Health Committee on Sept. 13th, 2017

[John Dickie]

That is a question that would vary by the province. Let me rephrase that slightly. Across Canada, landlords on first renting could impose a ban on cultivating and/or smoking. However, enforcing that ban would be relatively easy in the Atlantic provinces and in the west from Manitoba west.

In Quebec and Ontario, it would be difficult to enforce because in Ontario, where I have the most familiarity with the law, it is very clear law that a landlord cannot.... The way a landlord enforces a termination of the lease is by giving a notice and then bringing eviction proceedings. You don't necessarily want the tenant to go. You want them to stop doing what they shouldn't be doing, and the way you do it is with a notice of termination. It is not possible in Ontario to give a notice of termination for merely breaking the term of a lease. Merely to prove the smoking when it's banned in the lease, the growing when it's banned in the lease, will not get a landlord what they want. The tenant can basically flip them the bird.

To enforce the term in the lease, the landlord needs to demonstrate a substantial interference with the reasonable enjoyment of other tenants, or with the lawful rights and interests of the landlord. The first one is easier to do, although it's not easy to do. It requires bringing other tenants as witnesses to the landlord and tenant board to give their evidence about how they have been impacted.

You can understand people don't want to do that because they are living right next to this person, they are going to see them in the hallway, the person may crank their TV at night as the least of what they might do in retribution, and they are just uncomfortable doing it. They don't want to do it.

Ninety per cent or 95% of the steps landlords take to address tenant behaviour is, in fact, to protect other tenants in the building. In Ontario, thanks to Ontario's landlord and tenant law, it would be much easier to enforce against an illegal act than to enforce a lease term.

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

Right. If I understand correctly, it means if we allow home-grow under this legislation, then in Ontario and Quebec landowners will essentially lose the rights over their own property to keep people from home growing and smoking it there.

[John Dickie]

The only way they would not do that would be if the provinces added violations of those terms or that behaviour as a ground for termination under, for example in Ontario, the Residential Tenancies Act. Again, Ontario might do that because they look like they want to drive everything in the sales by the LCBO—heaven help us all—but that would be very much contingent on what Ontario and Quebec did.

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

It's good to know.

[John Dickie]

And it would also be contingent—in some of the other provinces, in the Atlantic provinces or the west—on how the boards reacted to this. It's certainly the case law that for mere trivial breaches of the lease, the landlord cannot terminate. So if the view is taken that, oh well, the federal government has made this legal, so it's legal, it's trivial.... Say someone is growing five plants. I doubt that even in Atlantic Canada or the west a landlord would get a termination for five plants, perhaps even six plants if the limit is four, because it would be regarded as a kind of minor breach, a minor violation.

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

It's concerning to me because apartment 801 here in Ottawa smokes so much marijuana that I get second-hand smoke exposure every time I come home, so it is a concern.

I have a question for Mr. Page.

Are most people growing plants inside or outside in their home-grows?

[Jonathan Page]

I think in general it's inside, partly because of security, and the fact that, if it's a medical grow, they're worried about people taking that, and if it's an illicit grow, they're worried about police or others seeing it. So I would say indoors, but it's very hard to get statistics on a very grey, nebulous world.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Time's up.

Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

Dr. Page, in your submission to the committee, you pointed out that among the task force's six specific recommendations was promoting “environmental stewardship by implementing measures such as permitting outdoor production with appropriate security measures.” Despite these clear directions, as of yet there has been no indication from the federal government that outdoor production of cannabis will be part of the new cannabis regulations.

So my question is, is that the case? It's unclear from Bill C-45 whether outdoor production will be permitted, and if so, is it your opinion that it should be allowed, and why?

[Jonathan Page]

I'm not clear on whether Bill C-45 restricts indoor or outdoor.

Mr. Conroy.

[John Conroy]

The definition of a dwelling-house in the cannabis act includes the land contiguous surrounding the premises and any outbuilding on the property.

Under the medical regulations, you can only grow indoor or outdoor. They won't let you do both, which actually doesn't make sense in some cases where people want to start indoor and go outdoor and then come back indoor, especially if you live in the west coast rainforest, but it appears you can do it outdoors under this bill.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Would that include community gardens?

[John Conroy]

No, it doesn't. That's why I think there's this problem with apartments that don't have an area where somebody could do it besides their apartment, so you need to give them the carrot to be able to do it somewhere else, rather than do it in the apartment, by creating the community garden.

[Jonathan Page]

Back to your question about outdoor and sustainability, the submission you referred to is one that I did as a team, not the one I'm doing as a witness here.

It really highlighted the issues around the carbon footprint of indoor cultivation on a commercial level, but less regarding the four-plant, personal production area. That is, when you put a large cannabis production facility in a concrete bunker, put it under intense lighting, and have HVAC and all the air control to do that, you have significant power needs. You've built a concrete structure maybe on farmland or something, so there's an ecological footprint to that industry, and you know, cannabis is a plant. It doesn't need intense sunlight. It can grow in a greenhouse. It can grow in the field as hemp does now with sunlight, and so the argument would be that the regulations arising from Bill C-45 should allow outdoor growing as well.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Oh, I see. So you mean for production, for producers who apply to the federal government for a licence to produce cannabis, you're saying that it should be explicit that outdoor growing would be permitted.

[Jonathan Page]

Right, exactly, and currently, under the ACMPR and the MMPR before that, outdoor production is prohibited for commercial purposes under the medical cannabis regime.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

I want to get your thoughts on labelling, Dr. Page. We haven't had a lot of testimony on this. As someone who understands the properties of cannabis, what aspects of cannabis do you think are properly of interest to consumers? I'm thinking beyond just THC levels, or CBD levels. What other things might a consumer want to know about the product?

[Jonathan Page]

THC and CBD levels, of course, are the main drivers of the pharmacological activity. That's what we label for medical cannabis at this point.

Other aspects would be the terpenes I referred to before, so those would be the smell and flavour components. One can see that labelling might, in a limited way—because we don't want to get into a list of a hundred chemicals that have to be parsed by a consumer—give us some information around the terpene composition of the product.

There are also other cannabinoids also present. THC and CBD are the two main ones, but we often see large amounts of cannabigerol, CBG, or cannabichromene, CBC. I would suggest also including information on the presence of some of the other cannabinoids that in certain products might be higher than a baseline.

There is also this whole focus in the cannabis world on strains and genetics and the origin of the material. There is a widespread classification between sativa-type plants and indica-type plants, which hasn't really stood up to scientific scrutiny at this point, but there could be labelling around the sort of genetic type of plant as well.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

I'll turn to Mr. Dickie.

I come from Vancouver. Another high irritant for people is the smoking of cigarettes and tobacco inside apartments. Interestingly, this bill, if passed as is, does not legalize edibles, so it will be promoting the smoking of marijuana in apartments.

Is it your view that it would be better from a multiple dwelling point of view that people have the opportunity to consume their cannabis in a non-smokable form?

[John Dickie]

Yes, absolutely, especially for medical users, but for everyone we would strongly support that. There are some health concerns in terms of children getting at it but, hopefully, that would be a limited problem and could be addressed in a careful way. To avoid second-hand smoke would be huge for all kinds of people.

It's ironic, the extent to which we are now being pushed, as landlords, to limit smoking, and the non-smokers' rights people are after us constantly to make our buildings tobacco smoke-free, yet this is kind of opening the whole thing up to smoking marijuana.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Conroy, I want to turn to you. To both Mr. Dickie and Mr. Conroy, thanks for bringing up the Le Dain commission. The NDP has been actively pushing for decriminalization for the last 40 years, since the Le Dain commission, so it's nice to see that we're finally here.

I want to talk about pardons a bit. Mr. Conroy, your whole career has been spent looking at the stigmatization and negative impacts of criminalization on people's lives and this bill will actually continue to criminalize people, and we're criminalizing people right now.

What is your advice to this committee on how we might approach pardons for Canadians who are maybe carrying around convictions today for things that this bill will now render legal?

[John Conroy]

I clearly feel that if you're going to make conduct legal that in the past was illegal, you should also then address eliminating those prior criminal records, and so on. You certainly are making a mistake, I think, in not looking at the existing industry and saying we're going to regulate them as opposed to trying to push them out and create a whole new group of people doing it, such as in the Ontario liquor stores.

The whole idea, as I understand it, is to try to eliminate the black market. That's what legalization is. Home-grows will reduce the black market, but stores reduce both home-grows and the black market. Just because somebody has a criminal record or has been convicted in the past, it should not be a bar, in my submission, to their being able to participate in this market. We should take steps to enable them to eliminate things.

The Criminal Records Act is what governs the pardon situation and there have been recent decisions that have pointed out that the ability to get a pardon is determined by the date of the offence. As a result, we've ended up now with a situation where, depending on how old your offence is, different rules apply under the Criminal Records Act compared to what's in the current version of the act.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thanks very much.

Mr. Ayoub.

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank our three witnesses for being here.

One of the advantages of living in a country like Canada is that there are three levels of government. Co-operation among the governments is always a challenge, but it is also a great advantage.

The federal level being what it is, and the provincial and municipal levels being what they are, our challenges and advantages are precisely that we can trust each other and work together to improve legislation. The federal government provides a framework, based on a vision to be able, in this case, to legislate on cannabis. When this new legislation applies more locally, provincial autonomy is particularly important.

Mr. Dickie, you said that eastern Canada, western Canada, Ontario and Quebec were facing different challenges. Isn't it true that they can legislate according to the will of the province in order to adjust this legislation in terms of the number of plants, particularly for dwellings? Already some apartment owners prohibit their renters from having pets or from smoking. Some cities prohibit ownership of pitbulls. There has been some heated debate about pitbulls recently in Quebec.

There is municipal autonomy and provincial autonomy. I would like to hear what you have to say in this regard. Do you think that this autonomy could help to solve more specific problems?