While the federal government’s new medical marijuana regulations took effect nearly a month ago, a recent injunction to temporarily allow previously licensed users to continue growing on their own has called into question contradictory municipal legislation.
In November, Burnaby city council approved a bylaw amendment to force all medical marijuana production facilities into industrial zones, falling in line with the incoming Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR). The switch by the feds to the new program sparked a national uproar from users under the old Medical Marihuana Access Regulations (MMAR), whose personal licences were to be revoked as of April 1.
However, an injunction has allowed those users to keep growing their own stash until a constitutional challenge of the MMPR system is heard.
“The feds granted a licence for personal growers or someone who was growing for a number of people under those licences, but that didn’t mean that if you got a federal licence that you were licensed at a provincial or local level,” said Lou Pelletier, director of planning and building with the City of Burnaby.
Pelletier said that even if a medicinal user wants to grow only for themselves, to do so legally, they would have to rezone their property to industrial through the city.
“The bylaw in Burnaby has been changed, so looking backwards at what the federal licence is isn’t really material to what we look at when someone comes forward and says, ‘I’d like to get local approval for this,’” he said, likening it to licensing programs for other fields.
“I can get a licence to drive a taxi from Burnaby, but if I go to Ontario, that doesn’t mean I have a licence to drive a taxi in Ontario. I still need to go through a local approval process.”
Similar bylaws have been put in place in other Lower Mainland cities, including Surrey and Richmond, restricting commercial grow operations to specific zones.
Pelletier noted that the city does not keep track of the number of medical marijuana users in Burnaby, though the bylaw amendment will allow the city to map out new medical grow-ops when owners apply to rezone their properties. In addition, the rezoning process requires a public hearing to give residents their say if a medical marijuana production facility is proposed for their neighbourhood.
Pelletier added that at this time, no one has applied to rezone their property to grow medical marijuana, commercially or otherwise.
