'Opted out': cannabis stores still banned in Richmond Hill, Vaughan and Newmarket, despite appeals

Licences granted in Aurora, Stouffville, Georgina

Yorkregion.com
Feb. 2, 2024
Mike Adler

Five years after cannabis stories became legal in York Region, Bloomington Road is still a dividing line.

Go north, and you can find stores selling recreational pot in Aurora. Go south, into Richmond Hill, and there are none.

That isn’t likely to change soon.

Cannabis advocates last fall asked municipal councils in Richmond Hill, Vaughan and Newmarket to reconsider their cannabis store bans.

Mississauga’s council decided to drop its prohibition last April after hearing from Rianna Ford and others who wanted the city to opt in.

Bret Unger, a Thornhill man whose company, Take Off Cannabis, owns a store in Thorold, joined Ford in approaching Richmond Hill in November.

Unger said he remembers feeling optimistic that, after years seeing legal stores operate in nearby Aurora and Stouffville, Richmond Hill councillors would lift their ban.

“There isn’t a really good argument to be made for (keeping it),” he said.

“We’re in 2024.”

But their presentation and similar appeals to councils in Vaughan and Newmarket got lackluster receptions and no results.

The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) has granted licenses for 1,400 cannabis stores, including 14 in Aurora, eight in Stouffville and nine in Georgina.

The provincial agency cannot grant store licenses in York’s other six municipalities because they “opted out” in 2018.

Ford, who represents a cannabis brand, The Loud Plug, wondered what councillors who wanted to stay “out” were standing against.

“It really comes down to stigma (against cannabis),” said Ford, a Jamaican Canadian who said she grew up seeing cannabis as a plant and medicinal product.

People warned her not to approach councils in York, she said, “telling me they’ll never opt in, don’t even try,” but she wanted to put the idea to them.

Richmond Hill’s decision in 2018 was unanimous and supported by Mayor David West, then a councillor.

Any decision can be re-examined, often due to a need the community expresses, but “I’m not hearing that,” West said in an interview.

Apart from the November presentation, council members haven’t heard much about cannabis stores from their constituents, West said.

Unchanged from 2018, he added, are his own concerns about municipalities being unable to control numbers of cannabis stores or minimum distances from schools and other sensitive places.

This produced some problems, said West. “It seems that I was right.”

A statement from Aurora Mayor Tom Mrakas acknowledged such concerns while praising cannabis store owners and the “strict regulations, restrictions and oversight” placed on them.

"We have great entrepreneurs that have risked their own capital and time to open a retail location to sell a legal product and create positive economic impact,” Mrakas wrote last month.

“The Town's challenge is not whether it was a good or bad decision to allow the stores, but rather the fact that Aurora was the only municipality in York Region that allowed them in the beginning,” which resulted in “a few adverse effects regarding parking, loitering and impacts on neighbouring businesses,” the statement said, adding the town saw fewer store applications after other municipalities opened to them.

The AGCO, in response to questions, called its licensing of retail cannabis stores “a thorough and rigorous process.”

Provincial law “imposes no limit or caps by region” but licenses aren’t granted for stores within 150 metres of a school and municipalities or residents can object to a license during a notice period, the agency said.

Unger, who wants to open a York Region store, said municipalities maintaining a ban is “a limitation to the whole idea of small business and free enterprise.”

Unger said smaller independent owners like himself give back to their communities. “I sponsor two different hockey teams, two basketball teams,” he said.