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Brandon Sun - PRINT EDITION

Pardons look bad for Tories

By: Uncredited

Friday, Aug. 3, 2012 | Comments: 1

“These people were not criminals. They were our fellow citizens.”

— Prime Minister Stephen Harper

The federal Conservatives have set a dangerous precedent this week, after Prime Minister Stephen Harper pardoned western Canadian farmers convicted of selling grain into the United States in the 1990s.

Harper made the announcement on a farm near Kindersley, Sask., where he and Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz marked what the government called marketing freedom day — the federal legislation kicked in to end the Canadian Wheat Board’s decades-long monopoly on western wheat and barley sales.

The stunt, which no doubt drew cheers from anti-monopoly grain producers across the Prairies, was not a well-thought-out move on the part of the Prime Minister.

And here’s why.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the use of marijuana will be legalized. Society is moving in that direction, and when the day comes, all those hundreds of thousands of people who were convicted of possession, use and the sale of pot will want to be pardoned too.

Ridiculous, you say? Not so.

In 1996, Alberta rancher Jim Chatenay drove across the U.S. border to donate a bag of wheat to a 4-H club in Montana. Chatenay knowingly tried to get around the law of the day, which stated that producers had to sell their wheat and barley through the wheat board or get export permits from the agency.

As The Canadian Press reported, Chatenay was told to pay a $4,000 fine or face 64 days in jail for his actions. He would eventually serve 23 days behind bars in 2002.

On Wednesday, Harper said the producers who made these kinds of symbolic rebellions were responsible for first raising the monopoly issue in the minds of Canadians.

“For these courageous farmers, their convictions will no longer tarnish their good names ... it is to them that much of this victory is owed,” Harper said.

Lets compare the ‘noble’ actions of these producers who knowingly broke the law to the marijuana-user protest dubbed 4-20 that takes place annually in Manitoba. In April of this year several hundred people sat on the Manitoba legislature grounds in a thick blue haze to advocate in favour of looser drug laws. Possession of marijuana is currently a criminal offense under the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

According to CBC, the annual police-reported crime survey for 2010 shows Manitoba had 157 reported cannabis offenses per 100,000 people. Thousands of people in this country have criminal convictions for pot possession.

The 2011 World Drug Report suggests Canadians are among the top marijuana users in the world, though we pale in comparison to Italy, Palau and Papua New Guinea.

By Harper’s definition, many recreational marijuana users who openly defy Canada’s drug laws could be considered courageous in their own right, as they fight for legislative changes.

A recent article in Rolling Stone magazine states that come November, voters in three U.S. states will vote on marijuana-legalization initiatives. The two with the best chance of succeeding are Colorado and Washington, which already have legalized medical pot and permissive local laws. This follows a failed 2010 vote in California, Proposition 19.

Should they succeed, similar legislative changes cannot be very far away in Canada. Rest assured there would be no decriminalization step — pot use would become fully legal so the government could tax it.

In the wake of Harper’s pardon of convicted farmers, would Canada then be honour bound to pardon Canadians convicted of possession — those other courageous “fellow citizens” — on the grounds that the law changed? One man’s felon is another man’s folk hero.

The convicted farmers, like convicted marijuana users, broke the laws that we as a civilized society put in place and were rightly charged. In our opinion, it looks bad for a Conservative government that has taken a hard line on law and order to pardon people simply because they share an ideological stance.

Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition August 3, 2012

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Posted by:portage main

August 3, 2012 at 11:10 AM

The government is not "honour-bound" to pardon anybody of a crime. There is certainly a parallel between the wheat smugglers and the potential situation for marijuana offenses, and somebody will no doubt use it as a precedent to push for pardons for small-time drug crime if marijuana is ever legalized. They only way a government would be honour-bound to pardon them is if they promised to do it specifically. Just the sheer number of people involved make the cases very different - a handful of people who smuggled wheat compared to thousands of people on marijuana offenses

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“These people were not criminals. They were our fellow citizens.”

— Prime Minister Stephen Harper

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“These people were not criminals. They were our fellow citizens.”

— Prime Minister Stephen Harper

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