OTTAWA—On a day when thousands of people were preparing to gather in the sunshine on the lawn of Parliament Hill for the annual celebration of cannabis culture — and smoke a little, too, in plain view of the police — the Liberal government formally announced its plans to legalize and regulate marijuana.

“We know it is impossible to arrest our way out of this problem,” Health Minister Jane Philpott said Wednesday in New York during an impassioned speech to the United Nations General Assembly at a special session on global drug policy.

The timing of the announcement on April 20 — or 420, as pot activists and connoisseurs call this calendar day — was a coincidence, more than one government source insisted, but still a fitting day to reveal plans to make good on a major campaign promise to legalize, regulate and restrict access to marijuana.

“Our approach to drugs must be comprehensive, collaborative and compassionate. It must respect human rights while promoting shared responsibility, and it must have a firm scientific foundation,” Philpott said in her prepared remarks.

The legislation to be introduced next spring and the regulations that follow it will be designed to keep marijuana away from both children and organized crime, said Philpott, whose speech drew upon her experience as a doctor in Africa as she spoke about the impacts of ineffective drug policies.

“While this plan challenges the status quo in many countries, we are convinced it is the best way to protect our youth while enhancing public safety,” Philpott said.

“Canada will continue to modernize our approach to drug policy. Building on our successes, such as (safe injection sites), our work will embrace upstream prevention, compassionate treatment and harm reduction,” she said.

The Liberal government will be launching a task force within the next few weeks to closely examine and evaluate every aspect of their goal to legalize, regulate and restrict access to marijuana, as well as give the government advice on designing the new system.

“We will task them with a very specific set of questions around how it will be produced, where it will be accessed and sold and around questions of taxation,” Philpott told the CBC in an interview from New York.

The draft regulations, which will govern everything from standards for packaging and labeling to exactly how to prevent it from being sold to minors, will be open to comment from Canadians.

Clive Weighill, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, said he hopes his organization will be invited to sit on the task force in order to be involved on designing the new policy.

The current period, however, leaves the police in a bit of a “grey zone” as police know marijuana will be legalized eventually but they also need to enforce the law as it stands now.

“It’s a tough time for us to be in right now, because people are expecting it to be legalized. I’ve never in my career come up against a law that we know is imminently going to be changed and is causing this much consternation,” said Weighill, chief of the Saskatoon Police Service.

“We’re trying to work with the Canadian public on this. We understand it is going to be legalized, but we really are in a grey zone right now and we are really just asking the public to bear with us. We are going to do our job and we’ll get through it,” he said.

That strange interim period had NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair calling for immediate decriminalization, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rejected as irresponsible.

“The fact of the matter is decriminalization, as the member proposes, actually gives a legal stream of income to criminal organizations. That is not what anyone wants in this country,” Trudeau said during question period in the House of Commons.

Quebec Conservative MP Gerard Deltell, however, said the Liberals were the ones putting children and youth at risk.

“That’s one of the worst things you can to the Canadian youth, to open the door to marijuana,” he said.

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The world war on drugs

The Canadian health minister unveiled the timeline to legalize marijuana at the United Nations, where she acknowledged the change would “challenge the status quo” in many places around the world. It actually goes further than that: legalizing marijuana will go against three global treaties on drugs Canada has signed onto over the years.

The politics of pot

The Liberals campaigned on a promise to legalize marijuana, so they have the mandate – and the majority government – to get it done. But that does not mean their political rivals will not be trying to score as many points as possible from Canadians who may not be as warm to these plans.

The police will still police

Clive Weighill, the president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, says he wants the public to know that police officers are not anti-marijuana, but they are still police officers and they need to enforce the law.

“We just have to weigh the merits of each encounter that we have as police,” he said.

Charges and convictions

What about people being punished for something that is about to be legal? The C.D. Howe Institute published a policy paper arguing the Liberal government should think about pardoning people who have been convicted of marijuana possession, as well as drop any charges for same, in order to save money that could be redirected towards legalization efforts.

No breathalyzer for marijuana

The maximum legal blood-alcohol level for fully licensed drivers in Canada is 80 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood, which can be estimated during a road stop using a breath sample. There is no similar instrument for measuring impairment from pot, and what is more, the reaction people have to it can vary widely from person to person.

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