Unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale.

I disclose this by way of making clear my position on the legalization of marijuana, which is:

Wait, what? It isn’t yet?

The feds are still frothing at the mouth over this? What’s wrong with these people? Are Conservative MPs the only ones that never got invited to the cool kids’ parties? Did they shun sin so they could spend their weekends in study hall? If so, why have we let these people run the country?

A better question might be: ARE they running the country anymore? Think of the issues that preoccupy us — climate change, housing, transportation, the economy — and our cities and city governments are not only generating the ideas and solutions to address them, they have moved to fill the political vacuum that our senior governments have themselves created.

It’s no wonder, then, that the City of Vancouver has moved to regulate illegal marijuana dispensaries. It’s neither “historic” nor new, as it’s being billed, but it is a common sense reaction to a cultural shift, of which the feds seem incapable. Rather than criminalize marijuana use, something the city and police are loathe to do — because, after all, this is Vancouver — the city has moved to regulate the proliferation of dispensaries rather than begin another wasteful and fruitless war on drugs that the feds demand.

The Conservatives, anyway, seem more interested in scoring pre-election points than conducting an adult conversation about the issue. Health Minister Rona Ambrose issued a statement Wednesday linking the city’s regulatory approach to “Justin Trudeau’s plan to make smoking marijuana a normal, everyday activity.” You know, like drinking, which is, of course, much healthier than smoking weed.

Once upon a time, ideas and innovations poured forth from our senior governments. Now we get bullying and moralizing. In the late 1960s and 1970s, senior governments poured funds into urban infrastructure not just out of an obligatory sense of duty, but to make city life better.

“It was a time of incredible optimism,” said Gordon Price, director of Simon Fraser University’s City program. “We’d just come out of Expo 67, and senior governments were doing major funding down at the urban level. And out of that came the structures and innovations we live with today.”

Granville Island. The south shore of False Creek. Co-op housing and affordable housing. Innovations that revolutionized Vancouver and changed the city’s way of looking at itself.

And then senior governments began their long retrenchment. They got out of nation-building and into bookkeeping.

“Call it neo-liberalism, or the idea that government is the problem,” Price said. “Its core idea was that government was wasteful, and the best thing you can do is cut off its funding and prevent it from innovating and producing new programs. And I think that political philosophy prevailed, won the day, particularly in the U.S. And I also think its effect spilled across the border and became the accepted philosophy of senior governments here. Less government is better. Less regulation. Less funding. The best thing you can do is cut taxes. And you’re certainly not going to get into the business of innovating social programs. In fact, you’re going to de-fund the ones you already have.”

Vancouver saw that in subsidized housing. The federal government (and to a lesser degree the provincial government) slashed its affordable housing programs. The housing problems didn’t go away, of course, so the city was forced to step into the political vacuum the feds had created.