Will Sherwood Park become a legal cannabis buzz kill?

Have you heard of “Toronto the Good”?

Well, meet “Sherwood Park the Prim.”

Strathcona County doesn’t allow anyone to build a casino.

No one is allowed to open an “adult entertainment” business within county borders, either.

So perhaps it’s not shocking that, so far at least, the Alberta Gaming, Liquor, and Cannabis Commission has received just one application to open a recreational marijuana store in Strathcona County.

However, it does make Sherwood Park — with a population of more than 70,000 — an outlier. And it has the potential to make Strathcona County a “supply desert” for legal marijuana.

By way of comparison,

St. Albert, which has a population of about 65,000, already has eight applications pending for cannabis stores.

Leduc, with a population of 30,000, has three applications in the works.

Stony Plain? It could be Metro Edmonton’s pot shop hot spot.

With a population of just 17,189 people, Stony Plain currently has six applications up for review by the AGLC — with another three outlets in the works for nearby Spruce Grove.

Of course, not all those applications may end up being approved.

Anyone who wants to open a marijuana retail shop must pass the province’s screening program and get the approval of the local municipality to open on their preferred site.

Still it seems unlikely Sherwood Park only has enough market demand to entice one applicant.

So what exactly is going on in Sherwood Park the Prim?

In many ways, opening up a pot shop in Strathcona County is far easier than in Edmonton.

Edmonton city council has imposed significantly tougher restrictions around the siting of cannabis stores than has Strathcona County.

In Edmonton, the city has decided there must be a 200-metre buffer zone between pot shops and schools and pot shops and public libraries. Shops must also be 200 metres apart from one another. The city also imposed a 100-metre buffer zone between cannabis outlets and all public parks and recreation centres. Now, councillors are debating imposing stiff local fees, too — $2,500 for a special pot business licence and an additional $5,600 for a development permit.

Strathcona County doesn’t charge any fees for business licences. And it won’t be imposing any kind of licence fee on cannabis retailers. And its buffer zone rules will be far less stringent than Edmonton’s — stores will have be 100 metres from schools and hospitals, but otherwise they can be pretty much anywhere.

So why are there — so far, at least — virtually no applications to open up in Strathcona County?

“We do have a reputation for being a little more conservative out here and a little more straitlaced,” said county Coun. Robert Parks.

Parks thinks that reputation may have dissuaded would-be shop owners from applying, because they may have assumed the county wouldn’t welcome them. And, he points out, it was only a week ago, on April 24, that county council finally approved its cannabis zoning bylaws.

“Perhaps they were taking a wait-and-see attitude,” Parks said. “There were a lot of tire-kickers at our last meeting. I’m expecting applications to pick up over the next few weeks.”

Strathcona County’s planning department won’t even begin to accept applications until marijuana finally becomes legal, which should be sometime in July. (It was supposed to be legalized July 1, but the AGLC now expects it to take a few weeks longer because of delays in the Senate.) By contrast, Edmonton plans to start accepting applications in May, and to issue conditional acceptances by June.

Stacy Fedechko, the county’s director of planning and development services, doesn’t anticipate it will have much difficulty approving applications, especially since it seems there won’t be many to process. But she said would-be retailers may have a challenge in convincing Sherwood Park landlords to rent to them.

Of course, it’s tempting — and easy — to giggle at the prospect of a buzzed Stony Plain with six marijuana stores, a blissed-out St. Albert with eight and an uptight Sherwood Park with one.

But there is a more serious public policy question here. If there’s no simple way for people to buy safe legal marijuana in Strathcona County, people will either buy black-market drugs, or drive significant distances to get stoned.

I have my own ambivalence about legal weed. But if we want to reduce organized crime, keep users safe and keep impaired drivers off the roads, we actually need cannabis stores where the customers are.