{"id":27089,"date":"2014-07-29T14:28:44","date_gmt":"2014-07-29T19:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27089"},"modified":"2014-07-29T14:28:44","modified_gmt":"2014-07-29T19:28:44","slug":"will-alberta-lead-the-way-on-legalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/29\/will-alberta-lead-the-way-on-legalization\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Alberta lead the way on legalization?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s<\/em>, Paul Wells<\/a> discusses the (rather amazing) fact that support for marijuana legalization in Alberta just went over 50%:<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been hitting hard at Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau\u2019s advocacy of marijuana legalization for about a year now. Really hard: I don\u2019t think the extent of the radio, TV and paper campaign against Trudeau and pot has yet been tallied. Here\u2019s one early effort<\/a> of mine to provide a partial accounting. The Conservative case against today\u2019s Liberals, in fact, can be summed up as a general<\/em> argument that they lack judgment and their leader lacks more than most; and a specific<\/em> case that he\u2019s high and wants to get your children high, too.<\/p>\n

My own hunch, discussed at length in this column<\/a> from last September, was that Harper was onto something. Advocates of pot legalization are a loud and self-impressed bunch, I wrote, but they\u2019re balanced by other people in other parts of the country who still greatly fear the demon weed \u2014 and outnumbered by many others who don\u2019t care about the disposition of the law and won\u2019t vote for a party just because of its views on pot.<\/p>\n

But views change. One suggestion that they\u2019re changing in Canada comes from Faron Ellis at Lethbridge College, who\u2019s done several waves of public-opinion polling in Alberta on social issues. In 2013, for the first time, Ellis and his colleagues found majority support<\/a> [PDF] in Alberta for decriminalization of marijuana for recreational use. Support for liberalized laws on recreational pot had grown by more than 10 points in only two years. In Alberta.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how marijuana will play in a general election, or whether it\u2019s salient enough to make any real difference. A year\u2019s polling on political party preferences suggests it hasn\u2019t exactly been a magic bullet against the Trudeau Liberals. Opposition to same-sex marriage was a strong incentive to form a united Conservative party more than a decade ago and, now, that issue has just about vanished as a differentiator among political parties. That sort of thing could happen again on another issue, and Harper must worry that it is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m suspecting that marijuana will<\/em> turn out to be a big issue in the next federal election — if only because Harper isn’t likely to give up what he thinks is a great weapon against Justin Trudeau. However, if the trend in popular opinion toward legalization continues, that weapon might well turn in his hand.<\/p>\n

As Colby Cosh<\/a> said a few weeks back:<\/p>\n

The consciously libertarian vote in this country is not large, but there is a larger, less intellectually coherent \u201cleave me alone\u201d vote \u2014 a fraction of the public that is equally tired of drug laws, overpriced cheese, green boondoggles, housing-market fiddling and all the other familiar species of unkillable state intervention. Feeding and watering the Ron Paul-ish voters would be light work for Conservatives if they weren\u2019t so strategically devoted to exploiting soccer-mom fear of drug dealers and other baddies. Paul himself spent 30 years as a tolerated totem, almost a sort of licensed royal jester, within the Republican party.<\/p>\n

When Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau announced his party\u2019s backing for marijuana legalization<\/a>, we were told by newspapermen, almost with one voice, that he would rue his radicalism. The pundits all know he is in the right on pot, but they do not trust him to articulate the right position. This might be fair, but his espousal of legalization doesn\u2019t seem to have hurt him in the polls yet. It\u2019s a self-fulfilling prophecy that is taking an awfully long while to fulfill itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not all that pleased to see the rise of Justin Trudeau: I suspect his actual policy positions should he become PM would be informed by the “we know better than you” nanny-staters, do-gooders, and earnest interventionists. His sensible position on marijuana may indicate a latent libertarian streak, but is more likely to be a variant of the stopped-clock phenomenon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells discusses the (rather amazing) fact that support for marijuana legalization in Alberta just went over 50%: Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been hitting hard at Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau\u2019s advocacy of marijuana legalization for about a year now. Really hard: I don\u2019t think the extent of the radio, TV and paper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,53],"tags":[542,887,908,83,258],"class_list":["post-27089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-law","category-politics","tag-alberta","tag-justintrudeau","tag-liberalparty","tag-marijuana","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-72V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27089"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27091,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27089\/revisions\/27091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}