A ‘wild West’ of marijuana shops grows in Toronto
TORONTO — If you are hankering for a government-sanctioned joint, then you have come to the right city.
The options along Queen Street West are bountiful. You could start at Toronto Cannabis Authority, with a sign outside suggesting customers “warm up with hot cannabis infused beverages.” You could take a few steps down the sidewalk and enter Friendly Stranger, which trades on nostalgia for tokers who picked up their first bong here, long before cannabis was legalized 3½ years ago. Or you could dash across the street to the Hunny Pot, which made headlines in 2019, when it became the city’s first legal cannabis store and saw an overnight line of customers.
And that’s just in 1,000 square feet. Walk two minutes and three more options appear.
“There’s a standing joke in Toronto that dispensaries are sprinkled around like parsley. They are everywhere,” said Dalandrea Adams, a budtender standing behind the long glass display counter — revealing pipes, grinders and rollers — inside Friendly Stranger. “Which is convenient, if you are a pothead.”
As Toronto slowly comes back to life after two years of repeated lockdowns and closures, the wreckage of the pandemic is surfacing like cigarette butts in melted snow drifts. Along the city’s many neighborhood main streets, “For lease” signs hang in dusty windows. Office towers in the city’s dense core remain mostly empty.
The obvious exception: cannabis shops, which the provincial government permitted by emergency order to keep operating during the pandemic. Just 12 existed in the sprawling city of 2.8 million back in March 2020. Today, 430 compete for customers, with another 88 in the approval process, even as some struggle to stay open amid the stiff competition.
“It’s the wild, wild West,” said Kristyn Wong-Tam, a city councilor who supported the legalization of cannabis but has called for a moratorium on new shops in the city.
The reasons for the sudden proliferation across the city include loosening license restrictions, a surge in available storefront space and the government’s decision to allow cannabis shops to operate during lockdowns. While Toronto restaurants were ordered to close for more than 60 weeks, according to Restaurants Canada, cannabis stores serviced customers — although sometimes just at their doors — for all but a handful of days.
“It was a perfect storm of supply and demand in Ontario,” said Jack Lloyd, a lawyer specializing in cannabis.
In 2018, Canada became the second country in the world after Uruguay to legalize marijuana, in an effort to extinguish the criminal trade and keep the substance out of the hands of youth by regulating the market. The stores appeared slowly at first, because of a shortage of legal marijuana. The provincial government permitted just five to open in Toronto, North America’s fourth biggest city, in the spring of 2019.
Two of those were along Queen Street West.
Back then, some 20 salespeople worked four retail floors of the Hunny Pot, walking a never-ending line of customers through the finer differences between various strains of marijuana. The store had two extra floors for celebrities, so they could shop in private. On its best day, more than 2,000 customers came through, said Cameron Brown, communications manager for the Hunny Pot, which now has 17 cannabis stores in Ontario.
“It was nonstop, all day, every day,” he said. “It was insane.”