C-15 is dead!
I have some great news! C-15 is no more.
Today, Stephen Harper asked the Governor General to “prorogue” (end the session of) Parliament. This means that all the bills are dead, C-15 included!
Had it not been for the hard work of everyone in lobbying the Senate, C-15 would have passed into law. That's right, we campaigned politically and won! C-15 has been stopped!
The Parliament will resume in March, and we can assume Stephen Harper will reintroduce C-15 in some form shortly thereafter.
We can not stop now! We must continue to build so that when C-15 comes back we can face it with even greater numbers and more intense campaigning.
Go to http://whyprohibition.ca/invite/import to invite your Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo friends to join WhyProhibition.ca, let's turn this victory on C-15 into real reform of Canada's drug laws!
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Heads Up!
Just a highlight from somewhere else I wanted to post here...
"Government House Leader Jay Hill (Prince George-Peace River, B.C.) said the main legislative priority for when Parliament returns will be the budget and economic issues. In terms of the 36 bills that died, the government intends to reintroduce Bill C-6, on consumer product safety, as well as Bill C-15, concerning drug-related offences, in their original forms."
As predicted
Stephen Harper stacked the Senate, giving him even more power over the legislative agenda.
http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/01/29/senate-appointments.html
How do I get to this blog
How do I get to the "C-15 is Dead" blog from the main page? I am putting a link in my signature on other sites, but I don't see an easy way to click to get to this blog. The only way I get here is by using the search. Thanks.
Since the name of the bill
Since the name of the bill has changed we have moved the C-15 info off the front page. If you want to link to the site, you can link easily to whyprohibition.ca directly, the newest info about whatever successor to C-15 is announced will always be at the top of the front page.
So what's the plan?
Ok, so everyone's in agreement that this is coming back in it's original form.
And that we need to get ready to fight, and do a better job of it.
So what's the plan?
The plan
We need to focus on the Liberals, and specifically their leadership to convince them to stand up to the so called "tough on crime" agenda.
To do this we need to display highly organized front, that is phone calls and emails to MP's, Letters to the Editors of news organizations, and in a coordinated fashion.
We have 17,000 people on the site now, the more we have the better!
When Parliament resumes (or when the Liberals resume sitting on January 25) we will begin an intense campaign aimed at overwhelming them with correspondence. The more organization we display, the more help we are to them during a fight over co called "tough on crime" and the more likely they are to stick their necks out.
-Jacob
Awesome Jacob. Is this where
Awesome Jacob.
Is this where the details will be found?
I don't know much about laws/politics, but I'm thinking if we can stop this from even being introduced we should focus some effort there.
Additionally can we do anything to prevent the 5 seats from being filled with Cons?
Absolutely we will post all
Absolutely we will post all information to WhyProhibition.ca and through our email lists.
To find out about important news and actions right away, join WhyProhibition.ca at whyprohibition.ca/user/register.
There's not much we can to do to stop Harper from appointing more Senators, but we can now expect the House of Commons to do a better job since it can't rely on the Senate to clean up messy bills anymore.
whoops didn't log in
That was me above.
"...we can now expect the House of Commons to do a better job..." seriously?
My eyes will be locked here on whyprohibition, and I'm getting whoever I can to register and watch for updates, plus I will post any updates from here over to other sites.
Thank you Jacob and everyone else here!
Rejoice for tonight. We do battle in the morning.
I would just like to say i'm really happy with this and thanks to everyone who helped lobby against Bill C-15. I know, I myself, emailed and called many offices urging politicians to oppose C-15. We can't win this alone. Even if you feel as if you can't do anything I urge anyone out there to at least pick up the phone and make your voice heard. This is our country damnit! Let's take it back from these pricks, eh!?
C-15 returning soon with a vengeance?
Id like to be cheering the demise of the Tories' get-tough-on-drugs bill C-15 too, but I fear it will just come back again to haunt us soon enough, worse than ever, without containing proposed amendments of Liberal Senators that would have made punishments for growing cannabis less severe than would the Tories' proposed version.
In January, Harper will appoint 5 new (Conservative) Senators, giving him his coveted majority in the Upper Chamber.
This means Liberal Senators' ability to make amendments to the crime bill will be no longer. A Conservative dominated Senate will happily rubber stamp Tory sponsored bills from the Lower House.
Most likely, Harper will easily get his original crime bill passed next time, unaltered and unimproved. So even small-time pot growers should prepare for guaranteed minimum prison sentences soon, should they be convicted. The Lower House politicians were too chicken of appearing "soft on crime" to oppose or propose amendments to Harper's bill the first time around, preferring to let Lib Senators try to amend it. There's little reason to think they'll develop spines over the next few months, even if public opposition to the bill ramps up a degree. Iggy & co. will be too afraid of provoking Tory attack ads portraying Ignatieff as a crook-coddler & pal to organized crime cartels. Such ads may work, unfortunately. Iggy's vulnerable to Tory attacks, and the majority mood of the public probably favours Tories' get-tough-on-drugs approach, regressive and unjust though it may be.
If only the coalition had gone ahead, Iggy'd be PM, Bill C-15 would not be in the works, and NDP's progressive drug policies would have stood a chance of implementation. And Harper would be an ex-PM, in the sunset of his political life, as Tories search for a new leader...If only!
This is NOT the end of C-15, not even close!
WARNING. This is NOT NOT NOT the time for complacency, this is an accidental victory and this legislation WILL be reintroduced, believe me.
Some quotes from various news stories:
"Warren Kinsella, a political consultant to the Liberal Party, said Prime Minister Stephen Harper will use the time to improve conditions for his minority government by likely filling five vacant seats in the Liberal-dominated Senate with Conservative supporters."
"Hopefully when Parliament returns in March that will no longer be the case and the key crime bills that the Liberal Senate has stopped can get through with no problems," said Tim Powers, a Conservative strategist.
"We will reintroduce in their original form the consumer safety law (Bill C-6) and the anti-drug-crime law (Bill C-15) that the Ignatieff Liberals gutted."
"By the time Parliament resumes, Harper would have had time to ask Jean to name five new senators, which would give the Conservatives a majority on the newly formed Senate committees and greater control for passing their own legislation."
Make no mistake folks, at best this buys us some time to get organized, and do a MUCH better job at knocking this down next time around. A paltry 500-odd signatures on the petition? Come on, we need to do better than that!
It'll be back...GUARANTEED!
What the petition shows us is that only 500 people out of 30,000,000 people understand the facts.
Is this more a problem of hiding what they're doing from the public, or the sorry state of education and ability to think? I guess, when the end result is the same, the reasons hardly matter.
I'm 100% in agreement that both Bill C-15 and Bill C-6 WILL RETURN next year...after all, bill C-6 was Bill C-51 in 2008, and was reintroduced with minimal changes, and none of them were to the benefit of the people, or our freedoms!
Politicians never do the right thing for the people who they allegedly represent...they do what they're paid most to do by the richest lobbyists and most corrupt criminals.
pathetic
http://www.cannabisfacts.ca/mandatoryminimums.html
the truth is infuriating.
I felt like punching my screen in hopes of destroying robs face quite a few times, especially when he pulled that slimy politician mumbo jumbo and refused to answer any of the questions that were asked. That's our justice minister? I'm losing faith in my country as the days go by. To think I used to be proud...
As the others voiced before me, it'll be back unfortunately.
Most infuriating part of the video was when our dear friend rob said that bill C-15 is the wish of the canadian population and immediately after says that he has received support on provincial levels and by enforcement agencies. Yes sir. Provincial governments and cops are what makes up the canadian population.
Dumb ass and a half.
We need a referendum on this.
"Our Conservative Government’s message is clear: drugs are dangerous and destructive. We will always work for the safety and well being of Canadians and their families." (from Rob's page)
"Alcohol is a psychoactive drug that has a depressant effect." (definition of alcohol)
Last I checked I'm allowed to purchase alcohol.
In fact I'm pretty sure that the government holds a wide collection of various alcoholic beverages and I'll be bold enough to say that they probably have a few alcoholic politicians in the house of commons.
But since it's legal... it's all good right?
C-15 to return
Of course C-15 will return, but we have months to prepare.
Ultimately, to say this was an accidental victory is to ignore the work of all those who made it possible. Were it not for the lobbying in the Senate, the amendments would not have been added and the bill would have passed into law before Christmas.
Yes, C-15 will return, but for now we have a victory; the next battle will comer sooner than we like, best to live in the moment and enjoy a victory before moving on to the next fight.
We need a facebook group
We need a facebook group opposed to C-15 and nothing else.
An anti prorougue group with only 25,000 members got air time on all Canadian National News channels and the air time allowed the word to get out and within days bumped that number to as of yesturday 88 thousand, just checked and it's a 101 thousand this morning.
So this kind of think works, put a few paragraohs in the info section on why the bill is bad and then links to a million more articles on the bill.
Because there are a lot more people willing to quickly join a facebook group or fill out there name on a ready send letter for a politician and we need to appeal to everyone, even the people who don't want to seek out sites like this.
Facebook = evil
We have facebook groups, but Facebook likes to delete them whenever they get to large (ie Cannabis Culture, Pot-TV, etc)
Additionally, we can't communicate with the members of the group after it passes a few thousand members.
We are in the process of adding a running total to the number of WhyProhibition.ca users on the side of the page, it's just passed 25,000 if I recall correctly.
The "Canadians against Proroguing Parliament" is being pushed by the Liberals and is getting a ton of press because there are a ton of press-releases going out about it.
We can do the same (but have not yet, pending the sidebar counter) and will be sending out press-releases proclaiming our size as well.
What would make a huge difference is if we could coordinate a massive membership drive alongside those press-releases, so the media could see the number increase by thousands every day, much like the Facebook group.
Any ideas on how to get more people registered and involved? Check out whyprohibition.ca/invite/import for a great tool to invite all your gmail, hotmail and yahoo contacts.
-Jacob