failed to provide reasonable access.

The evidence from the patients was that they would go to a licensed producer, maybe get what they wanted the first time, and then get on a waiting list and be waiting to receive, in the mail, their medicine, which they needed. It wasn't working. The evidence established that the patients voted with their feet and went to the dispensaries. There were only a few of those in the early days, the Compassion Club being one of them.

However, suddenly there was a huge increase in the number of dispensaries, because those people in the business of trying to sell cannabis and make money out of it figured out that this was where to go. The same then happened here in Ontario, particularly in Toronto. The surge in dispensaries occurred, and it established—I think as Jonathan Page said earlier—that most people don't want to grow for themselves or have somebody grow for them, they want to be able to go to a store to purchase and get information and not just wait to get it in the mail. That's the current situation.

I have a minute, so I'll just jump to the topic. In the context of that case, which deals with the entitlement of medically approved patients to have reasonable access and includes their ability to grow, we were faced with the police, Corporal Holmquist, and Chief Len Garis from Surrey, vocal opponents of home-grows, going on about fire, mould, public safety, and so on. We established, as we do in trials after examination and cross-examination of the witnesses, that they lacked credibility totally. Justice Phelan found that Holmquist was totally biased and not to be credited, as was Chief Garis.

We clearly established that all of these things in a legal market can be reasonably and safely done. All of the evidence they relied upon was from the illicit market, where people were cutting corners, staying underground, and not complying with anything.

(0850) Today, the inspectors I deal with in local government tell me that the last thing they want is to go back to those old days. The big issue nowadays is not a great problem in terms of fire, electrical safety, mould, and so on. They're very easy to deal with. The most common complaint is smell, so stinking out the neighbourhood or not impacting your neighbours is the critical thing that needs to be addressed. I want to very quickly, then, close by saying that Mr. Dickie and I managed to chat a bit before coming in.

He represents the apartment owners and I support what he says in the sense that, again, you don't want to allow people to do things where they may put their neighbours at risk or impact negatively on their neighbours. But you can't just sit back and say, well, then, we're going to prohibit it, because that will not work. It hasn't worked for as long as I've been practising. I think you're going to have to look at Washington state community gardens, or something. Most people don't have a dwelling-house, as the act defines it, with some land surrounding it, and so on.

You're going to have to figure out something so that they'll be encouraged to do it in a safe place. We do have bloom boxes, which are engineered solutions, but most people can't afford them and they'll take up most of the apartment. I think reasonable regulation is what we want, but we're heading in the right direction. Thank you.

(0855) The Chair :

Thank you very much. Now we have, from the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations, Mr. John Dickie.

Mr. John Dickie (President, Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations) :

Thank you, Mr. Casey. I appreciate being invited to speak here, and I'm glad to do so. As the president, I'm really the executive director of CFAA. I'm also their housing policy analyst and their government relations specialist. Our association represents the owners and managers of close to one million rental homes across Canada. The total rental sector across Canada consists of close to four million rental homes.

They range from close to one million apartments in high-rise buildings, a little under two million apartments in low-rise buildings, and then various other low-rise rental units—duplexes, triplexes—and some 525,000 single-family homes that are rented. You can drive down a street in a city and think it consists of owner/occupiers, but, in fact, depending on your city—in Toronto six or seven of those homes may be rented even though they're single-family homes, and in other cities it may be one or two or three or somewhere in between. Let me give you a bit about me, as well, as Mr. Conroy did. I'm 61.

I grew up in Montreal, and I remember the Le Dain commission. I remember how remarkable it was that the government had given Mr. Le Dain, they hoped, the job of condemning marijuana and what the young people were doing, and Mr. Le Dain and his commission came back and said that non-medical use of drugs was not the biggest problem, and that it was alcohol. It was a little bit shocking to a number of people at the time. As I've grown up, I certainly have experienced people using marijuana, and some of them use it and there's absolutely no harm whatsoever.

I know a fine young man who uses it in that way, smokes it once a week, and he's fine. My daughter, on the other hand, also dated a person who was also a fine young man, except that he is now afflicted with schizophrenia, and that may have been brought on because of his smoking marijuana as a teen. There's a whole range of reaction to this and the way it works. One other bit of personal background is that besides representing CFAA, I am by profession a lawyer. I, in fact, am one of the experts on residential tenancies law in Ontario, and with my law partner I've written one of the leading texts on that subject.

So Ontario residential tenancies law I know extremely well. The residential tenancies law of the other provinces I know reasonably well as well. I'll go back to multiple-dwelling units. Multiple-dwelling units are a living environment that is different from single-family homes. In a single-family home essentially what you do really affects only you and your family. It doesn't affect other people,

whereas in an apartment, what you do very much affects other people, and affects your neighbours. That has to do with noise. It has to do with anything that produces smells in your apartment, and certainly safety in your apartment. If as a homeowner you break the rules and don't have a smoke alarm, the people you're going to kill are you and your family. If you don't have a smoke alarm in your apartment, you may very well kill half a dozen people in a building. Landlords are empowered to stop those activities that are safety hazards or that interfere with the neighbours.

It used to be that second-hand smoke fell into the category of an interference that no one could address. People just had to put up with it, but that's not the case anymore. I know we're not here to talk about smoking, so I'll leave that subject, but it is certainly a concern for our members and neighbours of people who will be consuming marijuana by smoking it as opposed to ingesting it. The various provinces have a number of bans on smoking tobacco. I would certainly hope that they would ban smoking marijuana in those same locations, such as the common areas of apartment buildings in Ontario.

But that's a provincial matter and this whole business is very complicated because of the provincial-federal interface. Our position, as an organization, is that we would like to see more restrictive limits on growing in rented dwellings in order to protect the owners' interests and the neighbours' interests.

(0900) At best, we would see a federal ban. It probably doesn't need to be an offence subject to a term of 14 years of imprisonment, but a federal ban would be our first preference. That is because of the fire safety issues with electrical overloads, the humidity—and so, safety to the building—and certainly the smell through cultivation and its impact upon the neighbours. That would be our first preference. However, I'm here, and all of that is set out in the submission, with information that comes from the website ilovegrowingmarijuana.com.

Until 12 months ago I wasn't much of an expert on marijuana, but I certainly went to that site and found it extremely informative. I found what in law one would say are admissions contrary to interest. If the marijuana proponents say there's a problem, well, there's a problem, and they say there's a problem with smell and a problem with electrical, and they say there can be a problem with humidity. There are ways to address those things, but they all involve changing the physical building,

whereas our buildings are not built to do that, and we are not mandated typically to change our buildings to address those things, other than in the case of accommodation under the Human Rights Code for the medical users. For the medical users we may have to do certain things, but for recreational users we're not required to make those changes. At least, we never have been before this law came forward. In terms of compromises or suggestions, as a kind of fallback position I think our members would be willing to see a regime in which growing was allowed in rented dwellings with the consent of the landlord.

Then you could have landlords who had smaller buildings or weren't worried about the ventilation or had good electrical systems who could allow it. Tenants who want to grow would be able to find their accommodation there. On the other hand, landlords who aren't able to deal with this situation, who aren't willing to invest the money, and who aren't willing to disturb their other tenants could decline consent. Beyond that, the federal legislation could enable the provinces to establish a regime to make that a practical reality.

One regime would be a regime the provinces could establish in which the landlord's consent could be dispensed with. In other words, a tenant could come forward and say, “Well, landlord, you're refusing your consent unreasonably. Your building has good electrical, there is no humidity problem, there isn't this problem. My neighbours on both sides of me say it'll be fine.” Presumably, the landlord and tenant board would say they were going to dispense with consent and then provide a solution dovetailing with that. The person could then legally grow marijuana in his or her apartment, subject to size limits.

The flip—again, it could be left to the provinces to decide which way to do it— could be that the provinces establish a regime whereby, if a landlord wished to prohibit growing marijuana in his or her building, the landlord could apply, presumably to the landlord and tenant board, to say, “Listen, my building can't cope with this”—the electrical system, etc., ventilation, a petition of the tenants in the building—“so I should be allowed to prohibit marijuana”. Again, it'll be a little trickier to do, but we have some pretty smart people in this room and pretty smart people working on this bill.

I'm sure a set-up in which the provinces were able to do that fine tuning to address the problems that really do exist and that the Allard decision found would be a positive outcome. The last thing I'd like to suggest by way of a compromise is this. We are concerned that the four-plant limit is not a sufficient limit. We've heard from Mr. Page that people should perhaps be allowed more than four plants. My concern is that if they're allowed four plants or whatever number and they go to ilovegrowingmarijuana.com, they'll soon find that you can use a screen-of-growth technique.

You can put a screen across the top of your plant; as it grows up you can nip it at the top. You can bring it out and you could be filling an area from the end of this desk to past where Mr. Page is sitting or to the end of the table, full of marijuana leaves—off four plants. Surely that's not a good thing. Surely when the government is thinking and Parliament is considering four plants, you mean four plants—a plant here and here and here—you mean about a cubic yard. We would suggest that as well as whatever plant limit there is, whether it be four, six, or whatever, there be an area-of-growth limit.

(0905) We would suggest a cubic metre because that would pretty much cover it. One, it would address Mr. Page's concern about a higher plant; and, two, it would cover a higher plant, two plants in mid-stage, and a small plant. It would admittedly be a little more difficult to administer, but no one is going to be charged with an offence with possibly 14 years of imprisonment if they're growing 1.2 cubic metres. It's going to be pretty clear, if it's more than 1.5 cubic metres, how big it is.

The police can take a metre stick, put it there, and take a photograph of the plants as they're growing, and then at the end of the day you can prove in court, whoa, they had a grow area of four cubic metres, or six cubic metres, and that's way beyond the limit. That would be my suggestion in terms of limiting the amount that is grown. Thank you very much.

The Chair :

Thank you very much. All right, this is going to be interesting. We're going to go now to the question period. We'll start with Mr. McKinnon for a seven-minute round.

Mr. Ron McKinnon (Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, Lib.) :

Thank you, Chair. Mr. Page, you indicated that height might not be a good restriction, but you understand our desire to limit possible diversion. What would a good restriction be?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

I've given this some thought. Is it that 1.5 metres or two metres would encompass the majority of plants grown now? I think that is the case, so we could double or increase that grow limit by 50%. That would likely catch or encompass more of the typical growing, including outdoor cultivation. One of the issues is that cannabis is, in a technical term, photoperiod-sensitive, which means that it flowers when it is exposed to short days.

If you're growing cannabis inside, you can make those short days occur just by the flick of a timer or a light switch and force it to flower at 60 centimetres, or 80 centimetres, or a metre or more. Outside, on the other hand, the day length is, of course, determined by the season. With outdoor cannabis production in Canada now, the flowering starts in August and it might continue through September. Depending where we are in the country, in fact, harvest might be some time around Thanksgiving. What's happening during those long Canadian summers is that the plant is getting quite tall.

If we allow outdoor cultivation for typical climates in Canada, we might be approaching a two-metre plant height, or even a little taller, by the time flowering occurs. Of course, as I said, you can enforce pruning, and people can bend their plant down, or something. However, in general, if you have a limit, a plant number limit, if it's four flowering plants and a few more to tidy up the gardening issues as I suggested, that can be the limit.

In terms of what people do within those four plants, if it's 1.5 metres or two metres, or even 2.5 metres, I'm not sure we should be that concerned also about the 100 centimetres or a height limit. The task force came up with the suggestion of 100 centimetres and I was puzzled why that was. I think it had a lot to do with screening plants in cultivation in people's backyards. The height of a typical fence in Canada is about four feet, by city bylaw, and that would screen out those plants at 100 centimetres. As I indicated in my submission, allow the cities to enact those bylaws.

I would just toss out the plant height restriction.

(0910) Mr. Ron McKinnon :

Even though I remember the sixties, I don't know much about the growing of pot. What kind of life cycle is involved here with the plants? How long does it take to grow a typical plant? I keep hearing about smell as a problem. We keep hearing about potential problems with mould and property damage. I've heard that growing pot is like growing tomatoes. That doesn't seem to cause a problem with mould and property damage. Maybe you could expand on this area.

Mr. Jonathan Page :

There's a lot of variability in the approach. If you're an indoor cultivator, you're sort of force-flowering the plants, so to speak. It might be a cycle where you would plant a seed or establish a cutting, and it might grow for four weeks, or something, and then you would trigger flowering, and then there would be a flowering period of about eight weeks. It's about three months in total, sort of seed to harvest, in typical terms. Outdoors, that might be longer, because you would potentially plant in May, when you would plant tomatoes, around the Victoria Day long weekend, and be harvesting later in September.

That would stretch out that growing season to more than three months, or a little bit longer. In terms of the smell, cannabis has a very distinct odour, whether it is smoked or grown. This is not due to THC but rather due to the terpenes, the sort of volatile components of the plant. They are the same chemicals that give mint, lavender, and basil their smell; those are also terpenes. They have quite a powerful odour. In terms of indoor cultivation, they can be controlled with appropriate ventilation or appropriate filtration. You can have charcoal filters to remove the smell.

It is a little bit more complicated than tomatoes, in the sense that tomatoes don't smell as much. Some of the issues are that people are pushing larger numbers of plants into closets in their apartments or dwellings, and that smell, in that intense light, in the indoor confined space, is difficult to control.

Mr. Ron McKinnon :

Is it possible to tell if a plant is male or female before you see flowering? How soon might you see flowering in a plant?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

There are a few options there. One is that, if people are growing from clones, the plants are cloned from female plants. That's one thing. Feminized seeds are also available. These are seeds that are produced to only give female offspring. There are more molecular methods to determine males and females. For example, my lab offers a test that you can test at a very early seedling stage. Generally—and again it's all about the sort of light regime—you can detect males within several weeks of the triggering of flowering, and then they start to produce a different floral structure that can be identified and they can be removed or....

Mr. Ron McKinnon :

If I walk into a home that has a number of green things, if I'm a police officer, I don't necessarily know if they are male plants or female plants.

Mr. Jonathan Page :

No. At the seedling stage, in plants that are grown from seed and are 40 centimetres high or something, the males and females would be virtually indistinguishable.

(0915) Mr. Ron McKinnon :

In terms of controlling the numbers of plants—we're not counting seeds, necessarily, but a seed becomes a plant. What would be a good determinant for saying this is a plant and this is not a plant? If you had a bunch of small shoots coming out of the ground, is that something you want to control by numbers, or do you need to have a minimum size to say that this is a plant that we're counting?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

At this point I think everything counts as a plant under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Seeds are cannabis plants, and they are restricted. Importation is restricted; sale is restricted. I believe it's the case that under the current laws if you take a cannabis plant, and take cuttings from that plant, and they start rooting, those are also considered plants from the perspective of being charged with plant numbers. That's that the current case. If an organism has leaves and it's growing beyond the seed stage, it probably is a plant.

The Chair :

Okay. Now we go to Ms. Gladu.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC) :

Thank you, Chair. My first question is for you, Mr. Page. Are you familiar with the type of testing and quality control that the medical marijuana operations, the larger facilities, do?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Very familiar. My lab offers that as a service.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

Can you describe some of the things in terms of testing for potency, contamination from fertilizer, mould, and that sort of thing?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

There are five or six core tests within the ACMPR quality control measures. As you mentioned, potency; the presence of heavy metals; aflatoxins, which are fungal toxins produced through spoilage; bacteria and mould; and pesticides. The sixth area in the case of extracts and oils is residual solvents. It's an add-on measure.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

Okay. What kind of quality control testing do home growers typically do?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

At this point under the current medical regime under the ACMPR and since last August patient growers are able to access Health Canada certified labs in order to have their product tested. However, it's not required so it's their option to access those labs and pay for the tests.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

Okay. Very good. I have a question for you, Mr. Dickie. I see this article. There was a 2010 RCMP report on medical marijuana grow operations that shows fires are 24 times more likely to occur in homes with grow operations than those without, so I would think there is a huge concern about fire damage. I also know when we talk about second-hand smoke, in the U.S. there are an estimated 34,000 premature deaths from heart disease due to being exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke, and they report that marijuana smoke provoked even bigger effects than tobacco in their lab studies.

My question has to do with the rights of the person who owns the property. If I own a property, and I'm worried that I'm going to be more likely to have fires, or maybe somebody's renting the basement from me, and I don't want to have the second-hand smoke problem, does the homeowner have the right to prohibit people from smoking cannabis with this current legislation?

Mr. John Dickie :

That is a question that would vary by the province. Let me rephrase that slightly. Across Canada, landlords on first renting could impose a ban on cultivating and/or smoking. However, enforcing that ban would be relatively easy in the Atlantic provinces and in the west from Manitoba west. In Quebec and Ontario, it would be difficult to enforce because in Ontario, where I have the most familiarity with the law, it is very clear law that a landlord cannot.... The way a landlord enforces a termination of the lease is by giving a notice and then bringing eviction proceedings.

You don't necessarily want the tenant to go. You want them to stop doing what they shouldn't be doing, and the way you do it is with a notice of termination. It is not possible in Ontario to give a notice of termination for merely breaking the term of a lease. Merely to prove the smoking when it's banned in the lease, the growing when it's banned in the lease, will not get a landlord what they want. The tenant can basically flip them the bird.

To enforce the term in the lease, the landlord needs to demonstrate a substantial interference with the reasonable enjoyment of other tenants, or with the lawful rights and interests of the landlord. The first one is easier to do, although it's not easy to do. It requires bringing other tenants as witnesses to the landlord and tenant board to give their evidence about how they have been impacted.

You can understand people don't want to do that because they are living right next to this person, they are going to see them in the hallway, the person may crank their TV at night as the least of what they might do in retribution, and they are just uncomfortable doing it. They don't want to do it. Ninety per cent or 95% of the steps landlords take to address tenant behaviour is, in fact, to protect other tenants in the building. In Ontario, thanks to Ontario's landlord and tenant law, it would be much easier to enforce against an illegal act than to enforce a lease term.

(0920) Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

Right. If I understand correctly, it means if we allow home-grow under this legislation, then in Ontario and Quebec landowners will essentially lose the rights over their own property to keep people from home growing and smoking it there.

Mr. John Dickie :

The only way they would not do that would be if the provinces added violations of those terms or that behaviour as a ground for termination under, for example in Ontario, the Residential Tenancies Act. Again, Ontario might do that because they look like they want to drive everything in the sales by the LCBO—heaven help us all—but that would be very much contingent on what Ontario and Quebec did.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

It's good to know.

Mr. John Dickie :

And it would also be contingent—in some of the other provinces, in the Atlantic provinces or the west—on how the boards reacted to this. It's certainly the case law that for mere trivial breaches of the lease, the landlord cannot terminate. So if the view is taken that, oh well, the federal government has made this legal, so it's legal, it's trivial.... Say someone is growing five plants. I doubt that even in Atlantic Canada or the west a landlord would get a termination for five plants, perhaps even six plants if the limit is four, because it would be regarded as a kind of minor breach, a minor violation.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

It's concerning to me because apartment 801 here in Ottawa smokes so much marijuana that I get second-hand smoke exposure every time I come home, so it is a concern. I have a question for Mr. Page. Are most people growing plants inside or outside in their home-grows?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

I think in general it's inside, partly because of security, and the fact that, if it's a medical grow, they're worried about people taking that, and if it's an illicit grow, they're worried about police or others seeing it. So I would say indoors, but it's very hard to get statistics on a very grey, nebulous world.

The Chair :

Time's up. Mr. Davies.

Mr. Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway, NDP) :

Thank you. Thank you to the witnesses for being here. Dr. Page, in your submission to the committee, you pointed out that among the task force's six specific recommendations was promoting “environmental stewardship by implementing measures such as permitting outdoor production with appropriate security measures.” Despite these clear directions, as of yet there has been no indication from the federal government that outdoor production of cannabis will be part of the new cannabis regulations. So my question is, is that the case? It's unclear from Bill C-45 whether outdoor production will be permitted, and if so, is it your opinion that it should be allowed, and why?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

I'm not clear on whether Bill C-45 restricts indoor or outdoor. Mr. Conroy.

Mr. John Conroy :

The definition of a dwelling-house in the cannabis act includes the land contiguous surrounding the premises and any outbuilding on the property. Under the medical regulations, you can only grow indoor or outdoor. They won't let you do both, which actually doesn't make sense in some cases where people want to start indoor and go outdoor and then come back indoor, especially if you live in the west coast rainforest, but it appears you can do it outdoors under this bill.

Mr. Don Davies :

Would that include community gardens?

Mr. John Conroy :

No, it doesn't. That's why I think there's this problem with apartments that don't have an area where somebody could do it besides their apartment, so you need to give them the carrot to be able to do it somewhere else, rather than do it in the apartment, by creating the community garden.

(0925) Mr. Jonathan Page :

Back to your question about outdoor and sustainability, the submission you referred to is one that I did as a team, not the one I'm doing as a witness here. It really highlighted the issues around the carbon footprint of indoor cultivation on a commercial level, but less regarding the four-plant, personal production area. That is, when you put a large cannabis production facility in a concrete bunker, put it under intense lighting, and have HVAC and all the air control to do that, you have significant power needs.

You've built a concrete structure maybe on farmland or something, so there's an ecological footprint to that industry, and you know, cannabis is a plant. It doesn't need intense sunlight. It can grow in a greenhouse. It can grow in the field as hemp does now with sunlight, and so the argument would be that the regulations arising from Bill C-45 should allow outdoor growing as well.

Mr. Don Davies :

Oh, I see. So you mean for production, for producers who apply to the federal government for a licence to produce cannabis, you're saying that it should be explicit that outdoor growing would be permitted.

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Right, exactly, and currently, under the ACMPR and the MMPR before that, outdoor production is prohibited for commercial purposes under the medical cannabis regime.

Mr. Don Davies :

Thank you. I want to get your thoughts on labelling, Dr. Page. We haven't had a lot of testimony on this. As someone who understands the properties of cannabis, what aspects of cannabis do you think are properly of interest to consumers? I'm thinking beyond just THC levels, or CBD levels. What other things might a consumer want to know about the product?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

THC and CBD levels, of course, are the main drivers of the pharmacological activity. That's what we label for medical cannabis at this point. Other aspects would be the terpenes I referred to before, so those would be the smell and flavour components. One can see that labelling might, in a limited way—because we don't want to get into a list of a hundred chemicals that have to be parsed by a consumer—give us some information around the terpene composition of the product. There are also other cannabinoids also present.

THC and CBD are the two main ones, but we often see large amounts of cannabigerol, CBG, or cannabichromene, CBC. I would suggest also including information on the presence of some of the other cannabinoids that in certain products might be higher than a baseline. There is also this whole focus in the cannabis world on strains and genetics and the origin of the material. There is a widespread classification between sativa -type plants and indica -type plants, which hasn't really stood up to scientific scrutiny at this point, but there could be labelling around the sort of genetic type of plant as well.

Mr. Don Davies :

Thank you. I'll turn to Mr. Dickie. I come from Vancouver. Another high irritant for people is the smoking of cigarettes and tobacco inside apartments. Interestingly, this bill, if passed as is, does not legalize edibles, so it will be promoting the smoking of marijuana in apartments. Is it your view that it would be better from a multiple dwelling point of view that people have the opportunity to consume their cannabis in a non-smokable form?

Mr. John Dickie :

Yes, absolutely, especially for medical users, but for everyone we would strongly support that. There are some health concerns in terms of children getting at it but, hopefully, that would be a limited problem and could be addressed in a careful way. To avoid second-hand smoke would be huge for all kinds of people. It's ironic, the extent to which we are now being pushed, as landlords, to limit smoking, and the non-smokers' rights people are after us constantly to make our buildings tobacco smoke-free, yet this is kind of opening the whole thing up to smoking marijuana.

(0930) Mr. Don Davies :

Thank you. Mr. Conroy, I want to turn to you. To both Mr. Dickie and Mr. Conroy, thanks for bringing up the Le Dain commission. The NDP has been actively pushing for decriminalization for the last 40 years, since the Le Dain commission, so it's nice to see that we're finally here. I want to talk about pardons a bit. Mr. Conroy, your whole career has been spent looking at the stigmatization and negative impacts of criminalization on people's lives and this bill will actually continue to criminalize people, and we're criminalizing people right now.

What is your advice to this committee on how we might approach pardons for Canadians who are maybe carrying around convictions today for things that this bill will now render legal?

Mr. John Conroy :

I clearly feel that if you're going to make conduct legal that in the past was illegal, you should also then address eliminating those prior criminal records, and so on. You certainly are making a mistake, I think, in not looking at the existing industry and saying we're going to regulate them as opposed to trying to push them out and create a whole new group of people doing it, such as in the Ontario liquor stores. The whole idea, as I understand it, is to try to eliminate the black market. That's what legalization is.

Home-grows will reduce the black market, but stores reduce both home-grows and the black market. Just because somebody has a criminal record or has been convicted in the past, it should not be a bar, in my submission, to their being able to participate in this market. We should take steps to enable them to eliminate things. The Criminal Records Act is what governs the pardon situation and there have been recent decisions that have pointed out that the ability to get a pardon is determined by the date of the offence.

As a result, we've ended up now with a situation where, depending on how old your offence is, different rules apply under the Criminal Records Act compared to what's in the current version of the act.

Mr. Don Davies :

Thank you.

The Chair :

Thanks very much. Mr. Ayoub.

[ Translation ]

Mr. Ramez Ayoub (Thérèse-De Blainville, Lib.) :

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank our three witnesses for being here. One of the advantages of living in a country like Canada is that there are three levels of government. Co-operation among the governments is always a challenge, but it is also a great advantage. The federal level being what it is, and the provincial and municipal levels being what they are, our challenges and advantages are precisely that we can trust each other and work together to improve legislation. The federal government provides a framework, based on a vision to be able, in this case, to legislate on cannabis.

When this new legislation applies more locally, provincial autonomy is particularly important. Mr. Dickie, you said that eastern Canada, western Canada, Ontario and Quebec were facing different challenges. Isn't it true that they can legislate according to the will of the province in order to adjust this legislation in terms of the number of plants, particularly for dwellings? Already some apartment owners prohibit their renters from having pets or from smoking. Some cities prohibit ownership of pitbulls. There has been some heated debate about pitbulls recently in Quebec.

There is municipal autonomy and provincial autonomy. I would like to hear what you have to say in this regard. Do you think that this autonomy could help to solve more specific problems?

(0935) [ English ]

Mr. John Dickie :

Well, it seems to me that the federal government is legislating in this area, in part because of its power over criminal law. I realize that with respect to criminal procedure, there are differences in the different provinces, but with respect to criminal law, for the most part, it is uniform.

I think there is some value in uniformity on the basic prohibitions, in part because people do move around Canada quite a bit, and it seems to me it would be quite onerous for someone who grows up in one province where they're allowed, say, eight plants, who then takes a job somewhere where they're only allowed four plants, and to grow five plants risks 14 years of imprisonment, yet they don't know. I think that on the basic prohibition there should be uniformity.

With respect to procedures for allowing consent to be given or to be dispensed with, for example, I think that could well be a provincial issue, because it is already. That issue comes up with respect to other aspects of landlord and tenant law.

Mr. Ramez Ayoub :

That's why I said, “ C'est un cadre .” They can go lower, but they can't go higher than the maximum.

Mr. John Dickie :

I see. Well, in that respect that might be a partial solution. Certainly, as I understand it, the provinces, under their power with respect to civil property and civil rights, could in fact ban the home production. They could ban various forms of cultivation. They're being given the power, I think, to regulate the production and distribution system, so they could be given the power to make more restrictive rules.

[ Translation ]

Mr. Ramez Ayoub :

Thank you, Mr. Dickie. Mr. Page, I would like to take advantage of your expertise on growing marijuana plants. In short, there are two opposing points of view. On the one hand, we do not want to regulate the number of plants. The intention is to permit the cultivation of cannabis in the same way as there is no limit on the number of tomato or tobacco plants. There is no limit on the allowable quantities. It can be grown as long as there is land or soil, no matter where. On the other hand, we want to ban the individual cultivation of cannabis completely. Is there no middle ground?

Isn't there an intermediate solution where people can grow cannabis? Is it too complicated to legislate on the height? These are rather complex details to manage. I must admit, managing the cultivation of cannabis has a certain complexity. How does it work between these two extremes? I would like your opinion.

[ English ]

Mr. Jonathan Page :

I do think that we can strike a balance between a free-for-all, wide-open “You could plant 10 acres of cannabis if you wanted to,” and very restrictive limits. What I was getting at before was that I do agree that some plant limits for personal production are appropriate. We do see those in, say, U.S. states like Colorado and Oregon, where cannabis legalization has occurred. It is often six plants, not four.

I guess where I was going is that we want to have a limitation that also takes into account the cultivation realities of cannabis, the idea that you could have a limit on the number of plants in flower, which are really the producers of the drug. If that were to be four plants in flower, I think I could support that. There should be some sort of leeway so that you could have these additional four or six plants in a vegetative state, a non-flowering state.

(0940) Mr. Ramez Ayoub :

I have just one more question. I don't have a lot of time. Is it easy to cultivate cannabis? I have never grown cannabis in my home. Is it as easy as tomatoes?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Yes, it's as easy as tomatoes, though a lot of growers make all sort of complexities with cuttings, hydroponics, and all this kind of stuff. In general, it's like a weed. It grows easily.

Mr. Ramez Ayoub :

It grows like that.

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Where I was going though was my recommendation around plant height: that's a hard one to regulate. The plant does grow. Limit the number of plants and maybe the number of flowering plants, but after that, do not get into this idea that if we hit 100 centimetres, that's suddenly illegal.

Mr. Ramez Ayoub :

How can you regulate that? Is there a way to regulate that?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

As your colleague asked before, could you expand that to 150 centimetres or 200 centimetres and encompass more of the typical growing that might occur, and therefore Canadians wouldn't be offside if their plant has sort of inched up in those directions? I would say that police carry guns and all sorts of handcuffs and things; do they have to have tape measures as well? That's sort of where we're going with 100 centimetres. Just count the number of plants, and don't worry about how tall they get.

Mr. Ramez Ayoub :

Thank you.

The Chair :

The time is up. Thanks very much. Now we're going to our five-minute round. Mr. Webber.

Mr. Len Webber (Calgary Confederation, CPC) :

We'll go with Mr. Carrie. I'll go next time.

The Chair :

Mr. Carrie.

Mr. Colin Carrie (Oshawa, CPC) :

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Again, you are fascinating witnesses. I wish I had more time. I have a lot of questions for you. There are a lot of things we've agreed upon, I think, with some of the witnesses coming forward, but home cultivation is one that there's not a lot of agreement on. I think it's important to point out that cannabis isn't tomatoes. It's not aloe vera. It's not carnations or roses. According to the CMA and the Canadian Paediatric Society, it is potentially dangerous, especially for our young people. Like you, Mr.

Dickie, somebody close in my life developed schizophrenia and lifelong psychological problems that have been attributed to cannabis use. I'd like to bring it down to talking and listening to my constituents, who have concerns about these. I have mostly talked to individuals and small business people—or as the Liberals call them, tax cheats—but one lady came in to see me and identified herself as a former drug user. She identified herself as addicted to marijuana and it took her many years to get off it. She lives in an apartment, an older building, and she is concerned about the smell.

She's concerned about how it's going to affect her. This is an extremely difficult situation because now with the government legalizing it, we have the rights of one group, recreational users, and then the rights of others, owners and neighbours who may be in apartments. Mr. Dickie, I was wondering if you could maybe give us an example. How are governments going to manage the competing interests of the rights of one group versus another group, and historically how has that played out?

Mr. John Dickie :

Typically it's a question of this test of substantial interference with reasonable enjoyment. There has to be not just an interference with the other person's enjoyment, but a substantial interference. Medical problems will meet that test. If someone has asthma, someone's affected, or if someone coughs when they smell smoke; it's those kinds of things. Then the question is about the reasonable use. In other words, say if someone is playing the piano loudly at 7 p.m., or playing the bagpipes, God forbid—although I'm a Scotsman, by heritage at least, so everyone should love the bagpipes....

I'm sorry, I'd better go back to the piano, because the bagpipes probably would be a substantial interference; but with the piano, if someone wants to sleep at 7 p.m., it's kind of too bad. People get to play the piano at 7 p.m., but they don't get to play the piano after 11 p.m. Now with smoke, it's not that easy because smoke you can't adjust. You can't separate the interests by the time of the day. What typically happens now is that smokers are required to take steps to minimize their interference. Maybe it's to smoke on the balcony.

Maybe it's to smoke on the side of the apartment that's away from the person who has the problem. Maybe it's to run a fan to push the smoke out of a window.

(0945) Mr. Colin Carrie :

For somebody who's a former addict, for example, the onus would be on her, then, to get out there. If one of her neighbours is growing marijuana, and the smell is maybe triggering her, she was really concerned about falling back into—what she said—her addiction.

Mr. John Dickie :

Yes. She could certainly address the issue herself, but that takes a certain fortitude to do. She can, I think, in most of the provinces go to the landlord and say, “Look, the neighbour's interfering with me; will you please do something about it?”

Mr. Colin Carrie :

Can you see landlords—

Mr. John Dickie :

But that's when it gets into whether the landlord has the right, because remember that 90%—well, hell, it's 99% right now—of leases do not prohibit marijuana smoking or marijuana growing. They didn't have to, because it was in the law.

Mr. Colin Carrie :

Yes.

Mr. John Dickie :

Effectively, the legal regime of today is going to be turned on its head. Gradually landlords can take it back through a lease prohibition, but again in Ontario and largely in Quebec, you cannot impose a new lease term on a tenant. So there will be all those grandfathered leases where the landlord doesn't have any right under the lease.

Mr. Colin Carrie :

Again, some of my constituents are retirees who are renting out. Could you foresee landlords, then, being hit with huge bills to comply with these conflicts? I know that Ontario just rolled out its plan, and a lot of people thought that landlords could simply prohibit homegrown marijuana in leases. What you've said is that, for some of these grandfathered leases, this is going to be very problematic for certain people. Did Ontario put anything in its plan, that you're aware of, that will help in settling these issues for home cultivation?

Mr. John Dickie :

As to the second question, no. I don't think Ontario has focused on this either. People tend not to get this distinction between rental dwellings with these other competing interests and detached homes. As to the first question, the question of damage, yes, Ottawa, for example, has a marijuana grow op remediation bylaw, and there is within it no test. Any grow op could trigger a report by the police to the city, which then triggers the city to go to the owner and say, “you had marijuana growing in your unit or in your dwelling that you own.

Prove to us that there's been no damage.” One would hope the police would not go with six plants or eight plants or 10 plants or 12 plants or whatever. But if the police go with that, then that owner is basically looking at $10,000 of expert reports from engineers, air quality control, and electrical safety to prove there's been no damage to the unit. Plus they're on this registry, which might knock $10,000 or $20,000 off the value of their house.

Mr. Colin Carrie :

So these small-business owners most likely will be negatively affected by these changes in the law. That's what you're saying?

Mr. John Dickie :

Absolutely.

Mr. Colin Carrie :

These “tax cheats”, I should say. We have to keep that type of thing straight.

The Chair :

Time's up. Ms. Sidhu.

Ms. Sonia Sidhu (Brampton South, Lib.) :

Thank you, Chair. Yesterday we heard that home cultivation would make it easier for you to access cannabis. Mr. Page, could you explain to us what would be the impact on children or youth of eating the raw leaves of a cannabis plant?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

That's a good question. The leaves of the cannabis plant are not typically consumed by someone who wants to get high. It's the flowers that are rich in THC and other cannabinoids. The reason they're not consumed by people interested in getting high is that they contain very low levels of cannabinoids. So the classic sort of pot leaf that you see on people's T-shirts and things like that doesn't have a lot of THC or CBD cannabidiol in it.

With regard to the impact on children—and I'm a plant scientist, not a medical doctor—I'm going out on a limb a little bit, but just on the basis of the plant chemistry, if kids eat cannabis leaves or a small cannabis plant, not a lot of cannabinoids are going to get into their system and affect them. On the other hand, if the plant is flowering and it is that THC-rich material or CBD-rich material, they could ingest it and receive a dose of that. It gets a little technical here. The plant actually doesn't make THC. It makes an acidic form of THC.

So tetrahydrocannabinolic acid is the form the plant makes and you actually have to heat it to form THC, which is why smoking a joint or baking a brownie or something is required. If a child were to eat the raw bud of cannabis, they'd get mainly the acidic form, which is non-psychoactive. The fresh material is not capable of getting you high. You need to bake it or heat it or smoke it to get there.

(0950) Ms. Sonia Sidhu :

Thank you. Presently, the illicit market is 100% controlled by criminals, with an estimated $7 billion in income annually for organized crime. Furthermore, the cannabis being sold today is unregulated, untested, and often unsafe. How has allowing homegrown fought this illegal market? Can you explain that? That's for Mr. Conroy or for both.

Mr. John Conroy :

How has homegrown helped to eliminate the black market?

Ms. Sonia Sidhu :

Yes.

Mr. John Conroy :

Well, it's because people are growing it for themselves instead of being consumers of something that somebody else is producing. You're eliminating the market; you're not buying into the market. That's why these stores are the most important thing in terms of reducing the black market because most people don't want to grow for themselves. However, home-grows will reduce the demand that's out there. With regard to tobacco, for example, under the tobacco control act you can grow 15 kilograms of tobacco for anybody over the age of 18 in your premises.

We don't have a demand for illicit tobacco anymore, that I know of. I've never had anybody charged with that in my career in any event. It is the same with alcohol. You can make as much beer, wine, and spirits as you want. You can share it with your neighbour, but you can't sell it. We used to have bootleggers and stills and so on in the old days, certainly in the area where I live, and we don't see much of that anymore. Flooding the market, in my view, is what we need to do so that we can regulate it and control it. We have the tobacco act, and we have tobacco regulations under that act.

Presumably we're going to see federal cannabis act regulations, and presumably we're going to see provincial cannabis acts with regulations. So I say, as I think Dr. Page was saying, that many of these issues can be dealt with in those regulations without federally saying four plants 100 centimetres tall. You can allow the feds, as they do for tobacco and alcohol, to control manufacturing, but you can allow the fine details to be controlled in those regulations, and particularly in the provinces.

Human ingenuity being what it is—which keeps some of us lawyers busy—people will do things in order to get around what you come up with. You have to anticipate what may occur, but, as I say, make an opportunity for it to be done in a way that hopefully doesn't impact others.

The Chair :

Mr. Webber.

Mr. Len Webber :

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, presenters, for being here today. Dr. Page, your submission to the committee here I found quite interesting. You talked about the environmental considerations of indoor cultivation, and you say that:

...the statistics are staggering. According to a report by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council in Oregon (where recreational marijuana has been legal since 2014) an indoor grow system for only four plants consumes as much energy as 29 refrigerators.

You say:

The carbon emissions of this energy use are likewise staggering. It has been estimated that one average kilogram of final product is associated with 4600kg of C02 emissions. Looked at another way, embedded in an average indoor-grown plant is the energy equivalent of 265 litres of oil. From the perspective of individual consumers, a single marijuana joint represents about 4.6 kg of C02 emissions, or an amount of electricity equal to running a 100-watt light bulb for 75 hours.

In addition to the environmental and economic cost of the energy intensive nature of indoor cultivation, the legalization of marijuana has also placed strains on some individual utilities and local grids in US states where marijuana has been legalized.

It is clear to me that there is quite an environmental impact to growing four or however many plants in a household, yet you propose that we allow even more than four plants, which is the proposed legislation. Is it because you're not concerned about the environment, or is it because you believe that we have the right to grow more plants?

(0955) Mr. Jonathan Page :

No, I think, in general, what that submission is getting at is mainly the large-scale commercial production, which currently under the medical regime allows indoor production and greenhouses, but not outdoor production. The idea is that either personal production—four or 10 plants or what have we for personal use—could also include outdoor production. In the apartment situation, this could be on someone's balcony, carefully monitored so as to not be exposed to public view.

In the larger-scale commercial industry that we've seen now with medical cannabis and we'll see with recreational cannabis, that would also allow secure facilities with appropriate fences, cameras, and alarms to have outdoor production as part of the spectrum in order to have a more sustainable industry. Because we're talking about personal cultivation here, I guess where I would go with that is that regulations would encourage the outdoor possibility to reduce that carbon footprint.

Mr. Len Webber :

Okay, thank you. I can see with the effects here why Mr. Dickie and his association are concerned with tenants growing indoor plants, and the cost to our environment. Mr. Dickie, I owned a condominium in Edmonton. I lived there for a number of years in the past, though I don't anymore. I had to deal with a neighbour in a high-rise beside me who would have their morning toke and their evening toke before bedtime. I had to deal with the second-hand smoke coming into my apartment. It was frustrating. I did talk to the landlord about it.

They indicated that it was for medicinal use and they had legal documents stating that they can grow and smoke, so there was not a hell of a lot I could do about it, other than to try to sell my condo. It's up for sale now, and if anybody here is looking for a condo in Edmonton, come and talk to me.

Mr. John Dickie :

With added second-hand smoke as kind of an amenity.

Mr. Len Webber :

Yes, exactly. I do understand your concerns and the concerns of your association. Now, with the government going forward and allowing recreational marijuana, I can see more and more apartments, and more and more people like me out there dealing with more and more second-hand smoke from neighbours who live in multi-dwellings.

Mr. John Dickie :

Yes, it's certainly a concern. One of our suggestions today is to attempt to achieve a compromise in which a landlord's consent is required, and with different levels, which the provinces could choose, of ability to refuse or not refuse consent. That would allow us to take into account these safety features in the buildings.

It would allow for a diverse market, a diverse supply of apartments, some buildings where cannabis is used, and if you're going to rent them, you know you're going to get some second-hand smoke but you can use it yourself, or other places where you will not get second-hand smoke and you will not be smoking cannabis. The medical users need to go in the first set, so that could solve the problem in terms of creating these two sectors of the market. There would probably be a little middle ground in which a few people use it occasionally and no one freaks out about that.

However, certainly there are many, many people who rent apartments who do not want second-hand tobacco smoke and second-hand marijuana smoke, as well as the fire safety issues and the humidity, and all of those issues.

Mr. Len Webber: Yes, interesting.

The Chair :

Time is up. Mr. Oliver.

Mr. John Oliver (Oakville, Lib.) :

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your testimony today. One of the goals of the legislation is a public health goal to ensure that cannabis is produced in a way that's safe and there are no contaminants, and that it's a licensed production facility. We've heard from some witnesses that growing marijuana at home sort of reintroduces those risks. I am curious, and I guess the fundamental question is, can you grow safe cannabis at home? Are there any general increased risks that would be a contaminant which would be unhealthy for people, and that as part of public health we should be addressing with this legislation as part of education or messaging to the public?

(1000) Mr. Jonathan Page :

I absolutely think that people can grow safe cannabis at home. There is nothing inherent about home production that would say there's an issue with mould contamination or something that is different, say, from what licensed producers would do. Of course, they are professionals, and presumably the home cultivators are more hobbyists or amateurs, but some of them get really good at this. One of the things we haven't had good statistics on is the quality control analysis of home cultivation under the medical regime, so I can't refer to a statistic that says only 2% of it showed signs of mould or something.

We don't have those numbers. However, there's really nothing to indicate that there are inherent problems, whether it's a backyard cultivation set-up, or indoor in your garage or basement. That said, there have been indications of concerns around things like heat and wiring and, as Mr. Conroy has said, I think those were well refuted in the Allard trial. In both aspects, the plant itself and then the sort of infrastructure for the plant, we don't have a lot of information to say home cultivation is absolutely bad and people shouldn't do it, from the public safety aspect.

Mr. John Oliver :

Thank you. I'm Googling here. Four marijuana plants under a 60-watt HPS lamp, whatever that is, will produce about 150 grams per plant, or about 600 grams from the four plants. We've heard from many witnesses that they are concerned about increased exposure of children, of youth, to marijuana because of home-grown plants. Again, one of the goals of legislation is to reduce access to marijuana for Canadian youth. Do you have any reflection on that?

I heard you say that when the plant is growing, unless you heat it or do something, it doesn't actually release the THC components, but once it's dried and you have 600 grams of it sitting around somewhere in jars, what's your feeling about children's exposure to it at home?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Being in the same room as a jar of cannabis, obviously, doesn't mean that THC is wafting around. Children—and I guess I would define them as being younger than 13—are not smoking anything. They're not interested in that. As they become teenagers, that becomes something of an issue. It's not a very attractive thing to be eating. Toddlers are not going to reach into a jar of dried cannabis and start nibbling on it. It's sticky. It's stinky. It tastes bad. It's dry and crispy. It's not something like a cookie, or whatever, that's going to be more attractive, so I don't think we're looking at a massive problem.

Mr. John Oliver :

It does seem harder for a parent to control 600 grams of dried product versus 30 grams of dried product, in terms of someone getting into it or not. There does seem to be a greater quantity at home under the home-growing operations.

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Right, but I think secure storage is secure storage, and 600 grams is not like a bale of hay, so to speak. It's a smaller amount that can still be locked up, the same as a 30-gram amount. I have kids at home—9 and 13—so I think about these things as well.

Mr. John Oliver :

Okay.

Mr. John Conroy :

We've had people doing it for now over 12 or 13 years, and we don't have any bodies.

Mr. John Oliver :

Under the recommendation, Mr. Dickie, I'm a bit concerned about there being prohibitions on rented dwellings. I don't know this, but I would suspect that some of the more vulnerable communities are renters, not homeowners. It's sort of putting them more out into the market versus being able to do this at home. If the legislation permitted it, would the landlord-tenant things allow collective growing in a storage area, say, in apartment buildings? I don't think the legislation permits that right now, but would that be a way around the concerns of each apartment having its own four plants and the odours that come with it?

(1005) Mr. John Dickie :

Yes, it would be an improvement if that could be done. Again, that would be a way for the demand to be met by.... Landlords are certainly in this business. We provide housing for people, and we do it very cost effectively. But the motivating factor is, frankly, to make money. If the customers want to be able to grow, and the landlord has unused space in the basement or can throw a chain-link fence around a plot on the outside, in many areas of Canada, then that would be a way to allow it to be done at the building without being done in the unit and bothering the neighbours. Again, it's come up today. Mr. Conroy raised it with me before we began. Yes, I like the idea.

The Chair :

Your time is up. We're moving now to our three-minute round, with Mr. Davies.

Mr. Don Davies :

Thank you. Dr. Page, my research indicates there are three basic strains of marijuana: indica ; sativa ; and ruderalis , or hybrid. Interestingly, sativa is the strain that grows tall and thin. Indica is the type that tends to be shorter and bushier. My research indicates that it's the indica , the shorter bushier one that produces the higher yield than the sativa , which grows tall and thin. Ironically, it seems that by putting a 100-centimetre limit on a plant, we are actually enshrining the type of plant that will produce more yield, based on this arbitrary notion of height, than the indica plant, which will grow taller and produce less. Am I missing anything there?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

I hadn't thought of it that way. Yes, in general, as I mentioned before, the science is still out on this indica-sativa split and how it relates to the effects of the plant. Generally, yes, this taller, lankier, open-flowering sativa type can be lower potency than the dense, squat, wide-leaved indica type.

Mr. Don Davies :

There seems to be a pretty clear connection between height and yield. I'm just talking about yield.

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Yes, and indica —that type of short, squat plant—is the backbone of the commercial cannabis industry, legal or otherwise. So yes, by enforcing a height limit, there will be potentially a higher yield in that area than these taller plants, though you can get high-yielding indica types as well.

Mr. Don Davies :

I thought you gave very interesting testimony on the issue of research. We're restricting home cultivation to four plants. I've got your testimony that you think it should be more than that, perhaps 10. Then we have the producers who will be applying for licences, I presume for commercial growing. But in terms of researchers at universities who may want to be growing plants for research and experimental purposes, would you suggest that we amend this legislation to provide a clearer

section on that, to make sure researchers can actually get access to grow the kind of cannabis they need to do the research we all want done?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Yes, adding that to the legislation would be beneficial. Some of these things have been treated in regulations. Currently, under the narcotic control regulations, licensing and exemptions for research are delineated, but it has been the case that we just don't have the research that we need. Dr. Mark Ware indicated the same thing around clinical studies. Enshrining it in legislation and being very clear in the act that access to the cannabis plant, be it for the plant science side or the constituents for research purposes or trials, is necessary. I agree it should be amended; that would be beneficial.

Mr. Don Davies :

The last word to you, Mr. Conroy. Is there anything you would like to add?

Mr. John Conroy :

We don't have time for anything I'd like to add. As I say, where are the bodies? After all these years we don't have any of these problems that many people have talked about. For a long time now, we've had many people producing for medical purposes. We've managed to iron out some of the kinks as we go along, and that's what we're going to have to do here.

Certainly, the act doesn't address all of the issues, and you have a problem in terms of source regarding the 12- to 17-year-olds, even though I agree completely that it is a good thing in order to avoid them being stigmatized for the rest of their lives as a result of cannabis. If you look at the big picture in terms of how many people have been involved in this over the years, sure, we have a legitimate basis to be concerned about certain things, but we don't have many of these problems occurring on the ground. We've been able to sort them out, and I think we can sort them out in the future.

(1010) The Chair :

That completes our official round, but we have 20 minutes left. We have time for a first round with five-minute questions if that's the wish of the committee. Is that the wish of the committee? All right. We'll start again with four questions, and the questions will be five minutes, starting with the Liberals. Is there any Liberal who is ready for questions? Everybody's good? Okay. We now go to the Conservatives, to Ms. Gladu.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

Thank you, Chair. I have a couple of questions. I share the concern that Mr. Oliver raised earlier about the potential of having 600 grams in a home-grow operation. I'm not so concerned about kids eating. I'm more concerned, especially with the 12- to 17-year-olds, that they're going to try to dry it, roll it, and smoke it. There are no provisions that I can see in Bill C-45 about protected storage. Mr. Page, are there best practices in terms of how you would recommend storing this material to keep it out of the hands of children?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

One of the things about the experience Mr. Conroy referred to in medical cannabis is that people have now been receiving cannabis or producing it themselves and there are lock boxes and other sorts of small safes that can be put in people's houses. Certainly, with the opiate epidemic that we hear so much about, there has been a move in households to make sure teenagers can't get access to pharmaceutical drugs in medical cabinets. The same thing may apply to alcohol and liquor cabinets in someone's home, that there should be some control over them.

I think cannabis is very similar to those two areas that we already deal with. I think it's up to each family, and the age of the children in the household, how they deal with security. Certainly, best practices could include a small safe with a combination or a key to make sure, and there's also childproof packaging. Outside of personal cultivation, receiving samples, whether it's LCBO or online via producer, in packages—the same as a pill bottle—obviously a teenager can open childproof packaging but younger kids can't.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

My second question is for Mr. Conroy. It is about the time it will take for the provinces to introduce legislation. We've heard concerns today that in Ontario and Quebec, the landowner or landlord will not have any right to prohibit somebody from having a grow-op or smoking marijuana on their property if the provinces don't introduce legislation. Similarly, if we talk about trying to make sure there are regulations that keep the smoking of cannabis in the same light as the smoking of tobacco, where it's allowed and not allowed, how long do you think it will take provinces to get that kind of legislation in place, if they started today?

Mr. John Conroy :

It shouldn't take them very long. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic process in terms of passing regulations.... You don't need to go through the legislature or Parliament to pass regulations. It's always a puzzle to me how long it takes for them to do things. We heard them go on about how they're not going to be ready and they need more time. The provinces have said the feds have to tell them more about road safety. I know you're talking about that next week in terms of the impaired. On taxation, we have examples of how we tax tobacco and alcohol, HST, GST, and so on, so I don't understand what the difficulty is.

The training of distributors, they said. Well, we've got existing distributors who know what to do, and that's why we need to bring them in and regulate the existing market instead of trying to reinvent it. Public education was the other one the provinces raised. As I said, there's more information about cannabis out there than any other drug in history, given all of the royal commissions of inquiry and other things that we've had, as well as evidence in court cases. In R. v. Malmo-Levine; R. v.

Caine, the Supreme Court of Canada heard all the evidence that came from three cases that went all the way up, and there were findings of fact by judges after hearing expert witnesses, like you've heard, and them being examined and cross-examined, and made findings of fact, one of them being that marijuana is not addictive. That's because of the scientific definition—

(1015) Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

I think I've got the answer on the amount of time. It'll take a lot of time.

Mr. John Conroy :

But it shouldn't take a lot of time. The defect or the problem is in the process as opposed to the subject matter.

Ms. Marilyn Gladu :

Very good. That's it for me, thanks.

The Chair :

Mr. Davies.

Mr. Don Davies :

Dr. Page, I want to ask you your opinion on what production policy would look like in an ideal world. I've heard concerns from a number of people that they don't want to see production limited to so-called “big weed”, big, mass, corporate growers, but that they want to see space in the production world for the small growers, the boutique growers, the craft growers, as it were, to make an analogy to craft beer. As a person who has done a lot of research into the different kinds and strains of cannabis, what's your view on that?

Mr. Jonathan Page :

Some of the information we have around this is from the current medical system, where we have some very large producers licensed and also some small mom-and-pop-style producers under licence. There's a general feeling that the illicit world, which includes many small growers, primarily in British Columbia but elsewhere, has been excluded. The fact is that they don't have the wherewithal to produce the security or they have legal issues that have been held against them, and there have been delays in licensing that have led mainly to the large producers with very deep investment funds to build facilities.

What we need to do in the commercial sense, outside the personal cultivation subject of this hearing, is to have an ecosystem in the same way we have with beer or wine, where you can have Molson and that type of thing as big ones and also have smaller producers that are equally well regulated, with testing applied and securities around there, that we also have regulations and legislation that encourage those small ones to get involved in this industry and not make the cost of start-up so steep or the regulations so strict that we exclude those small producers.

Mr. Don Davies :

Thanks. Mr. Conroy, we're calling this bill the legalization of cannabis, but what we're really doing is making it less illegal.

Mr. John Conroy :

It's a little bit of legalization.

Mr. Don Davies :

If you have more than 30 grams in your possession, you'll be criminally charged. If you have more than four plants, you'll be criminally charged. There are penalties of up to 14 years of imprisonment. If you have more than five grams as a youth, you face some sort of penalty. In clause 7, one of the purposes of this bill is to reduce the burden on the criminal justice system. Do you see that happening?

Mr. John Conroy :

I live in the cocoon of British Columbia, where people haven't been charged with simple possession for a long time; the police just seize it. You still see a lot of charges but rarely convictions, unless it's something more than simple possession. In my practice, I don't get anywhere near as many cases as I used to in the old days, even though you haven't legalized it yet. The burden has been reduced. However, having this maximum of 14 years, hybridized by indictment, and so on, is frankly totally unrealistic in terms of what goes on on the ground.

Even in the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, which is not known to be the most liberal court in the country, the range for trafficking, for example, is 12 to 18 months. Most sentences are up to two years. For tobacco and alcohol, all your maximums are two and three years. This 14-year thing is ridiculous, frankly, and it's problematic because it will increase the burden in the following way.

Years ago, through the sentencing commission, through Parliament here, and so on, we determined that we had to reduce the amount of incarceration because we'd just make people worse most of the time instead of really protecting the public. Therefore, why are you going to put somebody in prison, actual prison, for trafficking in cannabis nowadays? It seems ridiculous. A judge will introduce something called a conditional sentence order. The conditional sentence order is the last step before having to put you actually in prison.

Depending upon levels of denunciation and deterrence, the judge decides whether to put you in prison. A 14-year maximum, because of the 2012 amendments, prevents a judge from doing that. What does 14 years have to do with it when the court is sitting there saying we think that up to two years is a fit sentence, but we also think you're not a danger to the community, you don't have any violence in your history or anything such as that, so we think you can serve it in the community? The judge can't do it. What do judges do, faced with that now?

They'll give probation with conditions to try to structure it like a conditional sentence order. I really encourage you to listen to what Le Dain said at least 45 years ago and reduce that to five years if you're going to keep a hybridized system.

My hope and expectation is that the cannabis consumers who I have now watched over a long period of time are going to demonstrate to you that they will be able to live under this existing proposed beginning, if I can call it that, and will not create a lot of problems, hopefully, for the criminal courts and others, that we will effectively, in practice, legalize and demonstrate to all of you that you don't need many of these limits that you're worrying about.

(1020) The Chair :

All right. That concludes our session on the household cultivation of plants. We appreciate the information you've given us. We continue to learn. I think we've all learned a lot today from your input, so I thank you very much for taking the time to come and participate. I suspend this meeting now until 10:45 in this room.

(1020) (1045) The Chair :

Welcome back to the 66th meeting of the Standing Committee on Health, where this afternoon we're going to have a panel on the age of legal possession and impact on young Canadians, which is certainly one of the controversial discussions and part of this. I should tell all our witnesses that some of the questions will be in French. We have translation here, so you should just be ready for that and be prepared. One of our witnesses this morning is the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, with Scott Bernstein, senior policy analyst, by video conference from Vancouver.

From the Canadian Public Health Association, we have Ian Culbert, executive director. From the Canadian Paediatric Society, we have Christina Grant, member of the adolescent health committee. From Educators for Sensible Drug Policy, we have Judith Renaud, executive director, and Paul Renaud, communications director. From Portage, we have Peter A. Howlett, president, and Peter Vamos, executive director. Each organization will have 10 minutes for an opening statement, and then we'll go to questions. We'll start with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, by video conference. Welcome.

Mr. Scott Bernstein (Senior Policy Analyst, Canadian Drug Policy Coalition) :

Thank you. Good morning, honourable members. Thank you for the opportunity to make comments on Bill C-45 this morning on this important panel. I'm representing the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition or CDPC, a non-governmental organization comprised of over 70 organizations and 3,000 individuals working to support the development of a drug policy in Canada that is based in science, guided by public health principles, and respectful of human rights.

CDPC supports the passing of Bill C-45 and the legal regulation of non-medical cannabis as a way to minimize the social and individual costs of prohibition while ensuring the cannabis policy supports public health and human rights to the fullest extent possible. Legalizing and regulating cannabis will ensure there is adequate oversight of the complete market of non-medical cannabis including control over dose, quality, potency, marketing, and access.

From decades of prohibitionist drug policy in Canada, evidence clearly and unequivocally demonstrates that criminalizing people for possessing and using drugs leads to great social and individual harms. As such, CDPC supports the legal regulation of all drugs within Canada as a route to retaking control of a dangerous, unregulated market for drugs that supports criminal organizations and puts countless Canadians at risk of criminal sanction.

We believe this is the path to minimizing infectious disease such as hepatitis C and HIV, reducing overdose and social stigma, and promoting public health and safety objectives. Similarly, we believe that evidence strongly supports decriminalizing all drugs and further improved public health and public safety. I would like to make comments this morning on recommendations that CDPC has put forward to this committee in our submitted brief. First, I'll address the minimum age of access.

The cannabis act establishes a federal minimum age of 18 years to access cannabis with provinces having the ability to raise the minimum age as Ontario has done to align with its alcohol age. CDPC supports maintaining the federal minimum age of 18 years in the legislation. Despite the existing system of cannabis prohibition that has been in place in Canada for decades, there remains a consistent one in three people in the 16 to 25 age range who are active users.

In a UN study it was shown that youth cannabis use was lower in countries with more liberal drug policies than in Canada, demonstrating that strict enforcement policies are not a deterrent for young people. It is unrealistic to conclude that all youth will completely abstain from consuming cannabis regardless of set age limits and sanctions against consumption. Having a minimum age that's too high will maintain the illegal market and put numerous young Canadians at greater risk than the risk to them of consuming cannabis.

That approach should be rejected in favour of a public health approach that looks at the entire spectrum of risk to young people from not only the substance itself but the policies as well. Protecting youth must consider the harms to youth of engaging with illegal markets as well as the harms of consuming cannabis, a policy balance that supports a lower minimum age of access. Second, regarding criminal penalties in youth, the cannabis act prohibits possession of dried cannabis of more than five grams by a young person, creating either an indictable or

summary conviction offence, and if convicted, a sentence under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Notably, the Province of Ontario has chosen to close even the small gap and create provincial crimes for a young person carrying any amount of cannabis. Seeming to recognize the harms of a criminal record, the cannabis act provides in some circumstances allowances for a peace officer to issue ticketable offences to both adults and organizations. Such allowances, though, are not available to young people.

It is now well documented that a criminal record contributes to considerable social harms from limiting international travel, diminishing career and volunteer opportunities, exacerbating poverty, and leading to poorer health outcomes, creating stigma, and consuming scarce public resources. As mentioned, evidence also supports the fact that the potential for criminal sanction is not a deterrent for adolescent use of cannabis.

Instead, as was recommended by the task force, achieving the public health and safety goals of the cannabis act with respect to youth should be addressed through education and soft approaches to discourage use as opposed to criminal punishment.

(1050) Overwhelmingly, respondents to the task force took the view that the criminalization of youth should be avoided, and that criminal sanctions should be focused on adults who provide cannabis to youth, not on the youths themselves. One such approach might be found in the state of California, where the regulatory scheme provides that young people found possessing cannabis will receive non-criminal infractions, and must attend mandatory education or counselling and perform community service.

CDPC recommends that youth not be subject to criminal penalties at all, and that the cannabis act be amended to substitute similar soft approaches to youth drug use, such as counselling and community service. Removing these sanctions of criminality will increase public health and safety, particularly with respect to youth, by decreasing the harm and stigma of criminalization, while still discouraging unlawful use through a balanced and realistic approach.

Additionally, social sharing, which is a common practice among young people, is something the task force recommended be allowed, but it has also been prohibited by the cannabis act through the criminalization of any form of distribution to a young person, with a draconian penalty of up to 14 years in prison. This would penalize an 18-year-old sharing cannabis with a 17-year-old friend, or a parent sharing with his or her son or daughter.

In the case of alcohol, there are clear exemptions to criminalization for adults sharing with their minor children in a private home, and all provinces regard social sharing of alcohol with far less punitive penalties than in the cannabis act. CDPC recommends that social sharing with a young person not be criminalized but rather treated in a similar manner to youth use, with counselling and community service. CDPC further recommends that adults be permitted to provide cannabis to their own minor children in a private residence, similar to alcohol. My final point concerns social justice.

Underlying the legal regulation of cannabis is the notion that our historical policies of criminalizing cannabis have led to unacceptable negative outcomes in Canadian society, including supporting a thriving illegal market for cannabis nationwide, and capturing hundreds of thousands in the criminal justice system for cannabis offences. Criminal law, though, is rarely applied equally, and cannabis prohibition has had a greater negative impact on marginalized communities, people of colour, youth, and indigenous persons.

Legislation crafted to repair past policies should also aim to repair the damage done to those punished under an unjust system, including creating opportunities within the new economy and clearing past criminal records. CDPC recommends two changes to the act to better serve the social justice aims of the legislation. First, prior drug convictions should not be the sole reason for denying a licence to participate in the cannabis economy. Paragraph 62(7)(

c) allows the minister to refuse to issue, renew, or amend a federal licence or permit required for participation in the cannabis industry if the applicant has contravened the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, or committed other drug-related offenses in the past 10 years. This would of course include any drug conviction for activities that would now be legitimate under the new regime. There is no logical reason for creating a specific ground related to drug offences in this provision, compared to any number of past offences that might make a person ineligible for a licence, such as theft or fraud.

A preferred approach would be one similar to California's, where prior convictions for non-violent drug offences are actually prohibited from being the sole reason for denial of a licence. Second, there should be clear mechanisms for those convicted of cannabis-related drug offences in the past to apply for the suspension of convictions on their criminal record, or for cases where sentences are still being served, of having these cases dismissed or re-evaluated under the new legislation.

CDPC recommends amendments to the cannabis act that allow for the reconsideration of ongoing sentences and record suspensions for prior convictions. The cannabis act is a remarkable piece of legislation that forges new policy standards regulating previously illegal substances.

(1055) It is important that these new standards be centred on evidence, public health, and the well-being of Canadians young and old. Thank you.

The Chair :

We'll be moving on to the Canadian Public Health Association with Mr. Ian Culbert, executive director, for 10 minutes.

Mr. Ian Culbert (Executive Director, Canadian Public Health Association) :

Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members. Thank you for the invitation to present to you today. I will preface my comments this morning by noting that, throughout my remarks, my references to cannabis use relate to recreational use, not the use of cannabis for medical purposes. On behalf of the Canadian Public Health Association, I am pleased that the Government of Canada has committed itself to a public health approach to the legalization and regulation of cannabis. We are further pleased that Bill C-45 does in fact embody such an approach.

Different from the publicly funded health care system, public health is the organized efforts of society to keep people healthy and to prevent injury, illness, and premature death. As such, a public health approach is based on the principles of social justice. It pays attention to human rights and equity. It is based on the evidence, and it addresses the underlying determinants of health. A public health approach is organized, comprehensive, multisectoral, and it emphasizes pragmatic initiatives.

As a colleague recently noted, in some ways public health is like that darling child who's always asking, “Why?” In the case of cannabis, we want to know why people use it, so that we can develop policies and interventions that meet their needs. The human relationship with cannabis ranges from abstinence to a spectrum of consumption. This spectrum ranges from beneficial to non-problematic, to potentially harmful use, to the development of use disorders.

At the federal level, the legal and regulatory response to cannabis needs to be sufficiently broad to encompass the entire spectrum of consumption, while at the provincial and territorial levels, the response begins to narrow to meet the particular needs of each jurisdiction. Then at the regional or local levels, the response is honed to the specific needs of particular populations. There has been considerable discussion and unfortunately a lack of consensus regarding the appropriate legal age for the possession of cannabis.

The Canadian Public Health Association supports the provisions in Bill C-45 establishing the minimum legal age at 18 and allowing provinces and territories to set a higher age, as appropriate, in their jurisdictions. From a practical perspective, it is important and appropriate for provinces and territories to establish a legal age for cannabis consumption that matches the legal age for alcohol consumption. In that way, confusion should be reduced and education efforts can be better coordinated.

While we would prefer that no Canadian use cannabis or any other psychoactive substance, a public health approach recognizes that cannabis will be consumed for a number of different reasons, regardless of efforts to discourage it. You are already familiar with the statistics: 12% of the general population, 21% of youth aged 15 to 19, and 30% of young adults aged 20 to 24 reported in a 2015 survey that they consumed cannabis in the previous year.

Since more than one in five youth aged 15 to 19 are consuming cannabis now and we have no reason to believe that rate will change, the responsible policy option is to create a legal and regulated market for cannabis that is accessible to adults 18 years of age and older. Bill C-45 will establish a supply of cannabis of known potency and quality. Currently, anyone consuming cannabis is playing a game of Russian roulette, never knowing the product's quality before consuming it, or if it has been laced with other, more powerful psychoactive substances.

From a public health perspective, the Canadian Public Health Association is encouraging provincial and territorial governments to limit the sale of cannabis to government-controlled entities to ensure that the focus remains on harm reduction, not profit. The prohibition model currently in place in Canada has severely hampered health promotion and harm reduction efforts. The only message we had at our disposal was, “Just say no”, and clearly that has failed. Beyond simple health education, health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health.

It is our view that legal cannabis sales must therefore be preceded by comprehensive, non-judgmental, non-stigmatizing health promotion campaigns across Canada that have a clear and consistent message. These campaigns must be supported on an ongoing basis and should be complemented by in-person health promotion and harm reduction messaging at the point of sale. We need to normalize the conversation about cannabis, not its consumption. There are concerns that the legalization will result in significant increases in cannabis use, especially among young people.

While the Canadian experience may be different, two recent reports from Washington state both indicate that youth cannabis consumption has remained stable since legalization in that jurisdiction. One of these reports, however, indicates an increase in older adults' cannabis use, while another indicates an increase in the number of people who consume cannabis daily or near daily.

(1100) These early reports out of Washington remind us that we need to pay attention to the entire population, with a particular focus on why certain individuals go on to potentially problematic use. Concerns have also been raised about the impact cannabis consumption has on the developing brain. While the studies quoted are important pieces of the research puzzle, they focus on young people who are daily and heavy cannabis users. I think we can all agree that if a child is consuming a large amount of cannabis on a daily basis, there is a cause for concern.

If a child were drinking alcohol heavily on a daily basis, there would be a similar cause for concern. Once again, from a public health perspective we want to know why that child is consuming heavily and daily; then we can focus our interventions accordingly. At the moment, we lack robust data on the health impacts of casual use of cannabis and we hope that legalization will allow research on that issue to take place. Having understood that people are going to continue consuming cannabis for various reasons and in various amounts, it is crucial that our policies and interventions focus on harm reduction efforts.

Harm reduction can take many different forms, including ensuring a product of known potency and quality; effective education and health promotion activities; ensuring that consumers and health and social service providers know about safer consumption methods; and adopting and promoting the lower-risk cannabis use guidelines. I understand that you have a panel dedicated to that subject later today, so I won't go into these guidelines in detail but I will say that they are an important tool that should be adopted in all jurisdictions.

The Canadian Public Health Association does have one recommendation for an amendment to Bill C-45 that I believe one of your witnesses mentioned yesterday. As it currently stands, subclause 10(5) of the bill will result in the crime of possession for the purpose of selling becoming an indictable offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison for those convicted, including young people between the ages of 12 and 18.

Clause 8 concerning possession and clause 9 concerning distribution provide similar sentencing options for people over 18 years of age, but permit referral to sentencing under the Youth Criminal Justice Act for those between 12 and 18. The Canadian Public Health Association's viewpoint is that an option for sentencing under the Youth Criminal Justice Act for young people should also exist under subclause 10(5).

In many cases these offences are related to possession for sale by young people to their peers, and the stigma established by such a conviction may cause irreparable harm to their futures, outweighing the actual offence. Care should be taken to apply the proposed rules concerning possession for the purpose of sale to reflect the severity of the crime. You have also heard calls that we are not ready for legalization. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of time, as Canadians are already consuming cannabis at record levels.

The individual and societal harms associated with cannabis use are already being felt every day. The proposed legislation and eventual regulation is our best attempt to minimize those harms and protect the well-being of all Canadians. Our first efforts may not be perfect, but perfection is not required as we can modify our approaches as we learn from our experiences. At the end of the day, we all want to do the right thing for the broad range of Canadians who already consume or may choose to consume cannabis for a variety of different reasons.

The Canadian Public Health Association believes that Bill C-45 and provincial responses such as Ontario's are steps in the right direction. Key lessons learned from jurisdictions that have travelled this road before us include the following: regulators must have the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions in the marketplace; upfront investments in education and health promotion are essential; law enforcement and public health need to work together; and the interests of the private sector cannabis industry are rarely aligned with the interests of public health.

(1105) The Chair :

Thank you very much. Now we go to Dr. Christina Grant, a member of the adolescent health committee of the Canadian Paediatric Society. You have 10 minutes. I look forward to your comments.

Dr. Christina Grant (Member of the Adolescent Health Committee, Canadian Paediatric Society) :

Dear members of the Standing Committee on Health, I'm an adolescent medicine specialist and associate professor of pediatrics at McMaster University. Thank you for the invitation to speak as a representative of the Canadian Paediatric Society on Bill C-45 , specifically regarding the age of legal possession and the impact on young Canadians of the legalization of cannabis in Canada. I have submitted a

summary of the CPS statement on cannabis and Canada's children and youth for your reading. My goal today is to ensure that you have up-to-date scientific information regarding the impact of cannabis use on young Canadians, including young toddlers, and to discuss our society's stance regarding the age of legal possession. First, there can be no doubt regarding the scientific literature that cannabis use prior to the mid-20s is associated with structural, functional, and harmful effects on the developing brain, as has been borne out in many peer-reviewed studies.

There are rigorous studies demonstrating a relationship between regular cannabis use in youth and the increased risk of approximately 40% of developing a psychotic episode. We know that early use, higher doses, and frequent use all contribute to this risk, in addition to other predisposing factors for developing a psychotic illness, such as family history. There are also studies demonstrating a relationship between regular cannabis use and clinical depression, though results are not as robust as for the psychosis relationship.

There are studies indicating that youth with certain anxiety disorders are at increased risk for developing problematic cannabis use that can inevitably interfere with their everyday lives. Strikingly, one in six adolescents who experiment with cannabis goes on to develop cannabis-use disorder, a psychiatric illness similar to alcoholism, where the drug use interferes with multiple areas of functioning. This can include academics, social and family relationships, and extracurricular activities, all areas that require rich development during the teen years in order to leave them well equipped for life.

For all these reasons, there is no safe age for experimentation with cannabis, and we recommend that young people not consume it. However, adolescence is a time of experimentation. We know that Canadian youth are experimenting with cannabis at the highest rate compared with other countries around the world. The proposed legal cannabis industry in Canada has raised a dilemma regarding the most appropriate age for its legal use, which should minimize harm to children and youth, our most vulnerable population.

On the one hand, prohibiting cannabis until the mid-20s would protect adolescents during a period of critical brain development. On the other, adolescents and young adults are already experimenting frequently with marijuana. Aligning the legal age for cannabis use with that of other legally controlled substances, notably alcohol and tobacco, would help ensure that youth who have attained age of majority have access to a regulated product with a known potency. Also, they would be less liable to engage in high-risk, illegal activities to access cannabis.

Of emerging concern in the United States and in Europe is the number of accidental ingestions of edibles by the toddler age group. Perhaps we all know that edibles are marijuana-infused food products that come in various formats, including cookies and candies. These are highly attractive to young children and often indistinguishable from regular candies, chocolate bars, or baked goods. In Colorado, rates of unintentional ingestion in children less than nine rose by 34% after the legalization of cannabis.

More than a third of those cases required hospitalization in a pediatric critical care unit because of overdose symptoms. Most commonly, the toddlers could not breath on their own.

(1110) A study from France published this month demonstrated a threefold increase in young children, mostly toddlers, requiring p