Spineless Liberals on Mandatory Minimums

The Liberal Party is contemplating reversing their position on mandatory minimums for growing a small amount of marijuana. Last year they supported the government’s bill to bring in such mandatory minimums, but now they are being more cautious and considering their position carefully. This is good news since neither the NDP nor the BQ supported the bill the first time, and without Liberal support this fundamentally flawed public policy will not see the light of day.

One question that comes to mind is why has the Liberal’s appeared to change their mind?

Perhaps a better question would be why did they support the mandatory minimums in the first place?

For 13 years of government the Liberals had resisted exactly this sort of policy move. In fact under the previous government, marijuana laws were heading in the opposite direction of the current government. The mandatory minimums bill is exactly the sort of law that Liberal Party members, in general, would oppose. So what was behind the Liberal leader’s support for the government? Was Michael Ignatieff taking a bold stand against his own party’s traditional views for an issue he truly believes in?

Nope.

He was bullied into it.

Mr. Ignatieff was afraid that Mr. Harper would call an election and spend a month accusing the Liberals of being “soft on crime.” The Liberal leader abandoned the long stand views of his party not out of principle but out of fear that he could not win the argument.

So what changed? Well there has been an increase in the public scrutiny of not just the cost of the Conservative government’s crime bills but the effectiveness as well. So now the Liberal Party has the political coverage to attack the bill without seeming to be on the side of drug kingpins.

But hang on, isn’t the Liberal Party suppose to be the official opposition? Are they not exactly the people that are supposed to bring questions like cost and effectiveness into the public debate? Isn’t that their constitutional role in our Parliamentary democracy? Aren’t they supposed to be the leaders of opposing government policy rather than the followers?

It isn’t like they didn’t know the arguments against mandatory minimums. All those MPs and MP staff that have spent their lives in politics must have had this debate at least once before. So why couldn’t they muster up the will to oppose the government from the very beginning?

It is because the Liberal Party of Canada, the most successful political party in the history of representative democracy, is completely spineless.