Pierre Poilievre’s Pipe Dream: Imprison Drug Users for Life

Just about every sale of fentanyl would apply, clogging our justice system. Time for a logic check.

BY Mo Amir from The Tyee and This Is Vancolour – Read the source article here

In December 2022, Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre wrote in a National Post op-ed, “People struggling with addiction belong in treatment, not prison.” Last week, he unashamedly called for many of those same people to be imprisoned for life.

It was a stunning culmination of Poilievre’s opposition to drug decriminalization and harm reduction policies, including supervised consumption sites (which Poilievre referred to as “drug dens”) and prescribed alternative drug programs.

What started as concern that current drug policy “lacked a path to a full recovery” devolved into Poilievre branding harm reduction as “wacko policy” and falsely blaming harm reduction for drug deaths in British Columbia. (The toxic, unregulated composition of illicit street drugs is responsible for the country’s drug deaths.)

Stumping across the country, Poilievre repeatedly promised to “fund treatment and recovery,” giving the illusion, at least, that his party views drug use and addiction through a lens of health care, not criminal justice.

That illusion shattered when Poilievre proposed mandatory life imprisonment for “fentanyl kingpins.”

It feels like a “common sense solution,” but in reality, Poilievre is flouting his own vow to “bring our loved ones home drug-free.”

40 mg is less than half of a baby Aspirin

As soon as the sloganeering unveiled a policy proposal, Pierre Poilievre’s mask slipped.

Under Poilievre’s plan, “anyone caught trafficking, producing, or exporting over 40 mg of fentanyl” would receive a mandatory life sentence in prison.

This 40-milligram threshold is a mere 1.6 per cent of the 2.5 grams that someone can possess under British Columbia’s decriminalization pilot project. For context, 40 milligrams is less than half of a typical baby Aspirin tablet.

When applied to a weight of 40 milligrams, “trafficking” — the sale, distribution, administration or transfer of drugs under Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act — becomes problematic given how fentanyl is sold and consumed on a street level.

As harm reduction advocate Zoë Dodd noted, fentanyl is generally sold on the streets in 100-milligram increments.

“If you’re talking about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, fentanyl users are using a quarter gram [250 milligrams] or more a day,” according to Guy Felicella, a harm reduction and recovery advocate.

No Evidence of Steady ‘Flow’ of Fentanyl into the US

“There are always hand-to-hand transactions, from dealers to drug users to other drug users. It’s a constant exchange in the Downtown Eastside. It’s pretty common for people to pool their money to buy from a dealer and then those drugs get distributed.”

These hand-to-hand exchanges constitute trafficking, which would — under the proposed policy — subject every habitual fentanyl user to a punishment of life in prison.

The very same people that Pierre Poilievre promised to “bring home” drug-free are now, by Poilievre’s own definition, “fentanyl kingpins” who should be imprisoned for life.

“Pretty much every drug user on the street would be going to jail for life,” said Felicella.

This Conservative policy marks an all-out “war on drugs” approach to permanently incarcerate drug users, which is inconsistent with Poilievre’s promise to provide drug users with treatment and recovery services.

It is also impractical.

An unserious proposal

Mandatory minimum sentence policies have been overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada, which in 2021 determined that appropriate sentencing for fentanyl trafficking is eight to 15 years. However, Poilievre has suggested that if his criminal laws are struck down by the Supreme Court, he will use the notwithstanding clause to “make them constitutional.”

Setting aside the Constitution of Canada, which Poilievre seems prepared to disregard himself, Poilievre’s proposal requires a massive investment in the staffing and capacity of Canadian courts.

‘I Want Them to Break Up with Their Drug Dealer’

Charges under Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act are prosecuted by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, or PPSC. The PPSC must navigate through the same backlogs, staffing shortages and limited courtroom spaces that have plagued Canadian courts and resulted in many criminal charges being stayed

The wide net cast by Poilievre’s policy would dramatically exacerbate these backlogs. It would need to be accompanied by billions of dollars of investment to expand the capacities of Canada’s criminal justice system.

Otherwise, according to Vancouver criminal defence lawyer Kyla Lee, Poilievre’s proposal will bog down the courts far more than just the simple addition of more cases.

“The more you increase mandatory minimum sentences and the higher they are, the more you motivate an accused person to pursue every possible angle and argument in their defence. The result of that is that you take a trial that could ordinarily be completed in a day or two and turn it into a multi-week marathon, all over a personal-use amount of fentanyl,” Lee said.

Since Poilievre’s proposed fentanyl trafficking charges carry a mandatory life sentence, the accused can elect to be tried in provincial court or Supreme Court.

An accused is incentivized to be tried in Supreme Court so that they can request a preliminary inquiry, whereby a provincial court judge screens the evidence to determine if it is sufficient to commit the accused to trial.

Drug Decriminalization Didn’t Fail. We Did It Wrong

The Crown can bypass this procedure by using the direct indictment process to take a case directly to the Supreme Court. However, given the limited Supreme Court sitting locations, it would not be feasible to prosecute every fentanyl case — especially under Poilievre’s definition of “trafficking” — by direct indictment.

Even if a case makes it past a preliminary inquiry, the limited Supreme Court sitting locations — again — make the inundation of new cases even more difficult to try within a reasonable time (30 months).

“Our courts would end up flooded with so many prosecutions that it would be untenable for the cases to proceed within a reasonable time,” said Lee.

Consequently, despite the extensive use of public resources, many trafficking charges under Poilievre’s proposal would be stayed.

So long as “fentanyl trafficking” is ridiculously defined by such a low threshold of 40 milligrams, the Conservative leader’s policy is, in practical terms, moot.

Effectively, Poilievre’s proposal demonstrates such a fundamental misunderstanding of Canada’s criminal justice system, street-level drug trade and his own promise to provide addictions treatment that it lacks not only logic, but any semblance of seriousness.

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