- Music
- 20 Oct 15
Despite Conservative scaremongering, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party have won a landslide victory.
Canada has a new government with the Liberal Party taking 184 seats in the parliamentary election, representing 54% of the vote. The outgoing Conservative Party has come in second with 99 seats.
The Prime Minister-designate is Justin Trudeau, the oldest son of former PM Pierre Trudeau who in the '70s was a sort of prototype Bill Clinton and Margaret Trudeau who had an affair with Ted Kennedy and hung out with the Rolling Stones.
These were both contributing factors to the couple eventually divorcing in 1984.
One of their son's election pledges was to legalise marijuana "right away."
"That's something we look forward to taking up, but from the federal side of it, moving it to a place where it is controlled and regulated is something we will start doing immediately," said Trudeau who's admitted smoking cannabis "maybe five or six times."
"The current hyper-controlled approach around medical marijuana that actually removes from individuals the capacity to grow their own is not going in the right direction, in either respect to freedom or the kind of care that people need," he expanded in another interview. "We don't yet know exactly what rate we're going to be taxing it, how we're going to control it, or whether it will happen in the first months, within the first year, or whether it's going to take a year or two to kick in. We haven't released a time... We want to get the best ideas from various places and construct a Canadian model."
His Conservative opponent, Stephen Harper, responded to Trudeau's pro-legalisation stance by claiming that "marijuana is infinitely worse than tobacco and it's something that we don't want to encourage."
A Conservative mailer was sent out claiming "Trudeau's agenda would make it easier for kids to get and smoke marijuana", but it hasn't stopped him and the Liberals scoring a landslide victory.
In a coming issue Hot Press will be talking to Anna Marie D'Angelo, Senior Media Relations Officer with Vancouver Coastal Health who operate the city's Insite supervised injecting centre.