IN QUEBEC, COCAINE'S OK, MARGARINE IS NOT

We have an interesting approach to the law in Quebec.

The balloting doesn't end until tonight but it looks as if the Parti
Quebecois is about to elect as its leader and, the way the polls are
running these days, Quebec's next premier, a 39-year-old, Andre
Boisclair, who admits to having used cocaine as recently as seven
years ago, while he was a cabinet minister in Lucien Bouchard's government.

Now, the use of cocaine was at the time and still is illegal. People
presumably are being incarcerated for it even as you read this.
They're certainly being incarcerated for selling cocaine. (That's
always been a puzzle: If buying marijuana, say, is no longer a crime,
why should selling marijuana be one?) But, if anything, the
revelation of Mr. Boisclair's drug use actually seemed to help his
campaign. In the short run, at least, he seemed a victim of the
boisterous press scrum at which he first addressed his former habits.

A cabinet minister admits to having broken the law, knowingly and
recklessly, and the public gets all bothered about the press being
rude, which admittedly the press often is, though usually not often
enough. Civility is a fine thing, but what does it say about our
values that his interrogators' rudeness won Mr. Boisclair more
sympathy than his own admitted law-breaking earned him contempt? Drug
use is supposed to be a victimless crime, but here's Mr. Boisclair
turned into a victim.

We like to think of ourselves as a sophisticated bunch in Quebec.
Yes, maybe cocaine use is illegal, but, hey, doesn't everybody do it?
Or at least doesn't everybody who counts do it? If you've got money,
if you disdain the slow lane, if you're famous, it seems you're
almost obliged to do it.

In this culture, being against recreational drug use, particularly of
a designer drug like cocaine, means not being cool. Sure, the
thinking goes, using cocaine may be against law, but it's a bad law:
We shouldn't be harassing people for their lifestyle choices. What
they do on their own time -- even ministers of the Crown -- is their
own business.

Except, it seems, if what they're doing on their own time in the
privacy of their own homes is -- I know this is a family newspaper
but in the interests of good journalism this disgusting act must be
described in its full details -- spreading margarine that is the same
colour as butter onto their toast or mashed potatoes or pancakes or
Brussels sprouts. And then -- brace yourself for this -- ingesting.

Some substance abuse clearly will not be tolerated, not even in
Quebec. For at the height of the PQ leadership campaign, when legal
relativism about cocaine was making the airwaves buzz, agents of the
Quebec Ministry of Agriculture raided four Quebec City Wal-Marts and
confiscated 72 tubs of illegal margarine. Street value: $179.28.

In this province, margarine gets to be illegal by being the wrong
colour. It can be any colour it wants, except the same colour as
butter. Yes, Virginia, our government employs people to police the
colour of margarine.

The rationale is that this protects consumers from unscrupulous
margarine dealers who will try to pass off their edible vegetable
product as real butter, which supposedly is the status all margarine
aspires to. "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" is the actual name of
one margarine Unilever produces.

But of course consumers aren't actually that stupid. The real reason
for the law is to make margarine more expensive to produce. Having to
stop the machines and change colour for the batch destined for Quebec
costs money. And white margarine is less attractive, which raises the
demand for butter.

Finally, there's the popular psychodrama of the poor Quebec dairy
farm pitted against the foreign giant Wal-Mart. If it ever came out
that M. Boisclair got his drugs from a foreign multinational, well,
that would change everything.

We Quebecers evidently think we're smart enough to make our own
choices about narcotics. It's just margarines we can't be trusted with.

Maybe the law against cocaine use is a stupid law. We can debate
that, and probably should. I expect we'd get opinions on both sides.

But everybody who doesn't have his own dairy herd understands the
margarine law really is a stupid law. But no politician will say the
emperor has no clothes and get rid of it.

With laws like that on the books, is it any wonder even cabinet
ministers feel they can pick and choose exactly which laws they'll obey?