In such circumstances, is it surprising that it is to the middle-ground that Canadian policy generally gravitates? When Canada rejected prohibition it was not in favour of an open market for liquor sales but, in concert with our national character and tradition, for a regime of strict government control and regulation. And in the case of drug policy, we have similarly tread a middle line, this time between the “drug war” mentality of our closest neighbour and the harm reduction focus of some European states.

From the standpoint of the mouse we have achieved a balance of sorts. Canada has pursued a policy, guided but not entirely defined by legislation, tough enough to meet our international commitments and mollify our bumptious southern neighbours. Yet we have avoided the worst excesses of the “drug wars” by preserving the discretion of bench and badge and a strong public health tradition.

But at the time of this writing, the balance appears to be shifting. In announcing that it will soon decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use, the federal government has again chosen to tread, in Canadian fashion, a path of compromise between the more revolutionary proposal put forward by Canada’s Senate to legalize and regulate marijuana, and the outraged exhortations of the Bush administration to hold the line on zero tolerance. The latter make the choice a risky one given our close ties and trade dependency, but it is also refutes those who deny Canada’s distinctiveness and see in Canadian drug policy simply a pale imitation of American priorities.

CONCLUSION: DIFFERENCES MATTER

In terms of political ideology, Canada inherited strong strains of Toryism, liberalism and socialism while America has only known various strains of liberalism peppered with religious moralism (Adams 1997). And these two different historical and political legacies have created differences that matter. Canadians, even with all the influences they face from American and other international sources, still rate their concerns about health care, child poverty, standards of education, environment, and homelessness well above their worries about drugs and crime. And as far as issues about which they are unconcerned, the crime issue outperforms health care and child poverty by a ratio of four to one, and is more than double the proportion of Canadians who are unconcerned about homelessness (Roberts 2001).

Our social safety net has helped reduce many of the social conflicts which plague the U.S. and which elites have exploited to build support for the war on drugs. Ironically it is on this preoccupation, which shares its roots with the temperance movement of a century ago, that today’s public health and harm reduction initiatives are building. Canadian social programs reflected:

...a Canadian philosophy, long in the making, that the healthy should be responsible for the sick and the fortunate for the unfortunate. In embracing this philosophy Canada moved away from the North American worship of individualism which had held back collective solutions to problems of industrialization (Murphy 1999:104).

Canada’s social legislation places the country part way between Western Europe and America, as indeed, it is in other public policy areas, including its drug policy.

The ideological underpinning for Canadian and U.S. social policies arise through different ideas about the relationship between the state and the individual. Traditionally, Canadian politics had been established around a federalist model, and our Constitution was primarily concerned with the division of power between levels of government with little reference to individual citizens and their rights. The Constitution in 1982, its incorporation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the growth of post-materialist value influences changed the discourse in Canadian political culture.