On Friday July 29th, marijuana activist Marc Emery — the 47-year-old leader of the British Columbia Marijuana Party — was arrested in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a U.S. indictment charging him with selling millions of dollars worth of marijuana seeds to customers throughout the United States.
Jennifer Garner, in an article titled Canada Now Officially 51st State, suggests that “the highest levels of the Canadian provincial and federal governments were involved in setting up the (US-authored Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters treaty between the US and Canada) investigation and raid, in the process raising obvious issues of Canadian sovereignty and revealing to Canadians in a very stark way that Canadian law enforcement can sometimes be a tool of US drug agents.”
Vancouver Police spokesperson Howard Chow admitted that Emery’s selling of marijuana seeds “is not enough” for him to have been arrested by Canadian authorities acting on their own, and confirmed that the arrests came solely as a consequence of DEA motivation and information.
Libby Davies, Vancouver East NDP Member of Parliament, stated that the arrests go against the views of most Canadians, who support decriminalization of marijuana and who had not demanded that Emery’s marijuana businesses be shut down.

“I think it’s very disturbing that the Vancouver police department is raiding a local business and arresting people for the U.S. war on drugs,” Davies told The Vancouver Sun. “It feels to me like the long arm of U.S. enforcement reaching into Canada.”

Here’s the video of the US DEA press conference. In this video, Halifax Police provide information on their role in the arrest. At BlogsCanada, Canadians have begun to express their alarm at Emery’s arrest, detention and possible extradition, taking the federal government to task — most pointedly federal two others are wanted in the United States to face charges of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, conspiracy to distribute seeds and conspiracy to engage in money laundering. Mr. Emery was in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, where he was scheduled to speak at a music festival that raises funds for the organization, Maritimers Unite for Medical Marijuana.
Mr. Emery spent Friday night in a Halifax holding cell, and was remanded to another correctional facility by midday Saturday, where he’ll remain pending arrangements to transfer him to British Columbia early this coming week.

Save St. Paul’s Hospital Coalition co-chair Aaron Jasper will appear live on Rafe Mair’s morning talk radio show on CKBD 600 AM this morning (July 27) from 8:40 – 9:00 a.m. The show is available live, and archived, on the web at 600am.com.
Providence Health Care, a faith-based health care provider, operates five hospitals across Vancouver, the largest of which is St. Paul’s, located in downtown Vancouver. Providence Health Care proposes to close the current West End site and move the hospital three kilometres east, to False Creek Flats, just southeast of the Prior Street exit of the Georgia Viaduct. A thriving community resource widely acknowledged as one of the finest acute care teaching and research hospitals on the continent, St. Paul’s Hospital serves the largest downtown urban core population anywhere on this continent, outside of New York City.
Rick Barnes, at Politics in BC, and Steve Wansleeben at Panorama, provide further insight into St. Paul’s Providence Legacy Project.
The home of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and the designated heart centre for the province, St. Paul’s Hospital treats more than 116,000 patients every year, many of whom are members of the majority elderly and gay and lesbian population of the West End / Coal Harbour / Yaletown downtown core.

“What people need is access to the site,” Vancouver Burrard MLA Lorne Mayencourt recently told the Vancouver Courier. “There are seniors in the West End that need to be close to where they get services. There’s a gay population that accesses the hospital’s Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. The plan leaves me with a great deal of concern for health care in my community.”

The West Ender recently also ran a story on the possible move of the 111-year-old hospital, although the West Ender failed to adequately report on the utter lack of community consultation — by Providence Health Care, the City and the province — involved in the proposal to move the hospital. The lack of consultation is particularly egregious given that more than 90,000 residents live within a 10-block radius of St. Paul’s, and another 50,000 work in the downtown core each week day — significantly more than the 20,000 people who live within 10 blocks of the False Creek Flats site.
By moving St. Paul’s Hospital away from the population it serves — should the move come to pass — there is little doubt lives will be lost and health care jeopardized, not least because of the distance of the proposed site from the West End and the relative inaccessability of False Creek Flats.