As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s nine years in power come to an end, many are reflecting on his legacy. His record on drug policy—in an era that saw the federal legalization of cannabis and the expansion of harm reduction programs, but far too little done to stem a devastating overdose crisis—forms an important part of that legacy.
Facing unpopularity both within the Liberal Party he leads and among the wider populace, Trudeau, 53, announced on January 6 that he would be stepping down after the Liberals chose a new leader. He has prorogued parliament until March 24. After that, a federal election is due by October 20 and may well take place much sooner.
“This country deserves a real choice in the next election and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election,” Trudeau said in a press conference outside of his home.
There’s a good chance he’ll be replaced by Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who is currently leading in the polls and has promised to crack down on overdose prevention sites and safe supply programs.
Trudeau, a former school teacher whose father Pierre Trudeau was also prime minister, won in a landslide election in 2015, ousting Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who had also been in office for nine years. Harper was staunchly anti-drug and pro-carceral punishment. He went viral for saying that cannabis is “infinitely worse” than tobacco while campaigning in October 2015, just weeks before he lost to Trudeau.
“If I take a 30,000-foot view … I’m very happy that we got legalization across the finish line.”
Trudeau, on the other hand, galvanized young voters in the country, and his promise to legalize cannabis federally was part of the reason. He managed to get it done by October 2018, just three years after taking office. That shift made Canada the second nation in the world to legalize weed for adult use.
“If I take a 30,000-foot view and kind of look at this drug legacy … I’m very happy that we got legalization across the finish line,” Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, told Filter.
Canada’s legalization scheme was met with resistance from some politicians, doctors and newspaper columnists, who feared it would lead to a spike in teen use; some even compared it to fentanyl. Cannabis has always been popular among young people in Canada, and research published in the Lancet in 2024 shows that at most legalization has resulted in teen use remaining steady.
“I had people tell me ‘Why are you advocating for this? People are gonna die.’ And we never saw that come to fruition,” Rebecca Haines-Saah, associate professor in community health sciences at the University of Calgary, told Filter.
“People are concerned about young kids exposed to edibles. These are things to watch in the health system, and we’re always concerned about problems from substance use for vulnerable groups, but to me, it’s not an emergency,” she added, noting that Canada’s approach to legalization favored strict regulation versus full-throttle commercialization.
One of the great successes of legalization was that people are no longer arrested for cannabis possession. But Trudeau’s government did not prioritize pardoning people with criminal records for cannabis possession—which would prevent them from showing up on background checks and contributing to discrimination in areas such as employment and housing.
“I still don’t think that we’ve done enough to help people repair the damage that was done.”
Nor did the government create equity programs that would make it easier for those who’d been criminalized for cannabis—disproportionately Black and Indigenous people—to get into the legal industry.
“There were many people for whom a single cannabis possession arrest was their entry point into the justice system. And I still don’t think that we’ve done enough to help people repair the damage that was done,” said Owusu-Bempah, who helped Canadians navigate the bureaucratic pardoning system through his work with the nonprofit Cannabis Amnesty.
Trudeau’s time in office also coincided with the rise of fentanyl in the drug supply and the worst overdose crisis Canada has ever seen.
In 2017, I hosted a VICE cannabis legalization town hall with Trudeau, where harm reduction expert Zoë Dodd pleaded with him to do more to address the crisis.
“It is young people who are dying. It is young people who elected you. Save their lives too,” she said, pressing him to decriminalize all drugs.
“I’m not there yet,” he responded.
Dodd, who is based in Toronto, described Trudeau’s legacy on harm reduction as a “mixed bag.”
He oversaw the expansion of overdose prevention sites, which Dodd and other activists pressured the federal government to legally exempt from Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. His government also expanded access to naloxone, increased funding for safe supply programs during the pandemic, and approved British Columbia’s request to decriminalize small amounts of all drugs in 2023.
However, Dodd pointed out that the federal government didn’t fund overdose prevention sites, leaving some of them to operate solely on donations. Federal funding of safe supply programs, meanwhile, will dry up in March, which will likely cut patients off from safe alternatives to adulterated street drugs.
“I think most of my colleagues and friends and fellow advocates are pretty afraid of what’s to come.”
After Trudeau announced his resignation, Poilievre released a video saying the Liberal government has unleashed “crime and drugs in your community.” He vowed to “take back control of our streets by locking up criminals, banning drugs, treating addiction, and stopping gun smugglers.”
“I am really angry at how the toxic drug deaths crisis has been used as a political football to buy votes,” Dodd said.
She said Trudeau’s government could have protected harm reduction programs by setting them up with years of earmarked funding, rather than smaller-scale pilot projects. She wished it had decriminalized drugs on a federal level, and permitted compassion clubs, which allow members to receive checked drugs without fear of arrest.
Despite these and other failures, the coming election might leave Trudeau’s drug-policy legacy looking comparatively positive.
“I think most of my colleagues and friends and fellow advocates are pretty afraid of what’s to come,” Dodd said.
Photograph of Trudeau in 2023 by United States Department of Homeland Security via Picryl/Public Domain
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