As the Jan. 22 deadline to accept or decline cannabis shops looms, more than a third of the 414 municipalities in the province have yet to decide.As of Friday afternoon, councils representing some 170 cities, towns, townships and regions across the province had not exercised their option to bar brick-and-mortar pot shops from their precincts.And while some may simply choose to abstain from voting — tacitly accepting the stores under Queen’s Park rules — many still have their fingers in the air, industry experts say. “A lot of municipalities have opted for the wait-and-see approach,” says Alanna Sokic, a cannabis specialist at the Toronto consulting firm Global Public Affairs.“Cannabis was only legalized in October of last year,” Sokic notes. “There’s still a lot of unanswered questions and I think that’s what we’re certainly seeing.”She says the last-minute decision-making may also be related to scheduling considerations for municipal councils. As well, the first 25 pot-shop licences that an Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario lottery offered up earlier this month can only be used in municipalities with populations of 50,000 or greater. Thus smaller municipalities may not have felt any urgency to put the question to a vote, Sokic says.Read more:Brampton pot lottery winner ‘elated’Cities fear huge financial shortallPlans for an open-air cannabis cropNick Pateras, vice-president of strategy at the cannabis resource and information company Lift & Co., says some communities may be waiting for the communities directly around them to decide.“There’s probably a bit of ‘you go first,’ ” Pateras says. “As well, I think generally that the market continues to evolve every single day … and (they’re) going to maybe leave it to the last minute so they can act with as much information at hand as possible.”King Township Mayor Steve P ...
|
