OTTAWA - Health Minister Jane Philpott stood before the United Nations last month and solemnly vowed that, by the spring of next year, marijuana use would be legal and tightly regulated in Canada.

Notably, she said: “ We know it is impossible to arrest our way out of this problem.”

And yet, if the next year is like any other recent year, as many 60,000 Canadians will be arrested for simple pot possession and, of those, about 22,000 will end up with criminal records.

To put that in perspective, a police officer in this country is dealing with a pot possession incident once every nine minutes.

As the federal NDP have been saying time and again, it just doesn’t make sense to hang life-changing criminal records on thousands of Canadians for an activity that will be legal in a year or so.

“By all means, the government must take the time to craft a responsible framework for legalization but do not ask ordinary Canadians to keep paying the price,” NDP MP Murray Rankin told the House of Commons last month.

“Why does the government refuse to take the common-sense step of immediately decriminalizing simple possession of marijuana?”

Rankin got his chance to put that very question to Justice Minister Jody Wilson Raybould last week at a meeting of the House of Commons justice committee. Wilson Raybould, though, didn’t have much in the way of an answer.

“With respect to decriminalizing marijuana right now, I think our prime minister has spoken very clearly around this and in doing so we would not achieve our ultimate objective,” Wilson Raybould said.

“Our government is committed to the legalization of marijuana and strictly regulating access to marijuana. Until such time as marijuana is legalized, current laws will continue to apply.”

Until then, though, Canada will be, as Philpott told the U.N., trying to arrest its way out of a problem. The federal prosecution service is expected to spend about $4 million or 3% of its annual budget this year on pot possession cases.

“The consequence of that is that kids will still be getting criminal records or records that will affect their employment and ability to travel and so forth at a time before [the] government gets its consultations completed,” Rankin said. “Their lives will continue to be dramatically affected by something that is perfectly legal a year from now.”

And it’s not just the NDP that think this makes no sense.

Rankin preceded his questioning of Wilson Raybould last week by reading into the record the words of Ontario Superior Court of Justice judge Robert Selkirk who, Rankin said, refused in December to accept a guilty plea in his court for pot possession:

“I recall distinctly the Prime Minister in the House of Commons saying [marijuana is] going to be legalized. I’m not going to be the last judge in this country to convict somebody of simple possession of marijuana.

“You can't have the prime minister announcing it's going to be legalized and then stand up and prosecute it. It just can't happen. It's a ludicrous situation, ludicrous.”

Justice Selkirk, the NDP, the millions of Canadians who support the Liberal plan to legalize marijuana, and possibly even health minister Philpott see no social benefit to continuing to arrest and prosecute those with a few grams of pot on them.

There ought to be a better way.