The government's big new justice bill has just been tabled. Stay tuned.

The Trudeau government's new justice legislation specifically permits police officers to issue a warning instead of making an arrest or issuing a fine for drug possession. It also encourages courts to consider alternatives to prison.

It's not decriminalization, but it's one step towards ending the war on drugs in Canada. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3v7e3/canada-introduces-new-bill-to-reduce-small-time-drug-prosecutions

The bill eliminates 13 different mandatory minimum sentences. Most, if not all, were already declared unconstitutional. They are predominately weapons offences. The bill doesn't touch any drug MMPs, nor does it eliminate all MMPs which have been declared unconstitutional.

The full bill is here: https://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/BillDetails.aspx?Language=E&billId=11104167

Sorry, I made a mistake: The bill *does* repeal some drug mandatory minimums around drug production.

This took me a minute to work out but, in fact, this legislation removes all mandatory minimum penalties from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

To put this in context, there are about 72 mandatory minimum penalties in the Criminal Code/CDSA. So this bill removes just shy of half, if my math is right.

Maybe of interest: Here's a rundown of various MMPs that were declared unconstitutional as of mid-2018. (Many others have been ruled as such since then.)

This is actually a massive problem. In 2015, the Supreme Court basically headed off a raft of incoming constitutional challenges to MMPs, and gave the lower courts a powerful new test to strike them down.

What we're left with is a national patchwork, where a crime carries an MMP in one province but not another. https://nationalmagazine.ca/en-ca/articles/law/rule-of-law/2021/canadas-web-of-mandatory-minimum-sentences

Attorney General David Lametti just took to the podium to announce the bill, saying this government is "turning the page on failed Conservative policies."

Which is rich. It's been the Liberals enforcing these laws, and defending them in court, for the past six years.

One really significant thing in the bill is the massive widening of conditional sentences. Right now, the Criminal Code allows for non-prison sentences for a very narrow subset of cases. This bill, C-22, basically strikes out a lot of the limiting factors.