Perhaps the lady shouldn't be smiling so smugly - BUSTED!

MARIJUANA POSSESSION
Spike In Pot Arrests Tied To Bill's Demise
Globe And Mail
July 9, 2007
Page A6

OTTAWA - The number of people arrested for smoking pot rose dramatically in several Canadian cities last year after the Conservatives took office and killed a bill to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijauna.

The spike in arrests for simple possession of cannabis appears in data compiled by The Canadian Press from municipal police forces through interviews and Access to Informatioin Act requests.

National statistics will be released next week, but preliminary figures suggest the number of arrests jumped by more than one-third in several Canadian cities.

Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Halifax all reported increases of between 20 and 50 per cent in 2006, while Montreal and Calgary saw their number of arrests dip a few percentage points from the previous year.

As a result, thousands of people were charged with a criminal offence that only recently was within a whisker of extinction. Every Party in the House of Commons except the Conservatives supported a bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, but the Liberal government that sponsored it never brought it to a final vote.

Severeal police officials say the trend is directly linked to that proposed legislation, which died as a result of the 2006 federal election.

Terry McLaren, President of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, said many forces simply stopped laying charges after the Liberals first introduced a deccriminalization bill in 2003.

"Everybody was waiting for what was going to happen. There'd be no use clogging up the court system with that decriminalization bill there," he said.

"When that was defeated, I'd say it was business as usual."

The number of people charged plunged from 26,882 in 2002 and remained relatively steady at about 19,000 for the three years that decriminalization was being debated.

The bill would have made possession under 15 grams a non-criminal offence punishable by fines starting at $150.

Canadian Press