Thanks, Mr. Chair. Yes, I will be supporting this motion. Part of the problem here is that we do not even have a plan for implementation of cannabis legalization. We have asked for that. I know we dealt with that in the first motion, but we do not even know what the costs are going to be. You know, the Regular MLAs who travelled to the communities, we were put in the position of having to explain that all the revenues were just going to go into the consolidated revenue fund. There is no guarantee that any of this money, revenues from cannabis sales, is actually going to get spent on health promotion. We do not know, in fact none of us really knows, what it's going to get spent on because it goes into the general pot, and that's different than the approach that is being taken by some governments.

The federal government has said that the revenues that they get they will put into health promotion. That is a good commitment. We do not have that from our government. I have also heard that some of the provincial jurisdictions are looking at sharing as much as 40 per cent of revenues with local governments, because their costs will be increased in many ways. I am also aware that, in New Brunswick, the provincial government has negotiated with their suppliers to set aside 2 per cent of the gross sales value into a special fund that will be used for health promotion. I understand, you know, we don't know what the sales levels are going to be here, but I would urge our Cabinet colleagues to look at the approach that New Brunswick has adopted.

You know, governments are notoriously opposed to targeted revenues. They just hate targeted revenues, because it ties their hands, but we heard this in all the communities that we went to. You know: what is the money going to be used for, and is any of it going to be directed specifically to healthcare, education, and so on? We don't know because there's no plan.

So my preference would have been to have something in the legislation itself deal with this, to ensure that there was a requirement that at least part of the revenues would be spent on health promotion, research, and public awareness, but we couldn't get that in the bill because that's not the way it was crafted, and it's outside the scope of what's already been put together. It's a financial matter, so we couldn't make that kind of change. So this is a poor second cousin to that, but at the end of the day, I do support this motion. Hopefully our Cabinet colleagues are going to respond to this in a meaningful way and ensure that some of the revenues are actually spent to supplement the existing monies that are spent for these purposes. Thanks, Mr. Chair