Pubdate: Thu, 19 Jan 2017
Source: Victoria Times-Colonist (CN BC)
Copyright: 2017 Times Colonist
Contact:  http://www.timescolonist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/481
Author: Jack Knox

CONFUSING HODGEPODGE OF DISPENSARY REGULATIONS

For those keeping score at home: Langford just shut down its only
marijuana dispensary, which puts it in line with neighbouring Colwood,
which has decided to keep them out, but at odds with Sooke, where three
pot shops popped up.

Victoria allows marijuana dispensaries (three dozen of them) but Esquimalt
- - with which the capital shares a police department - does not.

Storefronts in Nanaimo, Campbell River and Port Alberni have been raided
by the RCMP, but others go untouched. They're popping up in places like
Mill Bay, Salt Spring Island and Chemainus, though two in the last
community just got hit with $200 bylaw fines.

This haphazard application of law should not faze us here in
Dysfunction-by-the-Sea, where we are long used to rules that change every
50 metres or so as we cross into a new jurisdiction.

Greater Victoria speed limits go up and down in a wonderfully whimsical
way - what fun! - as drivers lurch from municipality to municipality. Oak
Bay residents aren't allowed to park boats or trailers in their front
driveways. The number of backyard chickens you can keep changes from place
to place: four in Colwood, seven in Esquimalt, five to 10 in Saanich
(where hens must be registered, just like handguns) and an unspecified
number "consistent with personal egg consumption" in Victoria.

Victoria in particular likes to go its own way. The city (motto: "Solving
the world through regulation since 1862") has at various times banned
balloon animals, bongo drums and sandwichboard-draped hucksters from its
streets. Costume-clad commercial mascots were once barred from waving at
passing cars from the sidewalk (in the 1990s, Luggie the Lug-a-Rug mascot
would hang out on Blanshard on the Saanich side of Tolmie, where the
Victoria bylaw officers couldn't touch him).

The dispensary drama is different, though. It isn't about local
governments making up local laws in isolation. It's about them being left
to clean up the mess made first by the Harper Conservatives - whose
inadequate, grudging response to a series of court rulings created the
legal uncertainty from which the dispensaries sprouted - then the Trudeau
Liberals, who created even more uncertainty by A) declaring they would
make recreational use legal at some point, while B) offering no leadership
on the question of what should happen between now and then.

That left municipalities to deal with the reality as pot shops spread like
zucchini. Vancouver, like Victoria, has chosen to govern storefronts
through regulation and licensing. In neighbouring Richmond, city council
will look next week at banning them altogether. Langford, having told a
dozen applicants to wait until the new law is in place, had little choice
but to shut down the one that opened without a business licence this week.
Sooke licensed its three storefronts, but has a moratorium on any more
until Ottawa figures out what it's doing.

While this has largely been a West Coast issue (it's always nice to
confirm a regional stereotype), increasingly it's becoming a big deal back
East, where authorities are having a tough time keeping the genie in the
bottle. In Toronto, there's an ongoing game of Whac-a-mole, the cops
vowing to keep busting the shops until they're legal, the shops restocking
their shelves as soon as the cops leave. Note that six of 10 stores raided
in Ottawa in the past couple of months have simply reopened. Ditto for one
in Halifax.

We're in this weird period. The Liberals plan to introduce a marijuana
bill this spring but it will likely be 2018 before it takes effect. A
federal task force made 80 recommendations, including one that would
prevent liquor and marijuana being sold in the same store, but we don't
really know what the new law will look like.

Maybe it will be similar to the one across Juan de Fuca Strait in
Washington, where the production, distribution and sale of recreational
marijuana are governed by a state liquor and cannabis agency - the
equivalent of the B.C.'s Liquor Control and Licensing Branch - that
decides how many retailers are allowed in a given jurisdiction. Port
Angeles, for example, has been allocated three shops.

Whatever the model, please sort it out soon. It shouldn't be forced on
Lisa Helps or Stew Young (or the dispensaries) to navigate this. The law
should apply from coast to coast, not differ from Victoria to Langford.
- ---
MAP posted-by: