Chris Selley expresses what a lot of surprised people must be feeling after Premier Doug Ford’s government introduced startlingly mature and sensible rules for the distribution and sale of cannabis products in the province after the federal government’s legalization is enacted:
The Ontario government tabled its cannabis retail framework in the legislature on Thursday, and it only further repudiates the Frightened Communist model envisioned by the Liberals. The government will sell pot online, as before, and will maintain a monopoly on wholesaling. But the rest will be up to the private sector, under the control of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission. As it stands, there won’t even be a cap on the number of licences; a government official said Thursday they expect 500 to 1,000 applications right off the bat.
In response, OPSEU president Smokey Thomas beamed out a furious press release on behalf of his spurned members — er, sorry, on behalf of Ontario’s “municipalities and communities.”
“Unlimited stores and unlimited places to smoke will cause unlimited problems,” Thomas averred. “It’s outrageous. We’re going to become the wild west of cannabis and Sheriff Doug Ford is going to skip town, leaving communities and municipalities holding the dime bag.”
Thomas predicted Premier Ford would hand out retail pot licences to “Conservative insiders” and “corporate donors.” (Corporate donations are illegal.) He accused Ford of funnelling what by rights should be public profits into “private pockets.”
“If Ontario’s finances are truly as bad as Ford wants us to believe, why is he giving away the millions, maybe even billions, in revenue we’d get if cannabis sales were public?” he asked.
Does the government make money on cigarettes? On alcohol sold in bars and restaurants, at privately run LCBO agency stores and, of late, in supermarkets? Of course it does. Scads of it.
So it’s all quite ridiculous, as OPSEU press releases tend to be. But Thomas is not wrong when he argues the new approach is remarkably permissive. Perhaps most notably, whereas the Liberals’ proposed rules banned using marijuana in public, the PCs’ would allow you to smoke or vape it anywhere you can tobacco (though not in cars or boats). But it’s far less permissive than one might expect in other ways as well.
