As I said, the agenda is set by the Prime Minister so I took some representation to have cannabis added to the agenda by the consult of federation. Carbon pricing was not discussed. It was not on the agenda. The discussion on cannabis mainly followed up on the consult of federation meetings that we had earlier in the year in Edmonton where the Premiers expressed concern about the fact that a lot of work still had to be done in five key areas with regards to implementation of the cannabis legislation.
We were reminded once again that there were still some concerns about the lack of time that June/July of 2018 is too soon and that we don’t have enough time to get properly ready. The prime Minister indicated that this was not an evented time. It was a progress over time where we’re looking to protect our youth and our children from the bad effects of drugs. Also, we’re trying to make sure that the bad guys didn’t get to keep all of the money. The longer we waited to implement, more money goes to the bad guys. We had a very good briefing by the parliamentary secretary. He talked quite a bit about enforcement of impaired driving or cannabis impaired driving and how that was going to work. He talked a lot about education. We also talked about the retail methods that would be used. I raised the matter of we have dry communities in the Northwest Territories and obviously to have communities where we don’t have cannabis would go against the initiative of legalizing cannabis.
The parliamentary secretary did advise that our member of parliament has invited him to visit the North and he would be visiting at some point in the near future. I think that would be very helpful. There’s still a lot of concern about licensing of retail or distribution methods and also the production of cannabis is still felt by the Premiers in a lot of the provinces that as soon as cannabis is legalized, there’s not enough production available to meet the demand. That was the gist of the discussions, Mr. Speaker.