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When marijuana was legalized in October 2018, only seven of the 51 licensed stores across Saskatchewan were open and ready for business.
One year later, there are 39 cannabis retail stores in operation province-wide.
That includes the last one of the six allowed pot shops in Regina, Fire & Flower, which plans to open on Friday in a changed location at 680 E Victoria Ave.
The company acquired the licence from Mera Cannabis Corp., formerly Avana Canada Inc., which had initially planned to open a shop on the Scarth Street Mall in downtown Regina.
A company spokesperson said it took the full year to open the store because of the planning behind confirming a suitable location, design and financing along with building permits and inspections.
Other stores to open within the last month include 5Buds in Yorkton, The Green Box in Unity and the second of two shops in Swift Current, Sweet Tree.
Weyburn is still waiting for its first pot shop, a point not lost on the city’s mayor, who’s frustrated by that.
There are two stores coming but they’re still going through the process with no definitive opening date. One licence holder withdrew from the process and it’s now gone to the runner-up. The second licence-holder, Compass Cannabis, said in an email that it has received an extension from the SLGA for its application.
“We have a location with municipal zoning ready to go as soon as we have the green light,” said Dave Martyn, president of Compass Cannabis.
As of Wednesday, there were 12 stores still going through the permitting process. They include one in each La Loche, Lloydminster, Nipawin, Saskatoon and Weyburn (Compass Cannabis). The remaining seven withdrew and those licences have gone to runners-up including one in each of Maple Creek, Melfort, Outlook, Rosetown, Weyburn and the RM of Corman Park.
The licence-holder in Canora also withdrew but there were no runners-up. The SLGA said it’s currently considering the process to select a proponent for Canora but no decisions have been made.
The SLGA said proponents have approximately 16 months to open their store from when they were notified to apply for a permit. The original proponents were notified in early June 2018, while most of the runners-up were notified at the end of June 2019.
Illegal pot market still thriving: Police chief
Regina’s police chief, Evan Bray, said that despite legalization, “there’s still a predominant piece of the market that is getting their cannabis illegally.”
“We’ve had meetings with the province and others that evaluate the economics of cannabis and the cannabis legislation,” Bray said. “I’m hearing numbers of about 10 per cent of all cannabis sales are being legally transacted.”
But he added his police members have yet to charge someone with impaired driving “strictly due to cannabis.” However, they have charged drivers with impaired driving for “a combination of alcohol and cannabis.”
Bray said the police service’s data isn’t current to date, because there’s a four-month delay for lab tests to determine if a person was in fact impaired with weed.