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“People in my community, I’m talking the police and others, they don’t know what’s going on,” NDP MP committee member and health critic Murray Rankin said Thursday.

“These people have talked about reform, why can’t they decriminalize in the near term, why can’t they show us a road map of where we’re going in marijuana?”

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, testifying this week before another Commons committee, said, “there’s a misunderstanding, it seems to me, in the Canadian consciousness,” whether possessing and dealing in marijuana remains a crime.

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As long as the current law is on the books, Paulson said Mounties will not turn a blind eye to people engaged in serious criminal enterprises involving marijuana or where children could be harmed. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has made a similar declaration.

Yet on Thursday, Conservative MP and former justice minister Rob Nicholson told fellow justice committee members that he is hearing of “more and more instances” of people growing marijuana. He asked whether federal drug prosecutors across the country are noting related changes.

Brian Saunders, director of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, replied, “what we’ve heard occasionally from prosecutors, sometimes the courts are questioning why we’re proceeding with these cases given the government has announced its intention in the future to legalize the possession of marijuana.

“The position we’ve taken is quite simply that until Parliament has enacted a new law, the current law remains in force and if cases are referred to us, we will conduct our usual assessment, and if it meets our threshold test for prosecution, we will continue to prosecute that case.”