I would say there is still a pattern of growth that's possible, but we're seriously at risk of stymying that growth if we don't take means to address a combination of three things that lead up to a very entrenched illicit market still having a good go at things.
We have this tax issue that I have put on the table, the combination of taxes and fees. The provinces are big beneficiaries of these resources, of course, if we're forthright about it, but the burden of those collectively, as the EY report shows, is very challenging to sustain.
Second, there are a lot of regulations, which nobody is surprised by, but now we know that a lot of the assumptions behind the regulations are just plain wrong, and the statutory review looks like a very slow process to get the change that a lot of people need more immediately, so I'll just put a circle around that.
What we're really concerned about, Mr. Drouin, is that we would see a situation where we stop growing and we get locked into what we would think is approximately a fifty-fifty situation between the legacy markets and the regulated marketplace.
Our argument—and this is the work that we're doing in the second stage of our study—will be to show all governments that if we take steps together, we can grow the pie, and we can get more of the sales under a regulated framework, which provides certainty for a certain number of public health objectives and really important economic objectives for individuals, for communities and for government.
We're a little concerned that the growth potential that's there as we bring on more of those legacy consumers is being stymied by a series of constraints and that a few years hence we might look back and ask where we went wrong and why we have only gotten halfway there.