The Federal government’s Bill C-5, passed in 2022, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, sought to, among other things, keep convictions for simple drug possession “separate and apart” from other convictions.
The bill contained an amendment that gave the government two years to sequester all simple possession records for cannabis and other drugs across the country. This required harmonizing records across multiple jurisdictions, something the federal government has repeatedly highlighted as a challenge. This means those charges would no longer show up on criminal background checks.
There was a November deadline for that process, which the federal government was, unsurprisingly, unable to meet.
Annamaria Enenajor, a criminal defence lawyer and former director of the advocacy group Cannabis Amnesty, told CBC News she isn’t surprised that the “ambitious” deadline was not met, given the challenges of coordinating such a move across the country.
“You can’t just press control-alt-delete and have them all disappear,” she told the CBC.
“The program is very ambitious, given how many levels of government are involved in the collection and preservation of records,” she added.
“There would have to be a coordinated effort on the part of the federal government to work with the provincial government and various law enforcement entities around the country. And I just haven’t seen that happening.”
The amendment sought to address one of the challenges the federal government has faced in clearing people’s records for simple cannabis possession charges.
Five years since the Liberal’s cannabis pardon program was launched, the Parole Board of Canada says only 845 pardons for cannabis possession have been granted.
NDP MP Randall Garrison, who introduced the amendment adopted into the bill to sequester those possession records, has noted in the past that the amount of bureaucracy required to implement such a change is a complicated one that he did not expect the government to be able to meet.
Conservatives, meanwhile, have been calling on the government to reverse Bill C-5 entirely, which they have argued is soft on crime.
While the Liberals passed legislation that allowed for pardons for low-level cannabis charges, the NDP has repeatedly called for further regulatory change that would automatically wipe such records clean.
The process behind such a proposal requires significant logistical changes to Canada’s criminal record-keeping system, although a program that would do just that has been tabled in the Senate several times. The NDP also presented a Primate Members Bill in late 2018, C-415, that would have called for a process where expungement requests were reviewed by the Parole Board of Canada.
While Bill C-93 partially addressed some of the issues for those with cannabis possession charges by removing the $631 fee and a ten-year wait time, it still means many hurdles for those applying, namely the cost of fingerprinting and seeking out those records. This is because of Canada’s archaic, outdated record-keeping method, where there is no single, online database of all criminal charges, meaning many arrest records are kept in courthouses and with police record keepers in the jurisdictions where the charges were originally laid.
This outdated, paper-based system, as well as the nature of how cannabis possession charges are recorded only as generic drug charges, was also part of why C-93 didn’t offer automatic record expungements for cannabis charges.
In October, just a month before the deadline, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc issued a ministerial directive instructing the RCMP not to disclose simple possession offences when completing background checks “unless otherwise required by law.”
