Planning to go skiing this winter in Alberta’s resort towns, or perhaps some fall camping in rural British Columbia?

Better be careful if you want to fire up a joint alongside the chairlift or barbecue.

That’s because police investigate more marijuana possession and trafficking incidents per capita in parts of Western Canada, despite the long-held belief that attitudes toward pot get mellower as you near the Pacific Ocean.

Postmedia analyzed 12 years of national crime statistics to determine where you had the highest odds of getting questioned by police for having a small amount of bud. Lake Louise and Jasper have consistently been at the top of the list, and were followed in 2015 by several B.C. mountainside towns including Whistler, Merritt, Hope and Salmo.

But go ahead, puff away, if your travels take you to some parts of Central and Eastern Canada, where police investigate fewer pot possession cases. That’s not because no one imbibes in the eastern half of the country — the highest provincial rate of marijuana use per resident is in Nova Scotia, while Alberta has the third lowest.

A woman smokes a joint during the annual marijuana rally on Parliament Hill on April 20, 2016 in Ottawa. (Justin Tang / The Canadian Press)

So why should we care where in Canada law enforcement has been targeting pot smokers, especially since the federal government plans to make cannabis legal? Although marijuana offences have been dropping for four years, they still represented nearly two-thirds of all drug probes last year. More than half of the 96,000 drug offences reported by Canadian police in 2015 were for marijuana possession, while another nine per cent were for cannabis trafficking, production and distribution.

How marijuana has been handled by police officers, prosecutors and mayors over the last decade has varied wildly in Canada, often dramatically between municipal and provincial borders.

Now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is grappling with legislation that will not only legalize cannabis, but also attempt to homogenize how we as a country think about weed — rolling together the Just-Say-No-To-Drugs hardliners and police concerned about organized crime groups with the recreational pot heads and those who swear by marijuana’s medicinal benefits.

The new legislation is not scheduled to be introduced until next spring, and it could be 2018 before it becomes law. So, what to do with pot right now — when it is still technically illegal, but everyone knows Ottawa plans to make it legit?

Canada’s doctors raised concerns in August that there is not enough solid evidence yet that weed is a safe medical treatment. And in Toronto, the health board has asked Trudeau for immediate clarification on how to handle the possession and sale of pot during this hazy period before legalization.

“We are told by the federal government that recreational pot will be legal tomorrow, but we are going to continue to enforce that failed criminalization model today,” Toronto City Councilllor Joe Cressy said in an interview. “The challenge that city halls, in towns and cities right cross the country, are facing is there is no overarching public health framework to deal with this today.”

How marijuana has been handled by police officers, prosecutors and mayors over the last decade has differed wildly in Canada, often osculating dramatically between municipal and provincial borders.(Uriel Sinai / Getty Images)

Postmedia is launching today a national series looking at a future when relaxing at the end of the day with a puff on a joint could be as common as sipping a glass of wine. Journalists across the country will look at the legal, medical and business ramifications of a reefer-friendly nation and the lessons learned from trail-blazing states such as Colorado and Oregon.

Trudeau argues marijuana prohibition has not worked because it hasn’t stopped young people from getting high; it has left too many people with criminal records for possessing small amounts of the drug; and that most profits from the sale of this popular drug fill criminals’ pockets rather than government coffers.

The Liberals promise new laws that will permit pot consumption, but also crack down on those who give the drug to children, drive a car while high, or sell it outside of the government’s as-yet-undefined regulatory regime. A federal and provincial task force will seek input from health, law and substance abuse experts, with the goal to design a sales and distribution system that will start operating and collecting taxes by 2017.

But finding consensus from coast to coast could be a challenge.

In Lake Louise, nearly 40 out of every 1,000 people were investigated for possessing pot in 2015, while in Jasper it was 30 out of every 1,000; the two Alberta ski towns have been near or at the top of this list for almost a decade, and also dominate statistics for per capita pot possession charges. (The RCMP detachments in both towns also have ski patrol teams to crack down on hillside toking and drinking.)

In contrast, of the 1,132 municipalities analyzed by Postmedia, more than 35 had no marijuana possession probes by police in 2015, and in 300 towns less than one person out of every 1,000 were investigated. Those with a history of no or low bud offences include Cape Breton; the Beresford area of New Brunswick; Stratford, PEI; Kativik, PQ; and Kingston, Ontario.

Vancouver has a relatively low charge rate for marijuana possession, even though the pungent aroma wafts through city streets. On April 20, cannabis’s counterculture holiday, there was a daylong pot party on one of the Vancouver’s most beautiful beaches, attracting tens of thousands of celebrants openly toking, and generally acting as though the drug was already legal. The event is unsanctioned, but had begrudging support from municipal officials and local police for two decades.

Vancouver’s celebration may be Canada’s largest, but similar smaller events took place across the country on 4-20, including Lethbridge, Kitchener and Fredericton. The festivities, though, peter out the farther east you trek; in Summerside, PEI, the talk in April was not of 4-20 celebrations but of Prince Edward Island trying to get its first medical marijuana dispensary. (It never opened, and the island still has no dispensaries.)

Many other Canadian cities already have technically illegal pot cafes on their streets, places where those who are truly or fictitiously sick can buy marijuana with a doctor’s note. The communities’ relationships with these stores vary.

After dozens of these dispensaries spread like weeds along Vancouver streets, the mayor of that city decided to ignore federal drug laws and offer some business licences, in part to help medicinal users stranded by the former Conservative government’s policies. The dispensaries allowed to remain open had to meet strict guidelines, including proximity to schools and community centres; in May, fines and legal injunctions were sent to pot shops contravening the rules.

That same month, Toronto, by comparison, ignored the advice it had earlier sought from Vancouver, and sent police to shut down 43 dispensaries and arrest 90 people.

Indeed, right across the country, city halls are relying on police more than lawyers to settle these disputes: dispensaries have been raided recently in Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Niagara Falls, Moncton and Halifax. And not all of B.C. is chill: pot shops were shut down by the RCMP in Chilliwack and Campbell River.

Pot smokers tend to prefer these retail stores to Ottawa’s bureaucratic mail-order system that requires users, with a doctor’s note, to order pot from one of 35 federally approved medicinal marijuana dealers.

Advocates won a victory in August when the Liberals introduced new rules to again allow authorized patients to grow a “limited” amount of marijuana for their own use, in response to a February court ruling that said a decision by the previous Conservative government to force people to buy their medicinal pot from Health Canada-licensed producers violated their constitutional rights.

It is a nasty entanglement of rules that may be unravelled by legalization. But does the average Canadian care if the country has unified, federal rules for marijuana?

According to Statistics Canada, nearly half of residents 15 years and older has tried pot, although only 12 per cent had used it in the past year. Imbibing was most common among 18 to 24 year olds. Cannabis is consumed most often in Nova Scotia (16 per cent of the population), followed closely by B.C., and the least in Saskatchewan (10 per cent).

While used by only a minority of Canadians, policing cannabis has cost taxpayers big bucks, although the exact amount is hard to pin down. Back in 2002, a Senate report put the annual law enforcement and justice system costs at $300 million to $500 million

The House of Commons justice committee was told in March that the federal government is spending close to $4 million a year prosecuting those caught with small, personal stashes of the drug. Tens of millions more is spent on police, jail and court costs.

What are all the drug officers and prosecutors going to do, then, once pot is legal?

Deputy Chief Mike Serr, chair of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police drug abuse committee, argues the price of policing pot will likely stay the same — or go up — over the next few years as law enforcement figures out how to get the public to comply with new laws that include black markets, home production, public consumption and use by youth.

“There is a misconception that law enforcement can wash their hands of marijuana once it is legalized,” he said, noting local police are learning lessons from their counterparts in Washington and Colorado.

Serr argues, though, that most drug squads have in recent years stepped up focus on more lethal substances like fentanyl, and have far fewer green teams today that target grow ops.

Even though marijuana has consistently represented close to two-thirds of all police drug incidents every year since 2004, the actual number of police pot files has declined since 2011; simple possession dropped by 20 per cent, while those accused of selling, growing or shipping fell by almost a half.

But in excess of 27,000 people were still charged with cannabis-related crimes in Canada last year. That’s down slightly from 2014, but still a staggering number.

Postmedia’s analysis of the crime data shows less than half of marijuana offences concluded by police in 2014 resulted in charges being laid.

When that reduced number of marijuana charges went to court, the conviction rate was cut in half again. StatsCan says in a majority of those trials, the pot charges were withdrawn, typically because Crown counsel opted for other solutions, such as community service work or treatment programs.

So, what was the point of pursuing all those cases if so few resulted in convictions? And is it fair for prosecutors to continue to pursue marijuana-related offences today when the drug will eventually be legal?

Indeed, the director of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, which runs most of the nation’s drug trials, told a House of Commons justice committee in March that some judges were even starting to question why cannabis cases were still before the courts.

In Quebec, though, the criminal prosecution service will continue to pursue marijuana-related charges until the country’s laws have officially been changed. “We have to apply the law of right now. We don’t speculate on the future,” spokesman Jean Pascal Boucher said in an interview.

He added, though, someone possessing a small amount of pot, with no ties to organized crime, may be able to avoid a criminal record through a first-offenders program in Quebec.

The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police supported Toronto’s crackdown on dispensaries in April, saying the non-sanctioned distribution of marijuana is akin to trafficking.

“While the OACP anticipates legislative change at some future point in time by the federal government with respect to the casual use of marijuana, our officers are sworn to uphold the current laws governing marijuana, particularly in cases of trafficking,” it said in a statement.

The situation is a bit more loose in some parts of British Columbia, where charges were laid by police in only a quarter of marijuana cases — compared with a province like Saskatchewan, where there were charges in two-thirds of the cases.

In Vancouver, the police department’s policy is that, “while some police officers locally or nationally may disagree,” it will ignore someone carrying a small amount of drugs unless that person is being unruly.

Last spring, the B.C. government took a road trip with a delegation of police officers and health officials to Washington and Colorado — the first two states to legalize marijuana — to learn lessons about safety, enforcement, impaired driving and other challenges. And several B.C. municipalities are lobbying Ottawa to share the tax windfall that will come from pot legalization.

Other provinces, such as New Brunswick, are also examining the social downside and economic upside of legalizing pot. “As we have seen in places such as Colorado and Washington state, there are economic and tax benefits to legalizing marijuana that can help pay for important things such as health care, education, social services and infrastructure,” Justice Minister Stephen Horsman said in March.

But first the nation has to agree how to legalize pot, which will be complicated. Take the national police chiefs’ drug committee, where not everyone agrees that pot should be legal.

“I think people are starting to get more open to the idea, but it has been a polarizing issue,” Serr said. “Certainly people on the west side of Canada are a little more liberal about the legalization of marijuana, and as you start moving east, they are a lot more conservative. Many of my colleagues farther east, some do support it, but there are many who think it is absolutely the wrong approach to take.”

Quoting a sheriff he met while on a fact-finding trip to Washington state, Serr added: “The sky didn’t fall. You legalize marijuana and, guess what, the sky didn’t fall on us… If this is done effectively and appropriately, we’ll manage it.”

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