It's high time

Personal possession and consumption of cannabis became legal in Canada in October 2018, fulfilling one of the promises Justin Trudeau made ahead of the 2015 election.  Over the last few months, cannabis has become something of an obsession for the print media.  Check out the front page of the Toronto Star website -- scroll down and you find that "Cannabis" has a section all of its own, on a parallel with Politics or Sport.

The media have reported obsessively on everything cannabis-related: the emergence of literally hundreds of would-be cannabis entrepreneurs and the subsequent winnowing out/attrition as the industry has consolidated; the creation of cannabis cultivation courses at colleges across the country; the criteria for the establishment of retail pot stores, with anything close to a school deemed a no-no; the conversion of existing greenhouses to cannabis cultivation, with the attendant nuisance issues, mostly related to the smell -- they don't call it "skunk" for nothing.  And so on, and on.

For all of this appearance of frenzied activity, it's only this coming Monday, April 1, that the first retail cannabis stores will open in Ontario.  There will only be a maximum of 25 stores at the outset, because of one unlikely problem: there isn't enough cannabis to go around.  It appears that a lot of the activity so breathlessly reported in the press was only taking place on paper.  Not enough legal cannabis is being grown as yet, and the shortage is expected to last for a good while longer.

Notice the reference there to "a maximum of 25 stores".  The actual number to open on Monday will be smaller than that.  The Government ran an auction to determine who got the first precious batch of licenses, but it now appears that a lot of the winners were completely unprepared for success, and are unable to open for business on the big day.  You might have thought that the Government would have sought to pre-qualify the bidders, given the severely constrained number of licenses available, but either that didn't occur to anyone, or it was incompetently done.

There's an old joke that says "crime wouldn't pay if the Government ran it".  Cannabis use may no longer be a crime in Canada, but the same principle seems to be at work. A big part of the rationale for legalization was the desire to eliminate the illicit market for cannabis, in the hope of keeping users away from harder and more dangerous drugs.  Based on how things have gone so far, the dealer hanging out down the block won't have to worry about unemployment any time soon.