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by Blog Critique
It’s Saturday evening at a Winnipeg weed store.
Shoppers come in quick waves on the way home from work, on their way out for the night or while making their way through a list of errands.
And buying a pre-rolled joint — the smokable symbol of a groundbreaking government effort to replace illegal marijuana trade with a regulated, controlled sector — is an utterly mundane transaction.
To a loitering reporter, nothing seems terribly newsworthy in this little corner of cannabis capitalism. It bears no resemblance to a year ago, when national and international media were on hand to document long lineups of curious shoppers as Canada’s first handful of government-licensed cannabis stores opened for business.
Shopper James Burton embodies the transformation of legal cannabis from hype to predictability in just 12 months.
“It makes life easy,” says Burton, the drummer in a local thrash-metal band, as he waits for a helpful Delta 9 Cannabis employee to transform his just-purchased bud into some joints.
Burton appreciates the sheer convenience of the stores, along with the added benefit of getting it without breaking the law.
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“I don’t have to worry about calling somebody at 10 at night. I just know when I can get my weed, and it’s during regular hours.”
Armstrong suspects Statistics Canada’s $104 million figure in July is actually an under-estimate, citing his own calculations based on data from provincial cannabis agencies.
But no matter how much market share Canada’s marijuana industry has captured so far, there’s plenty more to go; Statistics Canada’s latest quarterly survey of cannabis users found that 48 per cent of current users sourced at least some of their supply from a legal provider during the first half of 2019, and 42 per cent bought at least some from illegal sources. About 29 per cent of current users purchased exclusively from legal sources.
“We’ve got the first chunk of the black market,” Armstrong says.
Friendly Marijua-toba?
The province has issued 26 cannabis store licences to serve a population of more than 1.3 million Manitobans. That ranks Manitoba sixth out of 10 provinces in terms of population served per licence.
On a per capita basis, Manitobans have better access to retail weed than British Columbians, Quebecers and Ontarians, but worse access than consumers in Alberta, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan.
The province has issued 26 cannabis store licences to serve a population of more than 1.3 million Manitobans. That ranks Manitoba sixth out of 10 provinces in terms of population served per licence.
On a per capita basis, Manitobans have better access to retail weed than British Columbians, Quebecers and Ontarians, but worse access than consumers in Alberta, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan.
The government is working towards issuing licences for more private stores in rural areas, with the ultimate goal of giving 90 per cent of the population access within a 30-minute drive from home.
Manitoba’s licence plate may claim friendliness, but it is less so towards weed users. Even though Premier Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservative government rejected public cannabis sales similar to alcohol retail at Manitoba Liquor Marts in favour of a private-sector approach, it completely banned home cultivation of any amount and restricted consumption to private property only.
The Tories plan to extend that law to ban the public consumption of edibles, although it’s not clear how the prohibition can be enforced.
It’s also the only province in Canada where the legal age for weed use (19) isn’t the same as it is for alcohol (18).
Statistics Canada estimates that 178,600 Manitobans, or 17.6 per cent of the population aged 15 and older, used cannabis at least once in the second quarter of 2019. That’s a slightly higher rate than the 16.1 per cent national average that quarter, but considerably lower than Nova Scotia (24.4 per cent), New Brunswick (20.7 per cent) and Alberta (20.3 per cent).
Winnipeg-based Delta 9 Cannabis is the only Manitoba company that currently holds the federal licences required to produce and sell the product. Another Winnipeg producer, Bonify, had its licences suspended by Health Canada earlier this year after the company brought in cannabis from an unlicensed source and sold it on the legal market.
In provinces where consumers enjoy the greatest access to retail outlets, such as Alberta and the Maritimes, Armstrong believes legal sales could be capturing more of the market.
Conversely, where things have moved slower — Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, for example — the battle won’t begin in earnest until retail access improves, he says.
“And then, once we have that, then it becomes more of a head-to-head competition — black market versus legal product. And that’s where pricing becomes more important, that’s where product quality becomes more important and, potentially, advertising as well.”
Hype notwithstanding, legalization doesn’t appear to have had a lasting impact on the overall number of Canadians using the drug. Not yet, anyway.
The first quarter of 2019 saw a bump in the number of people trying marijuana, either for the first time or for the first time in years. But by the second quarter, Statistics Canada estimated that roughly 16 per cent of Canadians aged 15 and older had used the drug at least once in the three months prior — a rate that held steady from pre-legalization, in the same quarter of 2018.
That’s no surprise to University of Guelph associate sociology professor Andrew Hathaway, who has studied how Canadians use cannabis.
“My overall impression is: ‘boy, this is boring,’” he says.
“It’s just an indication that, as has been reported for a long time… the law has never been a particularly effective deterrent. If that had been what was preventing people from smoking weed, we would have seen higher prevalence rates post-legalization.
“So it’s nice that Canada is able to really fully demonstrate that for the first time.”
