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What you find when you consult the record in Alberta is that marijuana per se was never much of a live topic for provincial governments. To the degree that it did come up, opposition members made asses of themselves just as vigorously as government. In a 1996 debate over provincially licensed video lottery terminals, the late Liberal hero Percy Wickman challenged the logic of treating citizens as adults:

“There’s marijuana out there, I hear. Do we legalize that? There’s prostitution. Do we legalize that? There’s been a lot of purse snatching. Do we legalize that? Do you legalize something you feel you can’t control because it’s going to happen anyhow? No. I think if you went to a law-enforcement agency, they would say that that is no excuse to legitimize something that is no good for society at large.”

The amount of money being lost to the black market in cannabis was massive

Here’s Liberal whip Rick Miller in 2005, using the same card to take the same trick in a debate over ethical-investing guidelines for the province’s Heritage Fund. “There are now several pornography websites which are publicly traded, and they return a very handsome profit to their shareholders. The same is true of a number of offshore brothels, again known to be quite a profitable industry in jurisdictions where prostitution is legalized. What if marijuana were ever to be legalized? Are we going to be the proud shareholders in legalized grow ops just because we can make a quick buck?”

Like Wickman, Mr. Miller is no longer with us to behold the decisive answer. I can’t find evidence in the latest annual report that our beloved Heritage Fund has any direct investments in cannabis, but we’re holding a fistful of private-equity portfolios that probably control innumerable bales of the stuff, and we own great chunks of top retailers and consumer-products multinationals that will be marketing cannabis products by next week. AIMCo, Alberta’s manager of public pensions, is an order of magnitude larger than the Heritage Fund, and did make a big direct investment in Canopy Growth Corp. last year.