It won’t make any difference to me here in Oregon, where we’ve been dealing with the horror of legal weed for several years now. I hardly ever have to buy it any more – it’s so cheap and ubiquitous that people give it away. My friends just harvested their few plants and got** 6 1/2 pounds** of weed for just the two of them, way more than they can smoke in a year. It’s supremely good weed, too. They gave me a bunch of buds last time I was over because they have way more than they can use. I’ve got to trim the buds when I get off work tonight. I was thinking as I was doing some trimming earlier this week that I was trimming off as junk weed that was 10 times better than what I smoked in the 70s. Interesting times.
We were the first municipality in the Province to lay the ground work and cut through the green tape to make it happen.
It won’t be the only store in the province, just the first legal government run store.
I believe there are applications for 3 non-government run stores in Kamloops. I suspect every town with a population above a couple thousand people will have one.
Our province also launched a website, so you can order all the product online and Canada Post will ship it to your door. You do have to be 19 years or older to sign for the order when it arrives.
MtM
Canadian here. It has no impact on my life. I never smoked pot, and this doesn’t change things. I know some people got really excited by this… but I think they all used cannabis beforehand.
I am slightly worried about people using cannabis when they shouldn’t (they’re driving, or working, especially in a safety-sensitive position). People could have done that before, only now they may be more likely to. (And maybe they won’t be more likely to.) I am also slightly worried about underaged people using cannabis. The Ontario government was going to require cannabis to be sold in government-owned liquor stores, so you would be carded… but the previous government fell in an election and the new one is privatizing everything, including this. I don’t think the current sellers are going to care.
It’s also not easy testing people for cannabis impairment, apparently… although there’s always the possibility of biased reporting.
No. Cannabis is not illegal. Even the police are allowed to use cannabis, but some police forces say you’re not allowed to report for duty for 28 days after using cannabis, which is effectively banning it. (Who can take four weeks off all the time?)
Beer and wine are sold out of private stores all around Ontario and yet there is no evidence they’re any worse at carding people than LCBO stores are.
Will there be longer lines at the border due to US border control pulling everybody aside to be searched? If they went crazy with that, which I can well imagine they might, I can scarcely imagine the impact on US-Canada commerce or what new restrictions might be imposed overall.
The interviews with US border officials I saw said they weren’t changing their questioning or search procedures. At the end of the day, this really shouldn’t change much as far as real smuggling goes. You’ll probably get a few more Canadians trying to sneak a joint in when they go hiking in the Adirondacks but that’s hardly worth a big increase in inspections.
This is pretty much true. I know a couple of people who are trying it now who wouldn’t before, but then again I know an anarchist who quit on legalization day because he now thinks that smoking pot is selling out to the man. From what I’ve seen, stoners are mostly happy, the right wing pundits are predicting the downfall of society, and everyone else is pretty much “meh.”
I disagree with you on the drug testing however. At my job we don’t hire anyone who can’t or won’t pass a drug test, and that has not changed one bit. We even legally fired someone for cause because they were smoking cannabis on a work site yesterday. It may now be legal, but all that means is the cops probably won’t arrest you for possessing it. It doesn’t mean that your employer has to allow you to use it, and the cannabis act doesn’t even mention workplace drug testing at all AFAIK.
Lastly, however lazy you think government retail workers are about checking ID, I can assure you from personal experience that the illegal drug dealers they are replacing checked ID even less. For example, I sold drugs for years, and I never checked ID once.
In Canada, arbitrary workplace testing for impairment is only permitted for safety-sensitive workplaces (but what constitutes a safety-sensitive workplace is still a bit fuzzy).
For a non-safety-sensitive workplace, an employer would not be permitted to require a drug test as a condition of employment because it would violate the potential employee’s right to privacy. Same goes for random drug testing in a non-safety-sensitive workplace.
For a safety-sensitive workplace, an employer can require reasonable ongoing drug tests for employees. The norm when hiring is to make an offer of employment conditional upon being tested, and then test once the offer is accepted on an ongoing basis.
There is some gaming of the system at both ends.
From the employee side, if a person is going to be fired from a safety-sensitive workplace for failing a drug test, the person can assert that the drug use is an addiction that is a disability, and therefore puts the onus on the employer to make reasonable efforts to accommodate the disability by transferring the employee to a non-safety-sensitive workplace.
From the employee side, there is still not a definitive standard for establishing impairment by marijuana, so an employer can require its employees who will be functioning in a safety-sensitive workplace to abstain from using marijuana prior to entering the safety-sensitive workplace. What is in debate is the period of abstention. For example, the Toronto Police have been prohibited form using marijuana for twenty-eight days prior to going to work. I doubt if this long a duration will withstand a court challenge, for there is no rational connection between that particular duration and need for a clean workplace: one day – sure; a weekend – perhaps; a month – very doubtful.
To get a feel for how courts think their way through to finding a reasonable balance, read British Columbia (Public Service Employee Relations Commission) v. BCGSEU on discrimination, and British Columbia (Public Service Employee Relations Commission) v. BCGSEU, [1999] 3 SCR 3, 1999 CanLII 652 (SCC) on privacy.
The law is far from settled when it comes to testing for pot, for marijuana shows up on tests long after the impairment is gone. Keep an eye on Alberta’s oil patch, for there have been some interesting court battles that have originated out that way between the unions and the oil companies over drug and alcohol testing. I wouldn’t be surprised to see battles there over fine-tuning what constitutes a safety-sensitive workplace (e.g. an office worker in a generally heavy industry location).
It’s an interesting development. I don’t use drugs but I’m curious how the consequences of legalized marijuana impact society. It’s a good experiment at the very least.
I was going to mention this in the thread about reform of federal cannabis laws in the US, but maybe it’s more fitting here. If the laws and policies stay as they are it’s going to lead to interesting times and comedies of real absurdity, especially with more states legalizing.
A little example of this that I found amusing was CPB recently announcing that Canadians who worked in the cannabis industry would not be admissible to the US. This was then quickly changed to say that they would be admissible, but not if traveling on cannabis-related business.
Which leads me to wonder how they’re going to deal withthis pot-head. Yes, Brian Mulroney, the former conservative Prime Minister of Canada, is now on the board of New York based Acreage Holdings, the largest vertically integrated cannabis business in the United States. (For those unfamiliar with biz-speak, “vertically integrated” means they have operations throughout the cannabis supply chain, all focused on their one key product, which they bill as “the fastest growing industry in the United States”.)
So what are they going to do when Mulroney flies down to New York for a board meeting? Ban him as a pot-head? If they give him a hard time, maybe he can get support from fellow board member John Boehner. Or maybe William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, also on the board. 
The problem with Canada as an experiment is that casual use was de facto legal for years prior to this, anyway. The cops didn’t arrest you for smoking a joint. you would get arrested for trafficking or growing a lot of it - which remains illegal, you can only guy it from very specific sources.
So for all the ballyhoo, not really a lot has changed.
And former Toronto top cop / federal Conservative cabinet minister Julian Fantino now on the board of Aleafia.
And former federal Liberal cabinet minister Herb Dhaliwal founding National Green Biomed Ltd.
I figure the first major push was when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau established a Royal Commission to look into the non-medical use of drugs, that ended up recommending the decriminalization of simple possession of pot and of simple single use sharing, but not for-profit trafficking.
In my lifetime the cops certainly did arrest you for smoking a joint, or for a very minor possession. A few friends of mine, and a brother, were arrested back in the late 70s to mid-80s.
I’m not really sure when things began to change, or if any specific event triggered the change, but certainly for at least 10 years now simple possession of a reasonable personal amount of cannibals was simply overlooked by cops. It was considered a waste of time and resources to charge someone for that.
When did this attitude change and what was the catalyst?
This is a load of crap. White middle and upper class Canadians usually didn’t get arrested for smoking pot, but I sure know a metric fuckton of aboriginal, poor or homeless people who ended up with criminal records for simple possession.
One of the cruelest parts of the marijuana laws was always how unevenly and randomly they were being enforced. Cops were looking the other way in lots of large metropolitan areas when rural courts were placing draconian sentences on mild offences.
One of the unmentioned upsides is that the government can finally stop wasting tax payer money on studies, research, white papers and committees to consider…changing the marijuana laws! For at least four decades politicians have alluded to ‘changes’ when running, only to instead pour money into yet another inquiry, then fully ignore any and all results, which consistently amounted to the exact same as the Royal Commission. If you added up the cost of every ‘further study’ since the Royal Commission, we’d have the funds to solve a couple of our ills, in my opinion.
When Justin got elected on the promise to legalize, I was very ‘wait and see’! First thing, he ordered an ‘investigation into implications’, type study, and I admit I thought we were headed for another round. But, indeed, here we are!
RickJay is definitely overstating. Cops would often simply confiscate if it just some “good kids” smoking a joint but possession charges didn’t disappear and remained the vast majority of cannabis related charges.
Now, I’m sure a whole bunch of that is “add on charges” where they suspected you of something else then found you had pot on you. But that is still a far cry from “de facto legal”.
I went to the local dispensary. There was a queue outside at 11AM on a Thursday and about 90% of shelves were empty.
Some municipalities forbid being intoxicated with pot in public. That’s possibly unconstitutional* and sounds like it will hardly be applied and that when it is applied, it won’t be applied fairly.
*It verges on criminal prohibition; It’s very broad and likely based on moral opprobrium which is criminal and therefore not the competence of provinces or municipalities.
From south of you, I’m hoping that the new legislation works well, Canadians are largely happy with it and that you will serve as inspiration for the remaining opponents still in positions of power here.
Just swap in pot for booze.