Think what you will about Canada's legalization of cannabis last year, the commercial rollout of cannabis sales is generally considered to have been poorly executed, and nowhere more poorly than in Ontario.
Since the Progressive Conservatives took over the task, there has been one debacle after another and, almost a year after legalization the process is only partway completed.
But nothing has been quite so disastrous as the lottery system for new cannabis store licenses.
First, three of the 42 licenses issued through the latest Ontario lottery are on one street - in an industrial and commercial estate in sleepy Innisfil, Ontario (near Barrie, in case you, like many others, are not familiar with it). 1982, 1988 and 2008 Commerce Park Drive are within steps of each other, and at least two of them are currently leased to an operating marine and powersports store, which apparently has no connection with any cannabis store, and at least thinks it has a valid ongoing lease. This is not a heavily populated area, and anyone shopping there would need to drive from any centres of population. You could just put it down to the luck of the draw but, as we will see, that is not the whole story.
Because, it turns out that some (most) stores made multiple applications to the lottery, choosing to load the odds in their favor by paying the $75 entry fees multiple times. One store in Oshawa applied no less than 173 times (incurring $12,975 in entry fees), but, guess what, it worked - the store won twice (!), and landed on the waiting list a further three times! It turns out that the average winning store submitted to the lottery about 24 times (and the average losing store just twice). The three Innisfil properties mentioned above put in 43, 33 and 50 applications respectively.
If it makes you feel a bit better, 7 of the 42 winning stores in the latest round of the cannabis store lottery only submitted one application. And one store in Thunder Bay that applied 92 times did not win (although it did make the wait list), while another in North Bay submitted 80 applications to no avail. But I'm really not sure that all this was intended by the system's creators.
And three stores on one street on a suburban industrial estate? How does that serve anyone's interest?
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