Recently both federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Premier Danielle Smith have advocated for mandatory minimums for drug-related charges, and Poilievre even went one step further to state that anyone caught trafficking 40 mg of fentanyl or above should receive a mandatory life sentence.
Putting aside the fact any such laws would assuredly be struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper discovered when he tried the same thing, the idea itself has no relation to the cause and effect of addiction.
Most traffickers arrested and tried in Canadian courts are also addicts themselves. They work as low level pushers for the local cartels and gangs to feed their own addictions.
The addicts coerced into trafficking do the dirty work and get the arrests on the streets.The cartels and gangs rarely see any prison time, and their supply of new addicts to coerce into trafficking is nearly unlimited. That's the insidious nature of the drug business.
But even when they are occasionally imprisoned, what are these local gangs and cartels? Merely franchisees for much larger national organized crime gangs, who themselves are beholden to international criminal organizations not even based in the country for their supply of illegal substances.
So how does putting the street level addict/ trafficker into jail for life do anything to cut off the root of the evil tree, whose toxic and fatal fruits are endless? Not one thing.
There is no easy solution to the problem of trafficking and addiction, no matter the red meat any political party might want to throw out to its base. Prevention has to be paired with punishment.
And if you are going to target anyone for trafficking, maybe set your sights a little higher than the streets.
