Marc Emery smoking a joint among marijuana plants. The self-styled "Prince of Pot" is returning to Canada this summer following a five-year prison sentence in the U.S. for selling seeds. Photo: supplied Marc Emery, hands down, has done more for the marijuana movement in North America than anyone else. But is he still the right man to lead the charge for legalization?
First, let’s get a few things out of the way:
- When he first started selling pipes, bongs and other paraphernalia in British Columbia in the early 1990s, he was a trailblazer taking on a law against their sale. That rule is still on the books, but rarely enforced as head shops and corner stores across the country routinely sell drug paraphernalia as “tobacco pipes” with little to no consequence.
- He both funded and promoted key initiatives that led to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington states and, on this side of the border, backed Charter challenges that have guaranteed medical access to the drug.
So people who like their pot owe him a lot.
But now Emery has burst back onto the Canadian scene, proclaiming he can get a million voters out for the pro-legalization Liberals in the 2015 federal election. But he then compared himself to Rosa Parks on the CBC.
It’s that kind of over-confidence that prompts the question: Is Marc Emery still the guy to lead the pro-marijuana movement in Canada?
George Smitherman, former Ontario deputy premier, has become an advocate for medical pot and hints, ever so subtly, in a recent Toronto Life interview he too would like to see the green rush of full-blown legalization.
Big business is betting that he’s right. And Emery’s laissez-fair vision runs counter to that insight.
Canadian-based Jacob Securities is betting on a northern green-rush as a number of medical pot firms go public. They say the heavily-regulated nature of the Canadian medical pot market makes it appealing to investors around the world who can smell the green future.
“When you have a highly regulated regime …. (a handful of companies involved) that gives an investor comfort,” said Khuarrm Malik. The strict government controls on licensing have actually encouraged more investment in the space, Malik explained: “If it was a completely wide open market it would be almost impossible to pick a winner.”
The 40,000 people who hold prescriptions for medical marijuana in Canada is expected to balloon to 450,000 over the next decade — that’s about $1.8 billion a year in sales. And that’s only, if it’s not legalized first.
He’s the spokesperson the Conservatives want to run against.
“We also really think that it will ultimately become legalized down the road,” Malik said, but it needs to remain regulated to keep big investors interest. In the U.S. the pell-mell regulatory system and the disconnect between the federal and state-level governments has caused confusion. Malik said he thinks that wrapping the marijuana industry in a suit has helped, not hindered, the cause: “The problem is that when the general public looks at the space… it’s still a bit of a faux-pas in some people’s minds.”
“But when you have a buttoned down program that’s run professionally… that makes it a lot easier to digest,” he said.
Where does that leave Emery and, in many ways, Trudeau?
Emery believes that business corrupts the justice and civil rights arguments for legalizing pot.
“If you have a license to grow and sell and produce marijuana you might not want too many other people to have that privilege too,” Emery said last week on a visit to the Postmedia building. “The legalization I believe in is where we can all grow in our backyard and we can all grow a few plants in our atrium and there is no monopoly on growing it and there is no monopoly on selling it.”
But that’s exactly the version of legalization that the Conservatives will and already are using to attack Trudeau. The party has tweeted, leafleted and generally attacked Trudeau for his pro-pot stance for a year, and yet the Liberals polling numbers are holding steady, if not rising.
“To me it all has to do with how the Conservatives deal with it,” said Alex Marland, an associate professor of political science at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and co-editor of the upcoming book Political Communication in Canada. He said there are political takeaways from Emery’s return: One that it’s never good for a politician to be associated with a convicted criminal; and two, the Liberals will only be damaged insofar as the Conservatives take it.
If they manage to make it the “ballot question” in 2015, Marland doesn’t agree with Emery that pot will tip the scales towards the Grits.
Marland also said the current debate, and Jodie Emery’s planned bid for the Liberal nomination in Vancouver East, does benefit the Grits in one clear way: It marginalizes the NDP. The Liberals are the third party but whenever marijuana is in the news, it’s a Liberal-Conservative debate. That kind of framing serves the one-time natural governing party well in the lead up to the next general election.
But Emery’s pledge to spend the next year campaigning on the Liberals’ behalf — he seeks to turn the vote into a referendum on marijuana — is a mixed blessing.
“I think he’s actually more of an asset than a negative compared to before (he was incarcerated) when the political climate was a lot more opposed to any type of marijuana legalization talk,” said Chris Alcantara, an associate political science professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. He said Emery is “still negative for the Liberals, but less of a negative.”
“He’s taken extreme positions, and extreme positions in Canadian politics … can have a very polarizing effect,” Alcantara said.
That’s why the Liberal spokespeople, no matter what you ask them about the Emerys, say there’s a nomination process to be followed. They want to avoid too close an association without alienating the pro-marijuana voters that support Emery.
Five years on, Dana Larsen, a long-time marijuana activist, friend to the Emerys and director of Sensible BC, says Marc is “more relevant than ever” and thanks to all the coverage “if people hadn’t heard about Marc before they certainly have now.”
But notoriety isn’t esteem.
And for the over 30 million Canadians who don’t smoke pot (about 3.5 million do so at least once a year) Emery isn’t the spokesperson the movement needs.
He’s the spokesperson the Conservatives want to run against.
His vision of backyard pot sounds utopian to the converted, but that’s preaching to the choir.
If Emery really wants legal weed in Canada, he should step aside, and let big business lead the nation to the dispensary gates.
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