Liberals give Tories 30 more years in Kamloops

I can’t help but think that, if ever the federal Liberals hoped to win back the Kamloops riding they lost 33 years ago, they’ve pretty much guaranteed themselves third-party status hereabouts for another three decades.

That’s a lot of threes, but while three is a powerful number in sports, religion and superstition, it’s a bad omen out for the Grits.

The party wound up its national convention on the weekend with at least another trio of desperate new policies guaranteed to keep Kamloops and other traditionally conservative ridings re-electing the Tories.

Let’s begin with marijuana. At the urging of the party’s youth wing, the Liberals are now in favour of legalizing the weed.

In a strange interpretation of democracy, the party’s rules make it unnecessary for the party or the leader to heed the wishes of the convention, but no matter — like it or not, the Liberals will now be known as the party that wants to legalize marijuana.

“If you want to be part of a group of free-thinking, innovative, thoughtful, pragmatic, hopeful, positive, happy people, come and join the Liberal party,” declared interim leader Bob Rae. “And after the resolution on marijuana today, it’s going to be a group of even happier people in the Liberal party.”

Well said.

The party has thus departed its traditional middle ground, going beyond, even, anything the NDP has contemplated on the matter. Gone is the concept of decriminalization — pot would become legal for general sale, presumably under regulations similar to those for the merchandizing of alcohol.

The rationale for this is that the war on drugs has been a failure, as if anyone ever expected to actually win that war. We haven’t won the war on prostitution, nor on poverty, nor on the eradication of disease, yet we valiantly continue to do battle on those fronts with the hope and expectation that we can at least somehow manage them.

But, under the logic of the Liberals, it’s all or nothing.

How will this play in Kamloops? This is the city in which the cops raided a so-called “compassion club” set up to ensure medical marijuana was available to those who had a permit to use it, dragging its proprietor off to spend a night in jail.

This is a riding whose MP says, “Marijuana, whether you’re talking about the effects, the toxicity in terms of the human body are incredible. To legalize a substance that is incredibly toxic and is going to create a huge impact on our health-care system cost doesn’t really make sense.”

And, by the way, this is a place that has expressed no audible interest in establishing a supervised injection site for heroin addicts. In other words, this is not harm-reduction territory.

Rather, for the past dozen years, Kamloops has been represented in Ottawa by a party that wants to strengthen sanctions against marijuana users, build more jails, and give more people guns.

Oh, and the other two pieces of baggage the Liberals grabbed hold of on the weekend? How about the old preferential-voting fantasy, one that has been shot down not once, but twice, here in B.C.?

And then there’s the one allowing any “liberal-minded” Canadian to vote for the party’s leader — no membership fees allowed. What fun that will be.

Stephen Harper must be wondering how much better things can get.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca