OTTAWA—Bill Blair, the former undercover drug cop who rose to become Toronto police chief and now leads Justin Trudeau’s charge to legalize marijuana, long ago gave up his gun and uniform.

But his guard is still up.

He defensively shifts position in a room when he’s with a minister, switching to what he calls “protective mode.” He tries to be casual: “I didn’t have a first name for a decade,” he tells a reporter. “Now that I’ve got it back” — just call him “Bill.” And yet he’s still all “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am.”

Blair has been the Liberal MP for Scarborough Southwest for a year and a half. As parliamentary secretary to the minister of justice and point man on pot reform, he’s spent the better part of that time in meetings across the country to smooth the way for the Trudeau government to table a bill — expected the week of April 10 — to radically change Canada’s criminal drug laws.

And yet Blair, who’ll turn 63 that week, says with a straight face he doesn’t think of himself as a politician. He has “tremendous respect” for politicians, mind you. But he views himself as “a public servant.”

He did have an easier time than many political rookies. After a 39-year policing career capped by a decade as Toronto’s high-profile top cop, Blair didn’t have to introduce himself to voters when door-knocking in Scarborough, where he grew up.

Truth be told, Blair — the politician — doesn’t look much like he’s having fun in Ottawa.

In his Commons seat, he has the serious bearing of a police officer of high rank. Stern, focused, barely allowing himself a wry grin from time to time. He doesn’t join the partisan to-and-fro, hates the heckling, and doesn’t often speak up in debates except when he has to stand to say the government will or won’t support a private member’s bill.

He doesn’t seek the limelight and seems to be a reluctant though polite interview subject. He’s busy. He rents a small apartment in Ottawa. He flies a lot, folding his six-foot-five frame into economy seats on red-eye flights, “to save money” on hotels and get to cross-country meetings early so he can make it home at night when possible to his wife, Susanne. She’s taken on a new role, too, president of the parliamentary spouses association. The couple still lives in Scarborough, where Blair met and married Susanne McMaster, and raised their three children.

None followed him into policing. Blair’s sons are communicators: one an adviser to the Canadian Diabetes Association, the other a comedy writer. His daughter is a playwright. Blair squeezes in sleepover visits with his two grandchildren, aged 3 and 5, on weekends in the GTA. And when he’s not on the road talking weed with mayors, police, city and small-town councils and public health officials, Blair does turns at House duty — the grunt work of sticking around for debates to ensure the government side has the numbers it needs.

After weeks, Blair finally finds time to talk in a small, drab meeting room close to the Commons chamber. No sit-down in his office. No glimpse of personal mementos. No tagging along on his road tour. Cabinet minister Navdeep Bains spots Blair in the hall before the interview, says a quick hello, puts an imaginary joint in the corner of his mouth, takes an imaginary draw, grins and leans in to listen. Blair groans.

A casual approach to pot is the last thing Blair-the-cop wants to project. What he wants is for people to know how serious this undertaking is.

It’s soon obvious Blair-the-politician has got one thing down pat: his safe stories — anecdotes repeated to people like journalists that appear to reveal what motivates him but in reality are narrative shields. They tell only what he wants you to know, no more, no less.

Former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien was a master of the safe story. The current one, Justin Trudeau, is getting pretty good at it, too.

Blair turns out to be much better at the political ropes than he’ll admit.

He has honed his safe stories — about life as the son of a cop, about his own approach to police work, and about the evolution in his thinking on pot.

One he relates often is how he learned respectful policing from his father, John Blair, also lifelong Toronto cop. “In my house there was this notion that my father was one of the good guys and he went out and did good every day,” says Blair.

The elder Blair, a staff sergeant, and his son were rarely in uniform on city streets together. But Blair remembers the first time. It was not long after Blair finished police training in April 1977, a cocky graduate. They came across a “noisy, obstreperous” drunk on the street. “My dad stepped in front of me and reached down to the guy and he said ‘C’mon, friendly, let me help you up.’ I remember looking at my dad and thinking, that’s how you’re supposed to do it.”

Blair’s mother, Margaret Elizabeth, or Peggy, was the disciplinarian in the home. Blair remembers how she’d yell at them when he came off shift to stay quiet. “Magnificent,” says Blair, chuckling. “A force of nature.”

His family pride is evident. His father was with Toronto police for 39 years, his grandfather a Toronto firefighter for 42 years, a great-uncle was a police officer killed in the First World War, great-uncles and cousins were also firefighters.

The arc of Blair’s career, from undercover narc to political leader about to change the law, makes sense if you understand this about him: he believes talking can make a difference.

Blair never smoked pot or did drugs (and admits he doesn’t know if his children ever did). But as an undercover agent who surely looked like a long-haired cop, he never blew his cover, because “it’s everything to do with your ability to talk, not what you look like.”

Talk, the basis of community policing, was his weapon from the get-go. Fresh out of police college, he was assigned to 51 Division, walking the beat at Regent Park, squeezing in university classes between shifts. Years later, in 1995, he asked to be put in charge of 51 Division, dubbed “Fort Apache,” telling then chief David Boothby he could fix it.

He had a criminology degree from U of T and a long stint as a drug officer under his belt. Racial tensions between residents and police in Regent Park were high. Unimpressed by officers who marked progress by the number of drug arrests on a whiteboard, Blair erased it, dispatched them, and himself, into schools and the community centre to reconnect with residents fearful and distrustful of the cops.

“The union went nuts initially. They said ‘Blair’s soft on drugs.’ I’d just spent nine years working in drugs and I said ‘I’m not soft on drugs, I just don’t want to be stupid about it.’ I said, ‘Let’s do the right thing here. We can be smarter about this.’ ”

Asked what line he draws from all that to the work he’s doing now, Blair’s voice drops: “Sometimes you have to think, what is the real harm?”

His own view later shifted dramatically after a groundbreaking 2014 report by the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health urged “a public health approach focused on high-risk users and practices.”

That’s the key political message now. The government’s approach to marijuana is driven by a belief in harm reduction, a message Blair strives to convey in all those meetings. He wants to persuade cities and towns that the feds are not out to create a free-for-all marketplace.

Legalization of marijuana will be about tightly regulating cannabis production, distribution and consumption to get organized crime out of the game, and to protect vulnerable young people from its “social and health harms” — a phrase Blair uses repeatedly. That includes the kind of harm to adolescent brain development that can come from early or frequent use of unregulated high-potency cannabis, the kind of lifelong career harm that can come from being saddled with a criminal record, and worse — the kind of physical harm to kids who get more deeply involved in the illegal drug trade on the streets.

In the neighbourhoods that Blair “was responsible for keeping safe, we never had a kid die from marijuana overdose,” says Blair. “But we had kids die in gun violence directly related to disputes over the territory in which that drug was being sold.”

Blair and the Liberal government will soon see if the message has gotten through to wary police forces, municipal leaders, health providers and parents.

His former colleagues at the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police — who had called for pot possession to be decriminalized, not legalized — worry the government may be moving too fast. They’re resigned “to the fact this is coming,” says Mike Serr, chair of the chiefs’ drug abuse committee, but they’d like the bill to adopt a restrictive, go-slow approach to start.

“We’re going to have some challenges,” says Serr, who spent 26 years with Vancouver police and led the organized crime section there.

The chiefs are concerned there’s still no standard reliable roadside drug impairment detector for Canada; there aren’t enough police officers trained as drug impairment experts; and they say a massive campaign is immediately needed to educate Canadians who mistakenly believe weed can’t impair their driving judgment as alcohol does. And police chiefs oppose a recommendation of a federal task force that would allow home growing or personal cultivation of up to four marijuana plants. They say producers should be licensed and regulated producers, with oversight by bylaw officers or provincial regulators like liquor boards.

Serr has sat in on several meetings with Blair, including an hourlong one in Abbotsford, B.C. where Serr is deputy chief, and says Blair gets it.

“I think he’s a very smart man,” says Serr. “I think he’s caught on to the political side, too, and understands the challenges of, especially the enormity of, trying to bring this legislation into place.”

Meanwhile, stocks in companies who are piling up pot inventory in the hopes of cashing in have risen since the task force report last fall charted a possible way forward.

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If Ottawa adopts the approach urged by the task force, Canada could see a regime of controlled sales of legal recreational pot to Canadians aged 18 and older, under a system separate from the medical marijuana regime.

The task force proposed to leave many decisions with the provinces and municipalities, and pointed to provincial retail schemes for selling liquor as examples of how consumption can be controlled, but it recommended against selling alcohol and pot at the same location.

Blair — after all his consultations — agrees many decisions will rightly be left to the provinces and territories.

Yet he admits he was surprised to learn how complex it all is. As Toronto chief, he was used to a well-resourced system, a council that passed laws with city inspectors responsible for bylaw enforcement. His cross-country consultations, however, revealed the size of challenges from one province to another, one urban or rural setting to the next, and the huge capacity differences between southern and northern communities. It was, he said, “really eye-opening.”

He learned “you can’t just impose that from the centre. You’ve actually got to go and work with local officials, and work out what works in their experience and also their capacity to deliver with these things. To me it was a reminder of the importance of being careful and cautious. And I’m nothing if I’m not careful and cautious.”

Introducing the bill is just a first step. The debate in the Commons and the Senate could run well into 2018 before anything becomes law even if some in government have boasted they’d like it in place by Canada Day next year.

What’s pretty clear at this point is the prime minister believes William Sterling Blair has the credibility with provincial and municipal leaders and law enforcement that the government needs.

Blair bristles at the idea he’s there to put a credible face on it. “I’m not giving anyone cover,” he says. “When I get out in front of a community or the public and I say we’re doing this to protect kids, I really believe we are.”

The Conservatives, NDP and Liberals thought Blair would be a star political catch. All three approached him to enter politics when his contract as Toronto chief was not renewed. Blair says he didn’t go looking to run. The private sector came knocking, too, but he wasn’t interested because “money wasn’t a problem” and a public service career with the chance to do something “meaningful” was more appealing.

Blair chose the party that was once led by the only man he names as a political hero, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. There were others he admires who helped him as police chief — premier Dalton McGuinty and mayor David Miller supported his efforts to counter Toronto’s gun violence. But Blair says the elder Trudeau brought Canada the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a law he was proud to uphold, that allowed Toronto, “my city,” to thrive, its diversity celebrated.

It’s a declaration that might strike Blair’s critics as ironic.

This is, after all, the chief who resisted calls to drop “carding” after a Star series showed police stopped and documented young black and brown-skinned males at a higher rate than whites, who was blamed for the G20 fiasco when nearly a thousand residents were kettled in a downpour after G20 protests at the 2010 summit turned violent.

Criticism over the G20 still clearly stings although Blair doesn’t directly respond when asked if he was unfairly blamed. “Everything that happens in policing that city was my responsibility,” he says.

Asked how he feels about his career being defined in many ways by that moment — and knowing two class-action lawsuits are pending — Blair is blunt. “When they brought in a command structure for the event, my name wasn’t on the org chart.” In other words, he wasn’t in charge.

The RCMP led the integrated security unit in charge of G20 security.

Blair won’t talk in detail about it, says he’s not interested in finger-pointing. “I wasn’t giving operational orders that weekend. I did give one at the end. The event was over and everybody was going home, and I saw that there was a bunch of people kettled at Queen and Spadina, and I went up to the command room and I ordered they all be released, and they were. But it was a little late and they were wet.

“My responsibility at the end was to make sure that there were lessons learned, that policies, procedures changed.”

Not long later, Blair seems to regret speaking about the G20 and repeats he took responsibility, that’s been written already. Nothing to see here, move on. He may be concerned it wasn’t such a safe story after all.

Now, as Ottawa gets set to table its long-promised bill, which faces at least a year of parliamentary and nationwide scrutiny, Blair looks tired. The bags under his eyes have deepened and swelled in recent weeks.

Anne McLellan, the former Liberal minister of justice, public safety and health who co-chaired last fall’s expert task force, has worked with Blair on policing and national security matters for nearly two decades. He impressed her early on as one of a new generation of police leaders who said “we need to spend a lot more time on prevention.” McLellan said from her perspective in government, it “was an important evolution” not just when it came to spending public funds but when it came to “creating a culture in which police and communities are working together to keep everybody safe.”

Years later, she says, Blair brings that same broad perspective to the question of marijuana reform, and contacts from his previous life.

He drinks huge amounts of coffee and “just goes like the Energizer bunny,” not yet ground down by the slow-turning cogs of government, adds McLellan.

“Bill is an impatient guy in the best sense of that word in that he wants to get things done.”

Blair suggests he’s learning patience. “I come from an environment where you listen to all the smart people and you get the best advice you possibly can to make a decision, you give an order and on you go.”

If he has regrets about entering politics, Blair doesn’t admit to any.

Some were surprised when Trudeau didn’t name him to cabinet. Blair says there was no deal, no expectation when he joined the Liberal team but he is “honoured” the prime minister sought his opinion and entrusted him with this job.

He is not ambivalent about crackdowns on dispensaries or police enforcement of a prohibition law that is about to change. He tells reporters the storefront weed shops are operating outside of the law as it stands.

On the other hand, he says prohibition isn’t working. A simple pot possession charge takes up to 22 hours of work for police and courts to process. Blair says: “It’s like the only tool we’ve got is a sledgehammer and nobody wants to swing it.”

Blair’s view now is that it’s time to put the sledgehammer down, and take up a lawmaker’s gavel to do things the smart way.

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