Weed The North

In politics, we often think that there's little difference between parties and politicians.  We're seeing that in the U.S. as members of both parties wrestle with the choice of mainstream candidates or people who promise to shake up the whole system.

But the truth is, the all-politicians-are-the-same idea is only true if you're a radical who thinks destroying the system is more important than any change you can make within it.  Actually, politicians and parties have a lot of differences with real consequences.  Here in Canada, we've seen a lot of evidence of that in the first six months of the Liberal government.  Just in the last week:

• Assisted-dying legislation has been proposed
• The Prime Minister bragged that he knows about science
• We've started seeing ads warning us the long-form census is coming
• Politicians of all stripes have started caring if native people live or die
• Omar Khadr is apparently getting on with life
• The government has announced a timeline for legalizing pot

Why, if it wasn't for that cutesy little clip of the first bar of the national anthem in the census commercial, I wouldn't know what country I was living in.  Okay, that and selling arms to a morally-deplorable country because there are jobs in it.

And as a further tweak of the nose of the Conservatives, the pot plan was announced on 4/20. It's hard to believe that so many changes are happening with so little anger.  Of course, some of that is because the Tories' interim leader, Rona Ambrose, has a very different vision of the party than Stephen Harper.  And the fact is that Conservative opinion was never as uniform as Harper made it seem.  A lot of what his government did or didn't do was a result of political expediency, rather than widespread desires within the party.

It'll be interesting to see where this marijuana legislation goes, culturally.  We tend to think of the War On Drugs as an American thing, but the fact is that it's built into international treaties signed by almost everyone.  But there seems to be a growing belief that we need to change, so you can imagine the hardcore anti-drug consensus collapsing.  But it's hard to imagine the U.S. government backing down, so liberal drug laws could end up like the metric system - accepted everywhere except the States.  And since the drugs are measured in metric, that seems appropriate.

But, wait!  Some of the boldest legalization is coming from inside the United States.  So it appears that this is just going to be the latest battleground in their cultural civil war. And the usual way that works is that the other countries of the world choose a side and entrench themselves, while watching the frontlines of the battle pushed back and forth across America.  As always, we in Canada have a front row seat, so we'll be watching, and giggling.