Standing room only at Community Issues Committee cannabis information meeting

Becker Brookes was tasked with talking about the effects marijuana legalization could or would have in the municipal context. She described to the room, how municipalities should pay careful attention to their land use bylaws.

“So if you need to create new use-classes to deal with retail cannabis, that’s probably the most important thing. In addition to that, there’s the impacts of public consumption, nuisance bylaws, business licensing. But those are the main areas where municipalities need to think about their bylaws and their regulations. “

Becker Brookes says she’s spoken with many councils over the last couple of months, and taken may questions from the public. Most people she says, are generally accepting of the fact that there are going to be cannabis stores. It’s how each municipality deals with it.

“The area I think most people are concerned is public consumption. You know, can people go smoke it in public? If I go for a walk in the park is there going to be public consumption, and the nuisance factor?”

At least one question from a member of the public addressed just that: what to do if neighbors were smoking cannabis on their property, how someone would deal with it?

The answer, said Becker Brookes, is generally covered by second-hand smoke bylaws, because it’s something done on another property that is unreasonably interfering with another person’s right to use their own property.

The AGLC’s Graham Wadsworth spoke in broader terms of how the provincial government is managing legalization, how interested parties can get into the retail cannabis business, hours of permitted operations (10 a.m. to 2 a.m.), buffer zones for schools and hospitals (100 metres) and legal possession limits (30 grams per transaction).

“There’s a lot of public interest. Anyone that’s interested in opening a cannabis retail location really has to think about working on two fronts: at the municipal level and at the provincial level. And they need to seek licensing and approval from both of those two entities.”

In essence he says, the potential retailer will have an application ongoing with a municipality and with the province at the same time. All licenses will be reviewed every year and retailers will have to undergo mandatory background checks every one to three years, including a criminal record check, business history, and tax and financial information.

No one retailer may have more than 37 licenses province-wide and all employees must be at least 18 years of age, have no serious criminal record and undergo mandatory training as well.

Several questions from the public were directed towards Wadsworth, regarding whether the province was looking at allowing lounges to operate, whether special event licenses would be required and whether retailers could sell cannabis edibles.

“A lot of those items…are really going to play out at the Federal level,” he explained. “Once the Federal Government passes the legislation down to the provinces, and the provinces have an opportunity to view and examine what’s in there, then a lot of those items can be visited and can be addressed. A lot of those things, the province has only spoken about to this time, but they really can’t make any decisions or make any headway on addressing concerns until they see the federal legislation.”

And municipalities are in the same boat regarding some of those questions, says Lethbridge Director of Planning and Development Jeff Greene. Especially when it comes to land-use bylaws.

“At this point what we’re going to have to do is put the land-use bylaw in place that addresses what we know. So what we know, for example, is the separation requirement between schools, reserves and hospitals from a retail cannabis store…the things that we don’t know are whether the province is going to put anything in place with respect to public consumption. So that’s going to probably be the one that we are going to have the most immediate challenges with.”

At this point no extra police officers or bylaw officers will be hired, because the city simply can’t gauge what kind of demand there will be on their time, or whether they’ll get more nuisance calls than they normally get.

Greene says there have been 14 applications for retail cannabis stores in Lethbridge so far, and at this point nine are in the process of getting their approval; four on the south side, three on the west side and two on the north side of the city.

As Becker Brookes mentioned in her presentation, the city has a choice of whether to allow for “permitted” locations where stores may automatically be permitted in certain locations, or “discretionary” locations, meaning the city would look at each application and decided whether to approve it.

Greene explains that right now, there will be “permitted use” locations.

“The reason for doing so is that you would apply discretion if there were certain criteria that you wanted to meet over and above the general rules… and because cannabis is so tightly regulated by the AGLC, we don’t feel that there’s a whole lot of additional rules and requirements that need to be put in place from a discretionary perspective.”

City Council will next meet June 11, 2018 for second and third readings of the land-use bylaw changes to introduce retail cannabis, and to define where they’re allowed.

Council will either make change after that public hearing or it will approve them. At that point they’ll begin establishing the process for receiving applications so they can work with the AGLC on the implementation of the approvals.

by Lara Fominoff @LaraFominoff on Twitter

Standing room only at Community Issues Committee cannabis information meeting

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