Health Committee on Sept. 13th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Good morning. Welcome, everybody, to meeting 66 of the Standing Committee on Health. I'm looking forward to an interesting day today.

Our first panel is on household cultivation of plants. It's one of the more interesting and controversial topics we have on this subject, so we certainly welcome our panellists to help us through this.

Our guests today are, from Anandia Labs, Jonathan Page, who is the chief executive officer; as an individual, John Conroy, a barrister; and from the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations, John Dickie, who is its president.

We'll ask you to make a 10-minute opening statement, and limit it to 10 minutes, after which we'll ask several questions.

I'm going to start with Mr. Page, to open with a 10-minute statement.

[Jonathan Page, Chief Executive Officer, Anandia Labs]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the committee for the invitation to speak on this important topic. It's really an honour for me to be here.

I'm a scientist who has worked on the cannabis plant for more than 18 years. My research is mainly on the biochemistry and genetics of this very fascinating plant, and I'm very familiar with its cultivation, both in a scientific context and then in the new commercial industry we have in Canada. I'm also an adjunct professor in the botany department at the University of British Columbia and am the founder and CEO of a cannabis testing and biotechnology company in Vancouver called Anandia Labs.

There's a lot to speak about, but I've confined my comments specifically to the subject of cultivation of cannabis, hopefully to educate and eventually answer some of your questions.

I think it is fundamentally important that this legalization include the ability to grow cannabis for personal use. I was happy to see that Bill C-45 included some provision for this. The cultivation of plants is a foundational aspect of human culture. In fact, the advent of agriculture via the domestication of plants has been one of the key forces in the creation of human societies.

Cannabis has been grown by humans for thousands of years as a source of food, fibre, and drug. Given the long-standing relationship between humans and cannabis and the fact that we will soon be allowing adults to consume it legally, it is important that the cannabis act allows Canadians to grow the plant. The absence of personal cultivation from the act, as for example might occur if the provision were stripped from Bill C-45 in response to pressures from law enforcement, would surely lead to Canadians facing fines or charges for the simple act of planting seeds.

I also think we are dealing with a relatively small number of people who may choose to cultivate, since most consumers of cannabis would rather purchase from a store. This is the same situation as with the home-brewing of beer or making wine. I suspect we will not see apartment buildings overrun by cannabis gardens.

The fact that Bill C-45 includes allowances for personal cultivation doesn't mean everything is fine. There are a number of points that cause me concern. Bill C-45 restricts the number of plants that can be grown for personal use, with a limit of four plants per household. I see the purpose of this restriction in that the ability to grow larger numbers of plants might result in diversion into an illicit commercial market. Indeed, all the limits of plant cultivation, including plant height, plant number, and seed possession limits, appear to have reduction in diversion as their main goal. However, these limits expose the awkwardness of applying strict legal definitions to a living organism, a plant, and might criminalize Canadians who are simply gardening.

The proposed limit of four plants per dwelling doesn't take into account the practical challenges in growing plants or the biological characteristics of cannabis. As I think every gardener or farmer knows, plants are difficult to grow and might fail to thrive or might succumb to disease. In growing tomatoes, one might sow a dozen seeds on a windowsill and select the foremost robust plants to transplant to the garden.

Cannabis plants may be male or female, with the male plants unusable as a drug. Without cross-seeds, which are a proportion of the seeds that are available, 50% of the plants will be males and therefore discarded. In many cases, cannabis cultivators maintain so-called “mother plants” to be used as a permanent source of cuttings, producing so-called “clones”, which are vegetatively propagated cuttings to be used for growing, and then have one or two plants in flower at one time. In my opinion, the cultivation limit should be adjusted to account for these non-flowering and non-producing plants required for normal cultivation practices. In fact, Bill C-45 already distinguishes between non-flowering and flowering plants. Therefore, I would propose that the act be amended to allow adults to grow perhaps 10 plants in total, of which four may be in flower. This allows cultivators the flexibility to grow for personal use without running afoul of the law.

I also want to address the limit on plant height of 100 centimetres, or about three and a half feet. Cannabis is a highly variable species, and I have seen plants of 30 centimetres that are flowering, and others that are several metres tall. The limit of 100 centimetres is potentially problematic from the perspective that cultivators might break the law simply by providing fertile soil and water and then going away for a week's vacation. Their plants might grow from 95 centimetres to 105 centimetres during that time. I wonder what the goal of the 100 centimetre limit is, which was also contained in the legalization task force report. Is it to reduce the amount of cannabis that each Canadian is capable of growing so they don't go on to sell it, or is it to reduce the visibility of plants grown on private property?

If it is the latter, I think this is best dealt with by municipal bylaws. If it is the prevention of diversion to the so-called black market, I would suggest that achieving this through enforced pruning is quite silly, and that the 100-centimetre height limit should be removed.

I also wanted to comment on the awkward treatment of cannabis seeds in Bill C-45. Cannabis seeds are individually smaller than a peppercorn, weighing about 15 milligrams each and are devoid of cannabinoids such as THC. Yet schedule 3 of Bill C-45 indicates that one seed is equivalent to one gram of dried cannabis. One gram of dried cannabis may contain up to 250 milligrams of THC and is fully usable as a drug.

Bill C-45 proposes that this is equivalent to a single small seed that is not useable as a drug at all. The possession limit in public is therefore 30 seeds or about a thimbleful. Since there will be limits on the number of plants that can be grown, this equivalency factor seems very arbitrary. Cannabis seeds for the purposes of personal cultivation should not be restricted at all.

The cannabis act also makes a distinction between illicit and licit products, which also applies to seeds and plants. Under the ACMPR, our current medical regulations, patients and licensed producers may only purchase seeds and clones from licit sources, yet most of the patients choose to source their seeds and clones from the Internet, store displays, and trade with other growers. All of these are considered illicit.

Licensed producers are also under very tight restrictions on the access to cannabis genetics used for starting their commercial operations. As any plant breeder will tell you, genetic diversity is important. The genetic diversity of cannabis is important for its future breeding and improvement.

We need to make sure that the regulations—I respect the fact that this may not be in the act itself but in regulations arising from it—need to allow broader access to sources of cannabis genetics without criminalizing growers who use their own heirloom seeds as starting materials.

On the commercial side, licensed producers also need to access a rich supply of cannabis genetics, which now exists in Canada and around the world.

I have a brief comment on quality-control testing. My laboratory in Vancouver does a lot of this work. Cannabis can be safely grown at all scales, and the cannabis produced by home-growers is no more dangerous than the tomatoes, basil, and lettuce that others grow at home. There are always hazards inherent in gardening, and careful application of fertilizers, manure, and pest control products is always advisable. That said, allowing everyone access to accurate quality-control testing by certified testing labs will help to ensure the safety of the product. This is currently the case for patient growers under the ACMPR, and access should be continued and expanded under legalization.

The last point I'd like to make is from my perspective as a scientist who has done research on cannabis for many years. My request to the government as legalization and regulations are crafted is to allow our scientists to work on cannabis. Cannabis is a plant that in many ways has been left out of mainstream science because of prohibition and restrictions on research. As far as I know, there are currently no Canadian university labs licensed to grow drug-type cannabis or marijuana. So we have more than 200,000 authorized patients as well as 56 or 58 licensed producers, and yet our universities are lagging behind.

On Monday in this panel, Dr. Mark Ware made a strong statement about Canada's leadership in cannabis research from plant science to clinical trials and epidemiology. I echo his thoughts and add that if we allow cannabis to be grown in our homes and sold in our stores while keeping it out of our university, government, and private-sector labs, then we will not maximize the benefits and reduce the negatives arising from legalization.

Mr. Chair, I conclude by saying that I support this bold policy move. The time for legalization has come. Bill C-45 is not perfect, but I am sure your committee will recommend changes for improvement.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Welcome, Mr. Conroy. We're anxious to hear your opening remarks.

[John Conroy, Barrister, As an Individual]

Good morning. As a lawyer, it's always hard to confine oneself to 10 minutes; I'll do it.

To use the metaphor yesterday of travelling on the plane, I've been on this plane for almost 45 years. There have been a number of times when I thought we were going to run out of gas, with various other proposals that have come up in that 45 years, but I think we are coming in for a good landing. It's certainly not a perfect landing, from my point of view, but I think it's going to be a safe landing. We will have some bumps, obviously, along the road.

My experience with this started not long after I was called to the bar in 1972, when the interim Le Dain commission report was tabled. It recommended that the government hybridize, create summary conviction and indictable offences for trafficking back then. It's only just being proposed now, some 45 years later. It recommended the maximum penalty be five years imprisonment, not 14, as you are proposing now, some 45 years later.

In terms of the public education issue, there are studies that go back to 1894, the Indian hemp drugs commission, and you can take seven or eight royal commissions that led up to Le Dain before that. There is more information out there about cannabis than any other drug, if you want to use it for public education, which I understand is one of the concerns.

I was born in Montreal, but after a couple of years, my father, who got a degree in agriculture from McGill, went out to the colonies, so I grew up in central Africa. It wasn't long before I realized that some of the Africans smoked something called dagga, which was cannabis. Years later, my father told me that if he saw a marijuana plant up in around the tobacco plants, he would pull it up and throw it on the ground, as he was a consultant on the growing of tobacco.

I grew up in a situation where there wasn't this concern about cannabis as a problem. When I came back to Canada and started practising law in the early seventies, it wasn't long before I was in front of judges who would drink booze after court and pop Valium, but they would actually sentence people to prison for simple possession of cannabis and lecture them about it. The hypocrisy of what was going on, at that period of time, was something that certainly motivated me, in terms of the cases I was doing.

In those early days, we didn't have people growing marijuana. The market was coming in from Los Angeles, as Arlo Guthrie said, or we used to get it from Thailand, Colombia, and so on. They were all big import cases. It was only over time, with the ingenuity of Canadians, people figured out how to grow it indoors and create something called B.C. Bud, which became popular. We became an export economy after we had been an import economy for years.

I can remember one of my first growing cases was a young man who decided to grow a few plants out in his yard in Clearbrook, B.C. The police didn't know how to operate their own camera, so he helped take the pictures for them. When we went to court, they were actually dragging the plants along the floor and people were scooping up the material behind them. That was in the mid-seventies. That was the nature of what was going on, in terms of the production of cannabis in those early days, which has of course changed substantially ever since.

In those early days, I used to have drug squad, other police officers, and fellow lawyers come up to me and tell me I was trying to ruin a good thing by speaking out and that saying it was crazy for us to use prohibition on this subject. Now, at least I have the police coming up to me often, saying that they hope we win. Things have changed considerably since those old days.

I was counsel in R. v. Malmo-Levine and R. v. Caine, which was the challenge to prohibition, which went to the Supreme of Canada in about 2003. I incorporated the BC Compassion Club Society about 20 years ago and it's had senators, members of parliament, and many others go through it and compliment it on the way it operates, including the recent task force. I was also counsel in Allard.

You should have a five-page summary that I put together, as well an appendix, which are the excerpts from the court on the issue that you've asked me to address, which is the household cultivation.

I should step back and give you history, which some of you are probably aware of. When the BC Compassion Club Society first started, the patients had an authorization under section 53 of the narcotic control act, which at that time authorized practitioners to give, sell, administer, or prescribe any narcotic to a patient for a medical condition that they were treating them for. That was the basis for the Compassion Club, which was checked out by the police and everything in those days, and allowed to continue.

Subsequently, there was the Parker case here in Ontario, which determined that a medically approved patient had to be given reasonable access. When the government of the day ultimately determined that the marihuana medical access regulations, MMAR, was the way to do that, and that compelled people to.... The only source was for them to grow for themselves or have someone grow for them.

While we attempted to convince the government in those days that they should allow somebody to grow more so we would have fewer grows, they said you can grow for two, instead of one. We went back to court to say we should be able to have more in one place than just one or two grows, and they said you could have four. We did make efforts to try to have people grow for more people so we'd have fewer home-grows, but the number of home-grows went to some 38,000 by March of 2014.

That was the situation we were faced with when a new government decided it would introduce the marihuana for medical purposes regulations and take away that right to grow or the designated grower, which had existed for some 10 years. We went to court and got an injunction from Justice Manson in March of 2014. That basically allowed those who had a grow licence under the MMAR to continue to do so, as long as it was valid on September 30, 2013, and their authorization to possess had to be valid on the date of the injunction, which was March of 2014.

We then continued with the case, and ultimately Justice Phelan, in the Federal Court, ruled that indeed the new regulations were unconstitutional because they failed to provide reasonable access. The evidence from the patients was that they would go to a licensed producer, maybe get what they wanted the first time, and then get on a waiting list and be waiting to receive, in the mail, their medicine, which they needed. It wasn't working.

The evidence established that the patients voted with their feet and went to the dispensaries. There were only a few of those in the early days, the Compassion Club being one of them. However, suddenly there was a huge increase in the number of dispensaries, because those people in the business of trying to sell cannabis and make money out of it figured out that this was where to go. The same then happened here in Ontario, particularly in Toronto. The surge in dispensaries occurred, and it established—I think as Jonathan Page said earlier—that most people don't want to grow for themselves or have somebody grow for them, they want to be able to go to a store to purchase and get information and not just wait to get it in the mail. That's the current situation.

I have a minute, so I'll just jump to the topic.

In the context of that case, which deals with the entitlement of medically approved patients to have reasonable access and includes their ability to grow, we were faced with the police, Corporal Holmquist, and Chief Len Garis from Surrey, vocal opponents of home-grows, going on about fire, mould, public safety, and so on. We established, as we do in trials after examination and cross-examination of the witnesses, that they lacked credibility totally. Justice Phelan found that Holmquist was totally biased and not to be credited, as was Chief Garis. We clearly established that all of these things in a legal market can be reasonably and safely done. All of the evidence they relied upon was from the illicit market, where people were cutting corners, staying underground, and not complying with anything.

Today, the inspectors I deal with in local government tell me that the last thing they want is to go back to those old days.

The big issue nowadays is not a great problem in terms of fire, electrical safety, mould, and so on. They're very easy to deal with. The most common complaint is smell, so stinking out the neighbourhood or not impacting your neighbours is the critical thing that needs to be addressed.

I want to very quickly, then, close by saying that Mr. Dickie and I managed to chat a bit before coming in. He represents the apartment owners and I support what he says in the sense that, again, you don't want to allow people to do things where they may put their neighbours at risk or impact negatively on their neighbours. But you can't just sit back and say, well, then, we're going to prohibit it, because that will not work. It hasn't worked for as long as I've been practising.

I think you're going to have to look at Washington state community gardens, or something. Most people don't have a dwelling-house, as the act defines it, with some land surrounding it, and so on. You're going to have to figure out something so that they'll be encouraged to do it in a safe place. We do have bloom boxes, which are engineered solutions, but most people can't afford them and they'll take up most of the apartment.

I think reasonable regulation is what we want, but we're heading in the right direction.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you very much.

Now we have, from the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations, Mr. John Dickie.

[John Dickie, President, Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations]

Thank you, Mr. Casey. I appreciate being invited to speak here, and I'm glad to do so.

As the president, I'm really the executive director of CFAA. I'm also their housing policy analyst and their government relations specialist.

Our association represents the owners and managers of close to one million rental homes across Canada. The total rental sector across Canada consists of close to four million rental homes. They range from close to one million apartments in high-rise buildings, a little under two million apartments in low-rise buildings, and then various other low-rise rental units—duplexes, triplexes—and some 525,000 single-family homes that are rented. You can drive down a street in a city and think it consists of owner/occupiers, but, in fact, depending on your city—in Toronto six or seven of those homes may be rented even though they're single-family homes, and in other cities it may be one or two or three or somewhere in between.

Let me give you a bit about me, as well, as Mr. Conroy did. I'm 61. I grew up in Montreal, and I remember the Le Dain commission. I remember how remarkable it was that the government had given Mr. Le Dain, they hoped, the job of condemning marijuana and what the young people were doing, and Mr. Le Dain and his commission came back and said that non-medical use of drugs was not the biggest problem, and that it was alcohol. It was a little bit shocking to a number of people at the time. As I've grown up, I certainly have experienced people using marijuana, and some of them use it and there's absolutely no harm whatsoever. I know a fine young man who uses it in that way, smokes it once a week, and he's fine. My daughter, on the other hand, also dated a person who was also a fine young man, except that he is now afflicted with schizophrenia, and that may have been brought on because of his smoking marijuana as a teen. There's a whole range of reaction to this and the way it works.

One other bit of personal background is that besides representing CFAA, I am by profession a lawyer. I, in fact, am one of the experts on residential tenancies law in Ontario, and with my law partner I've written one of the leading texts on that subject. So Ontario residential tenancies law I know extremely well. The residential tenancies law of the other provinces I know reasonably well as well.

I'll go back to multiple-dwelling units. Multiple-dwelling units are a living environment that is different from single-family homes. In a single-family home essentially what you do really affects only you and your family. It doesn't affect other people, whereas in an apartment, what you do very much affects other people, and affects your neighbours. That has to do with noise. It has to do with anything that produces smells in your apartment, and certainly safety in your apartment. If as a homeowner you break the rules and don't have a smoke alarm, the people you're going to kill are you and your family. If you don't have a smoke alarm in your apartment, you may very well kill half a dozen people in a building. Landlords are empowered to stop those activities that are safety hazards or that interfere with the neighbours.

It used to be that second-hand smoke fell into the category of an interference that no one could address. People just had to put up with it, but that's not the case anymore. I know we're not here to talk about smoking, so I'll leave that subject, but it is certainly a concern for our members and neighbours of people who will be consuming marijuana by smoking it as opposed to ingesting it.

The various provinces have a number of bans on smoking tobacco. I would certainly hope that they would ban smoking marijuana in those same locations, such as the common areas of apartment buildings in Ontario. But that's a provincial matter and this whole business is very complicated because of the provincial-federal interface.

Our position, as an organization, is that we would like to see more restrictive limits on growing in rented dwellings in order to protect the owners' interests and the neighbours' interests.

At best, we would see a federal ban. It probably doesn't need to be an offence subject to a term of 14 years of imprisonment, but a federal ban would be our first preference. That is because of the fire safety issues with electrical overloads, the humidity—and so, safety to the building—and certainly the smell through cultivation and its impact upon the neighbours.

That would be our first preference. However, I'm here, and all of that is set out in the submission, with information that comes from the website ilovegrowingmarijuana.com. Until 12 months ago I wasn't much of an expert on marijuana, but I certainly went to that site and found it extremely informative. I found what in law one would say are admissions contrary to interest. If the marijuana proponents say there's a problem, well, there's a problem, and they say there's a problem with smell and a problem with electrical, and they say there can be a problem with humidity.

There are ways to address those things, but they all involve changing the physical building, whereas our buildings are not built to do that, and we are not mandated typically to change our buildings to address those things, other than in the case of accommodation under the Human Rights Code for the medical users. For the medical users we may have to do certain things, but for recreational users we're not required to make those changes. At least, we never have been before this law came forward.

In terms of compromises or suggestions, as a kind of fallback position I think our members would be willing to see a regime in which growing was allowed in rented dwellings with the consent of the landlord. Then you could have landlords who had smaller buildings or weren't worried about the ventilation or had good electrical systems who could allow it. Tenants who want to grow would be able to find their accommodation there. On the other hand, landlords who aren't able to deal with this situation, who aren't willing to invest the money, and who aren't willing to disturb their other tenants could decline consent.

Beyond that, the federal legislation could enable the provinces to establish a regime to make that a practical reality. One regime would be a regime the provinces could establish in which the landlord's consent could be dispensed with. In other words, a tenant could come forward and say, “Well, landlord, you're refusing your consent unreasonably. Your building has good electrical, there is no humidity problem, there isn't this problem. My neighbours on both sides of me say it'll be fine.” Presumably, the landlord and tenant board would say they were going to dispense with consent and then provide a solution dovetailing with that. The person could then legally grow marijuana in his or her apartment, subject to size limits.

The flip—again, it could be left to the provinces to decide which way to do it— could be that the provinces establish a regime whereby, if a landlord wished to prohibit growing marijuana in his or her building, the landlord could apply, presumably to the landlord and tenant board, to say, “Listen, my building can't cope with this”—the electrical system, etc., ventilation, a petition of the tenants in the building—“so I should be allowed to prohibit marijuana”.

Again, it'll be a little trickier to do, but we have some pretty smart people in this room and pretty smart people working on this bill. I'm sure a set-up in which the provinces were able to do that fine tuning to address the problems that really do exist and that the Allard decision found would be a positive outcome.

The last thing I'd like to suggest by way of a compromise is this. We are concerned that the four-plant limit is not a sufficient limit. We've heard from Mr. Page that people should perhaps be allowed more than four plants. My concern is that if they're allowed four plants or whatever number and they go to ilovegrowingmarijuana.com, they'll soon find that you can use a screen-of-growth technique. You can put a screen across the top of your plant; as it grows up you can nip it at the top. You can bring it out and you could be filling an area from the end of this desk to past where Mr. Page is sitting or to the end of the table, full of marijuana leaves—off four plants.

Surely that's not a good thing. Surely when the government is thinking and Parliament is considering four plants, you mean four plants—a plant here and here and here—you mean about a cubic yard. We would suggest that as well as whatever plant limit there is, whether it be four, six, or whatever, there be an area-of-growth limit.

We would suggest a cubic metre because that would pretty much cover it. One, it would address Mr. Page's concern about a higher plant; and, two, it would cover a higher plant, two plants in mid-stage, and a small plant. It would admittedly be a little more difficult to administer, but no one is going to be charged with an offence with possibly 14 years of imprisonment if they're growing 1.2 cubic metres. It's going to be pretty clear, if it's more than 1.5 cubic metres, how big it is. The police can take a metre stick, put it there, and take a photograph of the plants as they're growing, and then at the end of the day you can prove in court, whoa, they had a grow area of four cubic metres, or six cubic metres, and that's way beyond the limit.

That would be my suggestion in terms of limiting the amount that is grown.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you very much.

All right, this is going to be interesting.

We're going to go now to the question period. We'll start with Mr. McKinnon for a seven-minute round.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Page, you indicated that height might not be a good restriction, but you understand our desire to limit possible diversion. What would a good restriction be?

[Jonathan Page]

I've given this some thought. Is it that 1.5 metres or two metres would encompass the majority of plants grown now? I think that is the case, so we could double or increase that grow limit by 50%. That would likely catch or encompass more of the typical growing, including outdoor cultivation.

One of the issues is that cannabis is, in a technical term, photoperiod-sensitive, which means that it flowers when it is exposed to short days. If you're growing cannabis inside, you can make those short days occur just by the flick of a timer or a light switch and force it to flower at 60 centimetres, or 80 centimetres, or a metre or more.

Outside, on the other hand, the day length is, of course, determined by the season. With outdoor cannabis production in Canada now, the flowering starts in August and it might continue through September. Depending where we are in the country, in fact, harvest might be some time around Thanksgiving. What's happening during those long Canadian summers is that the plant is getting quite tall. If we allow outdoor cultivation for typical climates in Canada, we might be approaching a two-metre plant height, or even a little taller, by the time flowering occurs.

Of course, as I said, you can enforce pruning, and people can bend their plant down, or something. However, in general, if you have a limit, a plant number limit, if it's four flowering plants and a few more to tidy up the gardening issues as I suggested, that can be the limit. In terms of what people do within those four plants, if it's 1.5 metres or two metres, or even 2.5 metres, I'm not sure we should be that concerned also about the 100 centimetres or a height limit.

The task force came up with the suggestion of 100 centimetres and I was puzzled why that was. I think it had a lot to do with screening plants in cultivation in people's backyards. The height of a typical fence in Canada is about four feet, by city bylaw, and that would screen out those plants at 100 centimetres. As I indicated in my submission, allow the cities to enact those bylaws. I would just toss out the plant height restriction.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Even though I remember the sixties, I don't know much about the growing of pot. What kind of life cycle is involved here with the plants? How long does it take to grow a typical plant?

I keep hearing about smell as a problem. We keep hearing about potential problems with mould and property damage. I've heard that growing pot is like growing tomatoes. That doesn't seem to cause a problem with mould and property damage. Maybe you could expand on this area.

[Jonathan Page]

There's a lot of variability in the approach. If you're an indoor cultivator, you're sort of force-flowering the plants, so to speak. It might be a cycle where you would plant a seed or establish a cutting, and it might grow for four weeks, or something, and then you would trigger flowering, and then there would be a flowering period of about eight weeks. It's about three months in total, sort of seed to harvest, in typical terms.

Outdoors, that might be longer, because you would potentially plant in May, when you would plant tomatoes, around the Victoria Day long weekend, and be harvesting later in September. That would stretch out that growing season to more than three months, or a little bit longer.

In terms of the smell, cannabis has a very distinct odour, whether it is smoked or grown. This is not due to THC but rather due to the terpenes, the sort of volatile components of the plant. They are the same chemicals that give mint, lavender, and basil their smell; those are also terpenes. They have quite a powerful odour. In terms of indoor cultivation, they can be controlled with appropriate ventilation or appropriate filtration. You can have charcoal filters to remove the smell. It is a little bit more complicated than tomatoes, in the sense that tomatoes don't smell as much.

Some of the issues are that people are pushing larger numbers of plants into closets in their apartments or dwellings, and that smell, in that intense light, in the indoor confined space, is difficult to control.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Is it possible to tell if a plant is male or female before you see flowering? How soon might you see flowering in a plant?

[Jonathan Page]

There are a few options there. One is that, if people are growing from clones, the plants are cloned from female plants. That's one thing. Feminized seeds are also available. These are seeds that are produced to only give female offspring.

There are more molecular methods to determine males and females. For example, my lab offers a test that you can test at a very early seedling stage. Generally—and again it's all about the sort of light regime—you can detect males within several weeks of the triggering of flowering, and then they start to produce a different floral structure that can be identified and they can be removed or....

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

If I walk into a home that has a number of green things, if I'm a police officer, I don't necessarily know if they are male plants or female plants.

[Jonathan Page]

No. At the seedling stage, in plants that are grown from seed and are 40 centimetres high or something, the males and females would be virtually indistinguishable.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

In terms of controlling the numbers of plants—we're not counting seeds, necessarily, but a seed becomes a plant. What would be a good determinant for saying this is a plant and this is not a plant? If you had a bunch of small shoots coming out of the ground, is that something you want to control by numbers, or do you need to have a minimum size to say that this is a plant that we're counting?

[Jonathan Page]

At this point I think everything counts as a plant under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Seeds are cannabis plants, and they are restricted. Importation is restricted; sale is restricted. I believe it's the case that under the current laws if you take a cannabis plant, and take cuttings from that plant, and they start rooting, those are also considered plants from the perspective of being charged with plant numbers.

That's that the current case. If an organism has leaves and it's growing beyond the seed stage, it probably is a plant.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Okay. Now we go to Ms. Gladu.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

My first question is for you, Mr. Page.

Are you familiar with the type of testing and quality control that the medical marijuana operations, the larger facilities, do?

[Jonathan Page]

Very familiar. My lab offers that as a service.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Can you describe some of the things in terms of testing for potency, contamination from fertilizer, mould, and that sort of thing?

[Jonathan Page]

There are five or six core tests within the ACMPR quality control measures. As you mentioned, potency; the presence of heavy metals; aflatoxins, which are fungal toxins produced through spoilage; bacteria and mould; and pesticides. The sixth area in the case of extracts and oils is residual solvents. It's an add-on measure.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Okay. What kind of quality control testing do home growers typically do?

[Jonathan Page]

At this point under the current medical regime under the ACMPR and since last August patient growers are able to access Health Canada certified labs in order to have their product tested. However, it's not required so it's their option to access those labs and pay for the tests.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Okay. Very good.

I have a question for you, Mr. Dickie. I see this article. There was a 2010 RCMP report on medical marijuana grow operations that shows fires are 24 times more likely to occur in homes with grow operations than those without, so I would think there is a huge concern about fire damage.

I also know when we talk about second-hand smoke, in the U.S. there are an estimated 34,000 premature deaths from heart disease due to being exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke, and they report that marijuana smoke provoked even bigger effects than tobacco in their lab studies.

My question has to do with the rights of the person who owns the property. If I own a property, and I'm worried that I'm going to be more likely to have fires, or maybe somebody's renting the basement from me, and I don't want to have the second-hand smoke problem, does the homeowner have the right to prohibit people from smoking cannabis with this current legislation?