National Post (National Edition)
MULRONEY TO JOIN BOARD OF LARGE U.S. CANNABIS COMPANY
process of receiving pardons for pot possession convictions. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale promised forthcoming legislation that will waive the five-year waiting period and $631 fee that applicants for pardons currently face.
“Now that the laws on cannabis have changed,” Goodale said, “individuals who previously acquired criminal records for simple possession of cannabis should be allowed to shed the stigma and the burden of that record.”
In New Brunswick, Brian Harriman was at a boardroom table in a warehouse past midnight, watching numbers projected on a whiteboard in the room. Traffic was surging on the province’s online cannabis store, hovering around 400 active users at a given minute, then jumping past 700. Harriman, CEO of New Brunswick Liquor Corporation that is managing the rollout of the province’s government-run cannabis stores, said one of his staff kept refreshing their order totals – 12 purchases in the first nine minutes, 220 in the first hour. (Compare that to B.C., where the government site reportedly sold 1,000 cannabis products in the first hour.)
In the morning, Harriman posted himself inside one of New Brunswick’s 20 Cannabis NB retail stores, watching the people stream in after waiting an average of 35 minutes in line.
“In our stores all day, it’s been like kids on Christmas,” he said. “They’ve been waiting for this anxiously.”
In Montreal, Hugo Senecal thrust his fist in the air, crying out from the front of a line outside a government-run Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC) store on Ste-catherine Street that started at 3:45 a.m. “I’m basically a stoner,” he told the Gazette, “and I just want to be the first one to buy legal cannabis in Montreal.”
There were no lines in Ontario. There are no legal stores, not yet, as the new Progressive Conservative government sorts out licences for private retailers after scrapping its predecessor’s plan for governmentrun stores. Until April, cannabis sales will be confined to the province’s Ontario Cannabis Store website, which depends on Canada Post for delivery. But the possibility of a Canada Post strike as soon as Monday threatened to derail the province’s distribution scheme.
In Regina, delays meant that the closest cannabis store open on Wednesday was roughly 15 kilometres from downtown in Edenwold. By Wednesday morning, 30 people from Regina had made the trip to wait in line outside.
In Manitoba, Winnipeg police posted a photo of a $672 ticket, issued for using cannabis in a motor vehicle. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney is joining the board of directors of an American cannabis company. Acreage Holdings, one of the largest vertically integrated cannabis companies in the U.S., says Mulroney will become a board member in November, when the company will list in the Canadian Securities Exchange. Mulroney, who served as prime minister 1984 to 1993, will join some prominent former U.S. politicians in the board of Acreage, including former House of Representatives speaker John Boehner.