“Cannabis: City asks for public feedback” in the Feb. 7 issue of the Nelson Star.
I want to voice my disappointment with this article.
We don’t have a municipal business licence, but the Nelson Cannabis Compassion Club isn’t a for-profit business. Since March, 2000 we have been licensed by the province as a non-profit organization, incorporated under the Societies Act. The licensing and regulating of which is the jurisdiction of the province.
Also in the Feb. 7th 2018 issue Pam Mierau says, “Our assumption is they (medical dispensaries) will be treated like anybody else who is looking to set up a retail store here, and they’ll have to go through the same process , and they won’t have any advantage over anyone else.” “But we’re not sure.” Well, she shouldn’t be sure as there is a major difference between a recreational user of cannabis and a medical user. It’s called the Chart of Rights and Freedoms. Recreational users don’t have charter protections and medical users do. Even the provincial government realizes this. If you look at their announcements around the retail sales of recreational cannabis they use the same term “non-medicinal cannabis” over and over again.
In the same issue, Pam says that city staff have issued fines and that council may eventually consider an injunction. What she didn’t mention is that we have disputed those fines and shown how their current bylaw isn’t enforceable against the NCCC. As to the threat of an injunction, we will win. If city staff want to waste tens of thousands of Nelson taxpayer dollars fighting a bunch of sick and dying people in court, all the power to them. I’m easy to find. Just know, that when I win they will have opened the city to liability law suits from all of the other dispensaries.
Philip McMillan, (Facilities director of NCCC)
Nelson