In June 2018, Canada’s Parliament officially passed legislation to legalize recreational cannabis use and possession. The federal framework provides legal direction to provincial legislatures to ensure provincial cannabis policies are harmonized to reflect national goals, while leaving some room for provincial discretion. Every province has drafted a corresponding legislative framework, and cannabis is set to become legal in October. This makes Canada a living laboratory to examine the phenomenon of policy diffusion: when governments adopt policies that emulate those of other governments.
Have provincial governments chosen to align their regulatory frameworks for cannabis, or have they chosen to ‘go it alone’? There are many similarities in the provincial cannabis policies, specifically in terms of embracing the federal government’s three overarching policy goals for legalization: enforcing public safety and protection, establishing a safe and responsible supply chain, and minimizing harms of use. Yet, there are also notable areas of variation, including age limits, possession maximums, consumption parameters, educational awareness funding, retail and distribution strategies, and personal cultivation policies.
Why did variation occur where it did, and why was it so minimal? Our research compares two provinces – New Brunswick and Ontario – to find an explanation. Legislative debates and official government documents from New Brunswick and Ontario reveal two sources of this variation: first, New Brunswick and Ontario engaged in learning from the successes of other (primarily American) jurisdictions that had legalized cannabis recently. Second, those provinces combined this with what Jared Wesley (2018) calls the replication of analogous policies, by explicitly copying their own tobacco and alcohol frameworks and applying them to cannabis. The relatively minor differences between Ontario and New Brunswick can be explained in part by the differing extents to which they relied on these American states, and by their own minor differences in their existing alcohol and tobacco policies.
These provinces’ reliance on existing policies can in part be explained by the then-looming July 1, 2018 deadline set by the federal government, which discouraged policy innovation.
Given the complexities and uncertainties surrounding cannabis policy—and given that the long-term consequences of cannabis legalization are largely unknown—we fear that an overreliance on policy learning and replication may produce what Nair and Howlett (2017) call “policy myopia,” or “the inability to clearly see the horizon of the future policy environment."
The short timeline the provinces had to develop their cannabis frameworks may have produced misguided policy action ensuing from inadequate information and logistical uncertainties. This presents a serious problem as the likelihood of policy failure is significantly increased.
Andrew Train is an MA student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph.
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