Defend the Vancouver Three

Canadian anger is going to increase.
I heard the beginning yesterday, when a local radio talk show host here expressed concern about Canadian sovereignty with the Emery case. Today, a lawyer wrote a column in the Globe also raising the sovereignty issue.
The basic question for Canadians is this: why should Canada send the Vancouver Three -- Mark Emery, Greg Williams and Michelle Rainey-Fenkarek, all Canadian citizens -- to serve at least ten years in prison in the States for a so-called crime which has not even been prosecuted here for the last 37 years? It is a betrayal of both Canadian sovereignty and Canadian citizens if the Canadian government allows this to happen.
Now, to focus on the basic question, some irrelevant arguments have to be cleared out of the way.
First, Canada cannot accept the prosecutorial fiction that they are just being extradited for a trial.
They will be found guilty because they ARE guilty. US prosecutors will have no problem proving to the satisfaction of a Seattle jury that they have been selling seeds, and I don't think jury nullification is a realistic expectation.
Second, Canada must realize that each of the Vancouver Three will serve at least a decade in a US prison, maybe twice that.
The mandatory minimum sentence for each of the two marijuana charges in the States is 10 years. A mandatory minimum sentence means the same thing in the US as it does in Canada -- neither a prosecutor nor a judge has any discretion. So there is no way that our Justice minister could accept any US prosecutor's assurance that they would not be sentenced to at least 10 years in prison, perhaps twice that.
And third, Canada must understand that this is a political prosecution.
Canoe quotes Kirk Tousaw, the Marijuana party's campaign manager, saying "Virtually all the money from the seed sales went into political activism in Canada and the U.S. That's exactly what drew the ire of the Drug Enforcement Administration. There are many seed sellers in the U.S. and Canada. You see Marc Emery being targeted because he's a political activist, the leader of a political party. It should shock the conscious of all Canadians that he would be deported to face unjust penalties in the U.S. for something that in Canada he wouldn't even get jail time for." The Globe quotes John Conroy, Emery's lawyer -- "Far from being a marijuana mogul, Mr. Conroy argued, his client is largely a political activist who lives hand to mouth . . . Mr. Conroy argued that his client has openly sold his seeds for years in Canada with no interference from authorities here. 'Here we have a situation where they turn a blind eye locally, and now they're in a position of assisting the U.S. to try to have him extradited to the U.S., where the penalties are substantially greater than here,' Mr. Conroy said."
Sending the Vancouver Three to the United States means we are sending them to prison in the US until at least 2016. This is just wrong -- I would call it, in itself, a criminal act.
If Canadian prosecutors want to charge them under our own law and see if they can be convicted here, go ahead.
If US prosecutors want to charge Americans who purchased Emery's seeds, go ahead.
But it is cowardly and immoral for Canada to send the Vancouver Three to prison in the United States.