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Meet the neighbours of Toronto’s first legal pot shop

Business owners and employees in the Scarborough plaza muse about possible upticks for food ventures, concerns for clients with families and kids.

Thestar.com
April 12, 2018
Victoria Gibson

The owners and employees of the hair salons, pizza joints and convenience stores who will be neighbours to Toronto’s first legal pot shop had no idea about the government endeavour sidling up next door -- until they saw cameras, or flipped on the news.

Juliet Medina of Hi Cuts Hair and Care said one of her clients dialed her up after seeing the news early Thursday morning that their Scarborough plaza was one of four locations the province had chosen for its first marijuana dispensaries.

“One of my customers phoned me, and she’s so worried about that, she was even telling me she doesn’t want to come to the shop anymore if this is going to exist,” Medina told the Star. “The address was like, whaaat? It’s our plaza!”

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The strip of stores at Gerrard St. E. and Victoria Park Ave. will be home to the city’s first Ontario Cannabis Store, run by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. Those who work in the strip mall are close-knit, occupants told the Star, but feelings were mixed towards their new neighbours.

Jasmine Milani has only worked at the Dental Centre clinic since December, but she told the Star multiple stories of the generosity and kindness she’s seen among storekeepers.

“The business people here, from McDonald’s to this small shop on the corner, the convenience store and the spa, we know each other somehow,” she said, add that if she went to the convenience store and forgot her wallet the owners would let her pay later.

“It’s like the old style neighbourhoods,” she said. Once, she said, during a late night, she discovered building management had changed the key to the garbage. “Everybody was prepared to lend me the key, or help me with the garbage ... And you don’t see that very often.”

Inside the 7 Day Convenience, Halim Jang and her husband chatted with a customer as he tried his luck on lotto tickets. The couple was confused on Thursday morning when they heard the news about the pot shop. 2480 Gerrard St. E., the address given for the government’s Toronto marijuana location, is their address too. And they’re not intending to go anywhere.

It’s unclear where within the plaza the pot shop will be. There’s a dollar store that’s closed down next door, Jang told the Star. Maybe that’s the spot the government is planning to set up shop? Wherever it lands, she hopes it might bring the convenience store new customers, since their neighbour will be the first of its kind in the city.

At the Little Caesars Pizza a few doors down, Nick Singh said he expects to see folks visiting the plaza now from outside Toronto -- as well as those coming in from the subway line.

“I think for the food businesses it’s going to be fantastic, because it’s going to draw in a lot of volume and traffic to the plaza,” he said, sitting in the preparation room of his pizza shop. It was lunchtime, and laughter could be heard from three teenage boys, standing together by the door.

But, he added, “There could be loiterers and there could be unsavoury people around as well, so it’s a good and a bad.”

The area around the plaza is home to a diverse group, Singh told the Star.

“You have low income, people who are living off the government,” he said. He added local families pick up groceries at the Fresh Co. across the plaza, there’s a tutoring centre and kids’ martial arts studio on the same block, and the area also has its homeless population. “Then you have the upper Beaches community, which is a very family-oriented community, young children. It’s very diverse in terms of demographics, and there’s also an older population, as well.”

Back at Hi Cuts Hair and Care salon, Medina was focused on local kids.

“To be honest with you, this is a family area,” she said. She called over a friend, who was sitting on a bench in the salon, and together they prattled through a list of local schools: Blantyre Public School, Neil McNeil High School, Notre Dame High School.

“So there’s a lot of teenagers in the plaza, too,” Medina said. “It’s shocking news for us.”

Just why the province would pick a location so close to a school is something even Premier Kathleen Wynne wants to know. On Thursday, speaking to reporters at Mount Sinai Hospital, she questioned how the pot shop ended up 450 metres from Blantyre.

At the dental clinic, Milani said the neighbourhood also has a number of immigrant families from India and Bangladesh. She herself immigrated from Iran four years ago.

“They’ve come to Canada to start a new life and build a dream life for themselves, and now the next generation will be exposed to all these things,” she said of the marijuana shop. “I don’t think they’ll like it.”

Milani is a cigarette smoker -- though, she adds, she’s trying to quit -- but she’s adamantly against smoking marijuana, and her new neighbours.

“Being drunk (or) being stoned means you’re out of control,” she said. “You can do harm to yourself, and to the others.”