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.