Credit Where Credit is Due

This National Post column by Colby Cosh on Marc Emery (the "Prince of Pot") largely gets it right:

"The U.S. is using the technical presence of an unenforced law on our books to carry its drug war onto our soil. If the Honourable Mr. Nicholson allows this to reach its logical conclusion, and Mr. Emery is sent south for notional crimes committed entirely on Canadian soil, it will constitute a blow to our national sovereignty."

Of course I'm very doubtful as to whether the Conservatives will stand up to protect Mr. Emery as it would clash with their new "war on drugs" mentality. Harper is very conscious about staying on message, so I doubt that he would let common sense or jurisprudence override his political instincts.

The Opening Shots in a Long War

I have this feeling that Harper has managed to shed the scary "hidden agenda" tag in the eyes of a great many Canadians once he got his free vote on same-sex-marriage handily defeated in the House of Commons. Perhaps it's too much attention paid to the American culture wars, but we in Canada have come to equate the term with gays and abortion. Harper made a half-hearted run at the former and has not touched the latter.

Not only have we adopted a very narrow view of a culture war, we have also grown accustomed (especially in Ontario) to Conservatives governing in a hurry. Mike Harris rushed through reems of legislation in the first couple years of his first mandate. I suspect this is in part because hard right-wingers seem to be aware that they do not enjoy much of a natural constituency in Canada - and that's according to their godfather, Tom Flanagan:

"Canada is not yet a conservative or Conservative country. The [Conservative] party can't win if it veers too far to the right of the average voter."

Harper and Flanagan seem to have taken the view that this political dynamic means that Conservatives need to go slow rather than try to rush through things in a term or two before the Liberals regroup.

For these guys this is a long war to remake Canada as a conservative country (not how Flanagan says "not yet"). They may well be anticipating that this will be a 20-year process. They are starting small, killing the Court Challenges Program and launching a war on drugs. Taken individually, you might have an austerity measure and a crime policy. Taken together, in the context of things that Flanagan and others have said, these are part of a long culture war, a conservative push-back. I suspect that the average voters isn't even aware of the Court Challenges Program (though they may have benefited from it) and the anti-drug policy can be sold as "tough-on-crime" or something of that ilk.

Expect a long, incremental attempt to build a conservative consensus on whole range of cultural and economic issues. These are not individual policies tacked together, these are pieces in a much larger puzzle for Harper.

Keep Insite Open

I'm still hearing about this big fancy new war on drugs policy proposed by the Conservatives. The worst part of it (and there are a lot of very bad parts) is the bit about shutting down Insite and destroying the prospect of any similar plan in another city.

Today it appears that Insite will have a reprieve until next June. In reality though, the evidence suggests that they ought to keep it open indefinitely. I cannot understand the idiots who are always ready with a sound-bite about how this constitutes government endorsement of hard drug use. This is so stupid, as if people will suddenly take up heroin use because of safe injection sites. Safe injection sites don't glamourize heroin, Lou Reed does:

Killing Junkies

Yes, that's a harsh title for this post. But according Keith Martin, that's what Tony Clement will be doing if he kills off safe-injection sites as part of a new rehashing the "war on drugs" philosophy. With regard to the closure of the safe injection sites, Martin says:

“But in doing that they will be essentially committing murder.”

Of course the point of this is not about harm reduction. Rather it's about posturing, being "tough on crime" and of course appeasing those in the US law enforcement that blame their troubles on Canada. Underlying this policy there may or may not be a notion that junkies are "asking for it" when they get diseases from shared needles.

A Message for Harper and Clement from 1980s Ron Paul

Now that Canada's Newest. Government. EVAR. is launching (relaunching?) some kind of war on drugs in this country, here's something from Ron Paul (ht):