Happy Legalization Day, Canada! While the pre-launch within the Great White North saw issues paralleling what California saw before January 1 of this year; speaking from experience, here’s hoping that’s where the comparisons cease. One sector ripe for legalization? Toronto’s legal cannabis retail market.

In any case, the Canadian market is flush with opportunity. And nowhere is that potential more apparent than within the metropolis of Toronto. Toronto’s cannabis retail landscape is primed for eager plant-touching entrepreneurs. But before you sell your house, pack the car, and move to the idyllic, cultured Shangri Las on Lake Ontario’s north shore, let’s review some crucial realities about Canada’s newly legalized market and some unanticipated issues specific to T.O. itself.

Cannabis Across All Canada

• Starting today (10/17/2018) cannabis is legal across all of Canada for medicinal and recreational purposes.
• HOWEVER, individual provinces and municipalities have leeway in determining what is legal. For example: the federal legal age is 18, but provinces can determine what’s legal in their jurisdiction. So, Albertans can legally purchase at 18, but over in Ontario you gotta be 19.
• Dried flower and cannabis oils are the only two products that are legal for now.
• Given the popularity and consumer demand, it is expected that vapes, edibles, infused beverages, and concentrates will be legalized at some point in 2019, but there is NOT a plan for implementation that has even reached the floors of Parliament in Ottawa.
• The Canadian government has placed an extremely low tax rate on legal cannabis in an effort to quash out the unregulated market, a big reversal in what California and other legal states have done.

Cannabis In Toronto

• The Ontario provincial government determined that there will not be a cap on retail locations, there will be a cap on retail licenses afforded to a given corporation, however.
• Unfortunately, there will be a cap on licensed producers for now and that may cause a severe bottleneck on product with which to stock the shelves of all those retail stores.
• Private retailers will be open for business, no foolin’, on April Fools’ Day: April 1, 2019.

While bottlenecking supply chains in Canada remain the clearest impediment for the nascent legal market. Skyrocketing real estate prices, fueled by speculation and a bubble market, in Toronto will set a high financial threshold for any would-be cannabis retailer who has eyes on that April 1, 2019 date. Financing is tricky on either side of the border it turns out. Beyond those concerns, and as we’ve discussed before, Canada’s market is primed for growth. With Toronto in particular serving as a potential model for US cities to take note off if/when legalization occurs down here on the federal level.