More pressing issues than legalizing pot
Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens wasn’t exactly popping Champagne corks this week when he learned the clock is now ticking on our freespirit prime minister’s grand plan to make Canada a pothead paradise.
Fifteen months from today, on Canada’s birthday, of all days, this once-proud country will join banana backwater Uruguay as the only nations on earth to have fully legalized marijuana.
Dilkens, a former auxiliary police officer and current Windsor Police Service chairman, wasn’t celebrating Justin Trudeau’s leaked pot plan because he’s all too aware of the potential consequences for a border city like Windsor.
Last summer Dilkens took a trip to Colorado, now in its fourth year of legalized marijuana, and decided to check out how legalization is working in downtown Denver, ground zero for this social experiment.
Dilkens, who’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that he’s never tried marijuana (his old-school dad vowed to throw him and his siblings out on the street if they tried narcotics), visited a marijuana shop where he was impressed by the strict adherence to state regulations, including buzzers, security gates, multiple ID demands and no-nonsense warnings against product browsing. Strictly business. But it was what he saw out on the street, in an otherwise attractive section of downtown Denver, that left him rattled and deeply concerned about what’s in store for Windsor, especially its core.
Instead of mellow hippies and flower children with daisies in their hair, he found himself in the midst of intimidating throngs of lowlifes.
“The riff-raff and the undesirables were rampant. I was looking behind my back as I was walking because some of these people truly concerned me. These were very aggressive people,” Dilkens said.
And if someone like him, more than sixfoot-five with police training, is looking over his shoulder, you can imagine how intimidating that neighbourhood, rife with characters perhaps looking for cash to buy weed, would be for your average gawking tourist or frail senior.
Windsor taxpayers have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into our downtown, for streetscaping, riverfront parkland, an aquatic centre, a new museum and new academic facilities, all in an effort to make the area inviting for visitors and families. But that investment could be undermined if it becomes a sleazy Little Amsterdam with many more panhandlers and deadbeats.
Larry Horwitz, head of the downtown business association, is both “excited and leery” about the potential impact of legalized marijuana.
“If you harness it and do it properly, it could be great,” Horwitz said. “But if we become sin city and the wild west, I’m very much against it. I don’t want that title again, Tijuana of the North.”
On balance, he thinks the positives could outweigh the negatives. There’ll be more shops and restaurants and more foot traffic. A lot of folks are going to make cross-border money out of this phenomenon, at least until Michigan enacts similar legislation.
But Horwitz, who looks back with dismay on the Kiddie Bar era, which soured area residents on downtown, admits he’s worried the cycle could repeat itself if we don’t do this right.
“I am so tired of Windsor being this little hick town attached to Detroit where people come over and do bad things,” he said, fuming.
Downtown pizza shops will do a roaring business dealing with the munchies, but the pot trade could be yet another kick in the teeth for a downtown aspiring to become a safe academic zone and family-friendly entertainment quarter.
The way this is set up, Dilkens said, is the feds get the money, the provinces get the regulatory powers and the cities get the grief.
He argues border cities like Windsor are “on the front lines” and will need senior government money to cover dramatically increased policing, as well as social and regulatory burdens.
Hard to believe, in a country that grows less competitive year after year, that giving Canadians a legal buzz is such a high priority with our former drama teacher prime minister.