Legal pot producers say they must expand — or leave city

The city will push the legal medical marijuana industry out of Hamilton if it prevents rural facilities from expanding, say local growers.

Ancaster Coun. Lloyd Ferguson plans to bring a motion to next week’s council meeting asking for a review of rules governing location and size of licensed medical pot-growing operations. He also wants a moratorium on expansion applications until after the review is complete.

Right now, city zoning rules limit rural grow-ops to a facility size of no more than 2,000 square metres. But Ferguson said he knows of would-be producers seeking to build “concrete bunkers” that would sprawl across 30 hectares of “precious” Hamilton farmland.

The legal marijuana-growing industry is expected to explode as the federal government simultaneously licenses more medicinal producers and moves to legalize recreational pot next year.

There are only four licensed medicinal producers in Hamilton so far — but two of them showed up at a city planning meeting Tuesday to speak against

a moratorium and further limits on what they view as necessary expansion.

Beleave Inc. currently has a licensed, operating medical marijuana facility in Flamborough that is 1,300 square metres in size — but the company has applied to the city for a 7,400-square-metre expansion.

Hopefully, that’s just the start, said director Gordon Harvey, who told councillors the firm wants to build close to 93,000 square metres worth of greenhouse facilities.

“It’s about economies of scale,” he said, noting successful producers are scaling up dramatically to compete in the mushrooming legal marijuana market.

If Hamilton limits facility expansion, or puts a moratorium on applications, the company will have to consider offers to set up shop in communities such as Burlington, Welland or Caledonia.

“That would be our only option if we can’t expand,” Harvey said.

Ferguson, who wasn’t at the planning meeting, said by phone his priority remains protecting “increasingly precious” local farmland that can be used for food crops.

He even floated the idea of allowing legal grow-ops to instead set up shop on the city’s Glanbrook landfill — and selling collected methane gas to the greenhouse as a side benefit to the city.

At the meeting, Coun. Matthew Green, questioned why producers don’t make use of the city’s offer to allow legal marijuana facilities on industrial brownfields — where there is no restrictive size limit on facilities.

But urban air pollution in Hamilton — or any other big city — effectively makes repurposing industrial buildings a non-starter for medical marijuana producers, said Ian Wilms of the Green Organic Dutchman.

“This is not a business that can go in downtown Hamilton,” said Wilms, who called the prospect of inadvertent crop contamination by airborne pollutants “potentially catastrophic” for a heavily regulated and tested licensed grower.

The Ancaster organic marijuana business also wants to expand its operations by nearly 14,000 square metres.

Wilms argued the facility is a “good fit” for Hamilton, pointing out it is located on mostly low-grade farmland, reuses a majority of its water and leases parcels with the best-quality soil to neighbouring farmers for traditional crop production.

“We’ve been working at this for more than three years,” said Wilms, who added the business just received a licence to sell the pot it grows this year.

“To have a roadblock thrown up in your face … while other jurisdictions plow ahead at warp speed, it’s disappointing.”