The enforcement lobby is most often represented in policy discussions by the following organizations: the Canadian Police Association (CPA), The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP), the RCMP, provincial police, municipal police, The Bureau of Customs and Immigration, etc. These organizations represent a large number of politically active Canadian citizens. For example, the Canadian Police Association has 30,000 members, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has 932 members representing the leadership of 350 police services,⁶ and the RCMP had 20,866 employees as of May 1, 2001. While drug enforcement represents only part of the overall mandate of these organizations, these figures provide a good assessment of the size of enforcement-related interests in Canada.

It is possible to gauge the relative influence of the enforcement lobby in Canadian drug control politics by comparing the number of appearances of enforcement and non-enforcement interests before the House and Senate Special Committees currently reviewing drug policy. Between October 2000 and March 2002, 46 groups or individuals presented testimony to the Senate Special Committee on Illegal drugs. Of these 46, seven (or 12%) represented enforcement interests. Looking at the activities of the House Special Committee on the Non-Medical Use of Drugs, between October 2001 and June 2002, 171 individuals or groups presented testimony and of these, 43 (25%) represented enforcement-related interests. According to this analysis, then, it does not appear as though the enforcement lobby currently dominates policymaking on illicit drugs in Canada.

A close reading of the lobbying efforts of the enforcers in recent policy deliberations on illicit drugs reveals that even though they no longer enjoy a monopoly in this issue area, their arguments and tactics have become more sophisticated as the critique of the enforcement-dominated approach has broadened. In testimony to the Senate Special Committee on Illegal drugs, for example, representatives from the Canadian Police Association appear to have anticipated the critique of their position based on bureaucratic imperatives. They write:

While those critical of Canada’s existing laws and strategies to deter the use of illegal drugs will attempt to marginalize our input into these discussions, by suggesting that our contribution is somehow tied to a desire to sustain the allocation of police resources to drug enforcement programs, we will demonstrate in this submission that this is simply untrue (CPA 2001).

To support this statement they report that, on average, there is less than one drug-related conviction per active duty police officer annually in Canada.⁷ A second tactic that the enforcers use repeatedly is to use legalization as a “straw policy” when they defend the enforcement-dominated approach. Most drug reformers argue for the decriminalization of select substances (i.e., cannabis), or the implementation of harm reduction strategies like needle exchange, rather than for all out legalization of illicit drugs. Of course, the enforcers use this tactic because it allows them to make the reformers out to be more radical and “dangerous” than they actually are. A third tactic that the enforcers use repeatedly is to state that they are in favour of the balanced approach to drug control, that current drug policy is already balanced, and so there is no need for change. In theory (i.e., The National Drug Strategy), Canadian drug control policies indeed sound balanced but, as the 2001 Report from the Auditor General documents, in practice they are not.

⁶ In 1999, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) began supporting a less hard-lined approach in regards to cannabis possession. According to testimony by CACP representatives in Parliament, other law enforcement groups in Canada and the US harshly criticized the CACP for this shift in policy. See: Boyd 2002.
⁷ Of course, they do not also interpret this data as showing that the drug problem in Canada is probably less of a threat than pro-enforcement interests like to suggest. For an excellent analysis of the enforcement lobby’s tendency to exaggerate the threat from illegal drugs, see: Alexander 1990, Chapter 10.