The vast majority of Vancouver’s plethora of new pot shops would have to move under new proposed city regulations, says a Vancouver city councillor.
Vision Vancouver Coun. Kerry Jang told the Courier Wednesday afternoon that complaints from the public to city hall have picked up a lot over the past year.
“Mainly what we’re responding to, why we started creating this new process, is because a lot of the shops are located close to schools. That was the number one concern we’d heard from the general public,” Jang said. “This is to help address that problem, as well as [move them] away from community centres and each other so you don’t have the clustering.”
The proposed new regulations go before council April 28.
The first marijuana-related business — the B.C. Compassion Club — opened in Vancouver in 1997. Now more than 80 such businesses operate in the city without business licences. The number has grown at a rate of 100 per cent per year over the past two years, according to the city report.
The report states that the proliferation of unregulated businesses poses a risk to youth, public health, the city’s general quality of life, and impacts the local economy.
The city report proposes to use the building, fire, zoning and development, licences and heath bylaws to regulate the businesses.
A person who wants to open an operation would be permitted to if they apply for a development permit that includes a community notification process, which also requires schools to be notified, and if they apply for a building permit for any construction work to be done. A business licence would require a $30,000 annual fee based on cost recovery for regulation, as well as a police information check for the applicant and all employees, and a good neighbour agreement.
A marijuana-related business would be permitted in an commercial-retail district as long as it was not within 300 metres of a school or community centre, within 300 metres of another marijuana-related use, located in the Downtown Eastside other than sites on Hastings or Main Streets, and not in the Granville Entertainment District or on a minor street.
Such businesses would also have to meet operational regulations such as not displaying wares or advertising to minors and refusing entry to minors.
Jang said the proposed new rules are based on examples taken from Washington and Colorado.
He said marijuana-related businesses in Vancouver took a chance by setting up shop.
“We’re just trying to normalize the business practice here. We aren’t trying to regulate the product. That’s up to the federal government to do, but we’re trying to regulate the businesses like any other city would whether it’s hats or books or whatever,” he said.
When asked why it took so long to draft the proposed regulations, Jang said it was a complex problem.
“We had to see what other jurisdictions had done. We wanted to put it through legal process here to make sure we were only regulating what we could with our scope of powers. So, again, it’s simply just regulating a business not a product. That took some time to do.”
While the proposed $30,000 business license fee is high, Jang said it’s meant to recover the cost of creating the regulations and enforcing them.
“We’re not profiting off marijuana. Let’s make that very clear,” he said.
If council approves the report, Jang said it will be referred to public hearing where residents and business owners will have the opportunity to provide feedback.
“We’ll see if there are any changes required, and if council’s amenable, it’ll pass and it will be implemented. So it’s just really regulating marijuana businesses or marijuana-related businesses, as we would other businesses,” he said. “It’s nothing new. There was just no regulations around them and so we created some in order to make sure, quite frankly, our kids don’t get exposed.”
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