A day after announcing his budding career in the pot business, former prime minister Brian Mulroney said the massive social change Canadians are experiencing with cannabis legalization is comparable to society’s acceptance of same sex marriage.
Still, he has no plans to smoke it.
“If you had told me when I was prime minister say 25 years ago or so, 30 years ago, that samesex marriage would be on everybody’s radar today, and be universally accepted that would have been a stretch for me and for a lot of other people,” Mulroney told Don Martin on CTV’s Power Play Thursday.
“But it’s happened, because these important social advances occur in waves.”
Mulroney added that “a major social advance” like cannabis legalization can have a domino effect around the world as other countries follow suit.
“My guess is that…other countries are going to seek to emulate what Canada has done here,” he said.
That would be good news for Mulroney, who just recently announced his plans to join the board of directors of an American cannabis company. The role with Acreage Holdings becomes official in November. His daughter, Ontario Attorney General Caroline Mulroney, is also in charge of pot legalization in her province.
The former prime minister has joined legions of former politicians who are launching careers in the cannabis industry – despite previously working for governments that doled out fines and jail sentences for the people who will now be their customers.
Mulroney’s new industry boasts political participants such as former prime minister John Turner and former Conservative cabinet minister Julian Fantino – but not everyone is impressed to hear about these cannabis-related career changes.
Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, one of the few MPs who has said he plans to partake in some cannabis consumption, was unimpressed by the move.
“I mean, there are lots of different words to describe that and certainly, they're adults and can make their own decisions, but one word that comes to mind is hypocrisy,” he said.
Erskine-Smith did seem to agree with one of Mulroney’s sentiments, however.
“Five years from now no-one will be interested in this question because we’ll all recognize we’re responsible adults…there are potential harms but certainly Canadians are capable of doing this because we’ve been doing it for decades,” he said.
For his part, Mulroney also agreed with Erskine-Smith on something – that legalizing pot was the right move.
“Canada is playing a major leadership role in this area and I applaud the government for it,” he said.
When pressed on why he didn’t do it during his tenure as prime minister, Mulroney said Canada was busy focusing on another issue at the time.
Canadians’ biggest priority when he was prime minister from 1984 to 1993?
“Acid rain,” he said.
