Medicinal marijuana dispensaries have been hiding in plain view in Vancouver for years now. Places like the Green Panda and The Healing Tree have operated in downtown locations with the full knowledge of the city and police who have chosen to look the other way.
To imagine that federal authorities have not also been aware of the proliferation of these establishments defies belief. They are everywhere.
But Ottawa, too, has had bigger fish to fry, and consequently, was happy to put its hands over its eyes and ignore the situation. That is until the city announced it was going to start regulating the businesses to stanch their rapid growth while making some cash from licensing.
To all appearances, it looks like the city is trying to regulate the sale of marijuana, even if, as it insists, it is really trying to bring some order to a chaotic situation. But in the process, it opened a can of worms the federal government could no longer ignore, given its current war on weed.
This has resulted in the showdown we are now witnessing, with federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose urging the city to halt its plan immediately and the city telling the feds it intends to proceed as planned.
We now have what amounts to an ideological war between a conservative government and a left-wing civic party set against the backdrop of a looming federal election. And don't think that this is not about politics, too.
Ms. Ambrose has recently been speaking out about the health risks of marijuana for youth. More broadly, the Conservatives have taken a hard line against drug use and some of the more controversial treatments to address it. That plays well in the Chinese and South Asian communities, constituencies that are going to be vital to the Conservatives come this fall's election.
In Vancouver, the government's stern attitude toward the pot dispensaries appears designed to undermine Justin Trudeau's acceptance among the two crucial ethnic groups mentioned.
The federal Liberal leader has taken a decidedly more open-minded position on marijuana use than the Conservatives.
It is no accident that Vancouver's civic government, Vision Vancouver – a party far more aligned with the world view of Mr. Trudeau than that of Stephen Harper – has put councillor Kerry Jang out front on the dispensary issue. Mr. Jang has solid connections among the city's Chinese population and has been deeply involved in educating that community on the dispensary issue. I'm assured the initial response to the initiative has been good.
That, at least, is the politics of the situation.
The reality is that the city had to do something. Police were growing increasingly concerned that the Hell's Angels were preparing to get into the medicinal marijuana dispensary business in a big way, which is why, under the proposed regulations, anyone even remotely involved in a storefront operation will have to undergo extensive police background checks. Something tells me the Hells Angels have ways of getting around this, but we'll see.
Of course, Ms. Ambrose and her colleagues could order the shutdown of every operation in existence.
Here, I'm imagining a prohibition-era-style raid by gun-toting RCMP officers who, instead of poking holes in barrels of illegal booze, light bags of illicit pot on fire. Talk about a sure way to attract a crowd in Vancouver.
Yet, somehow, I don't see this occurring. More likely, given the world in which we live, this whole matter will end up in court. Either Ottawa will seek an injunction to close these places down, or the establishments themselves will go to court attempting to exploit the imprecise language the city and others say exists in this whole area.
One might think legalizing and regulating the sale of marijuana would solve this entire problem. That's not necessarily the case. When I was down in Washington State recently to see how legalization was working there, officials were wrestling with a similar problem to the one Vancouver is experiencing: the absolute explosion in the number of medical cannabis outlets.
The pot being sold by the medical dispensaries is about a third of the cost of pot sold at state-regulated outlets. The medical dispensaries have effectively become the new black market, although it sounds like legislative changes are afoot to put the two systems on a more equal setting.
Back here, we can only sit and watch as a frustrated federal government tries to deal with the problem child known as Vancouver, which has been defiantly smoking pot in the open for years. Selling it in stores has somehow always seemed inevitable.
Gary Mason