Is Trudeau’s legalization merely Harper’s MMPR for recreational consumers?

It seems that is the case, and the evidence has only been stacking up since the Liberal victory in 2015.

But more so, the question must be asked: Do we need government-funded police services? Does Parliament need to do anything but remove cannabis from the criminal code and pardon all non-violent offenders?

Following politics means always questioning someone’s motive for power. What someone says to win is almost never the real reason why they want in. Canada’s traditional checks and balances offer only marginal improvement to the more corrupt administrations around the world.

So long as law and order are provided by bureaucracy, the allocation process will always be inherently political. There’s simply no other alternative.

Of course, where there are market exchanges, bureaucracy still exists. But the profit motive forces entrepreneurs to root out inefficiency, there’s also a risk a more competent producer will enter the market.

Political lobbying will fix that pesky issue of free markets and consumer choice, but often, as is the case with police services and other government functions, there is no market competition.

Vancouver and Toronto’s police departments exist because of an implicit “social contract” that binds all Canadians to Ottawa. Their actions, although perhaps sometimes perceived as valuable, are inherently political and often counter-productive.

Some consider this a good thing since “we” have to be compassionate and think about the poor — efficiency be damned.

Because, y’know, heaven forbid we allow individuals to freely contract their demand for arbitration and security services to competing firms, much like they do with insurance or with lawyers. Canada is apparently “progressive” by relying on bureaucratic methods that proved fatal in other, more socialistic countries.

Meanwhile, impoverished Canadians who, compared to the poor in India or South Africa, are doing okay for themselves given the circumstances, need “our” help. Therefore we involuntarily finance a one-size-fits-all political system that also debases the value of the money, demands income taxes, and gradually but completely deteriorates the capital structure that was responsible for our standard of living to begin with.

The latest in the fight against cannabis prohibition demonstrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of this system.

Police play politics. And evidently, when Justin Trudeau, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Bill Blair are heading the bureaucracy, there isn’t much difference between the previous Conservative government and this one.

Except, of course, that gender-pronouns are now written into law and that the federal government will be running deficits into the 2050s, and you’ll still have your cannabis criminal record. The drug war is far from over regardless of whether the majority party is Liberal, Conservative or NDP.

But Liberal MP backbenchers recently voted against Trudeau and passed a law banning genetic discrimination. Perhaps there is still hope for cannabis.