[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto overtakes Vancouver as country’s cannabis capital"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Mike Hager reports from Vancouver about how Toronto has surpassed the British Columbian metropolis as a leading centre for cannabis. I've seen a dispensary on Bloor near Ossington, in my neighbourhood, so I can believe it.

Toronto has unseated Vancouver as Canada’s de facto cannabis capital due to an ongoing explosion in illegal dispensaries, while officials begin shutting down dozens of shops in the West Coast city to enforce a landmark new bylaw.

The owner of a cannabis consulting firm who has been tracking the meteoric growth of the illicit sector following last fall’s election win by the federal Liberals, who have promised to legalize the drug, says Toronto’s wide-open market is now supporting more than 100 pot shops.

This expansion comes as Vancouver has shut down 22 dispensaries out of its roughly 100 locations in the past week, and city staff say they will continue their crackdown over the coming weeks. About two dozen are expected to remain open while they clear regulatory hurdles to obtain a coveted new class of business licence.

Harrison Jordan, a second-year student at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School and owner of The Big Toke, said he has mapped 114 dispensaries now operating – or opening very soon – across a region where only a handful of tucked-away businesses were operating a year ago.

Newer, more brazen, storefronts are increasingly branching out into quiet residential neighbourhoods, but most, he said, are clustered into four main areas: The Danforth, The Junction, Queen Street West and their original hub of Kensington Market. (He has included eight locations in the suburban areas of Etobicoke, Mississauga, Richmond Hill, Scarborough and Vaughan.)