Big Weed has been betting that Doug Ford would come through

The minute Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives came to power, legal cannabis companies began making moves to stake their claim on lucrative territory.

Ontario, as far as the previous Liberal government was concerned, would only sell recreational weed through a government-run monopoly with the provincial regulator at the helm — but these firms were hoping that Ford, a fan of privatization, would turn that on its head.

On Thursday, that became clearer, as VICE News and other media outlets revealed Ford’s plans do away with the Ontario Cannabis Store retail model in favour of allowing private retailers to sell pot. The government is expected to still oversee wholesale distribution and online sales. While the details of the plan are expected to be announced sometime next week, a number of Canada’s largest legal cannabis companies were already on the hunt for retail spaces.

“We started preparing for this immediately after the change in government … lining up locations and leases,” Cam Battley, chief corporate officer at Aurora, one of the largest legal cannabis companies in the world, told VICE News in a phone interview on Friday morning. Though the timeline is tight to get the new sales regime up and running in Ontario before the legal market opens on October 17th, Battley says his company would be ready for it.

Under the previous Liberals, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario was bestowed exclusivity over recreational cannabis sales through a new subsidiary, the Ontario Cannabis Store. The government monopoly was heavily criticized as industry experts believed its plan to open only 40 storefronts at first would not meet the demand.

Aurora, along with other cannabis companies with licenses to grow and sell cannabis from Health Canada, has made plans to be involved in private retail sales in other provinces that embraced such models at the outset, such as Alberta.

In May, Aurora announced it had upped its stake in its retail partner Alcanna Inc., a company previously known as Liquor Stores North America. As part of their agreement, Alcanna has been developing a retail network with the goal of opening 50 retail cannabis shops in western Canada to start.

Alcanna’s CEO Jamie Burns told VICE News his team had people on the ground after the Ontario election and has been in discussions with “all the major landlords” in the province to prepare leases and identify potential retail sites.

Burns said the company has also been in touch with landlords who have Ontario Cannabis Store sites. The OCS had announced in April that it had identified four locations for initial storefronts: Toronto, Kingston, Thunder Bay, and Guelph. Those location choices had to adhere to strict regulations such as not being close to schools.

“We’re ready to take over, if in fact that government does not proceed with that lease,” Burns added.

Whereas the previous government-run model for Ontario would have started out with only one recreational cannabis shop for around every 500,000 people in the province of nearly 14 million, Burns and Battley agreed that it should follow other provinces by aiming to have one shop for every 40,000 or even 20,000 people.

Bruce Linton, CEO of Canopy Growth Corp., the largest publicly traded cannabis company, told 680News on Friday while the licensing structure for private retailers still hasn’t been announced by the government, Canopy has been scouting locations anyway, and he envisions a day when his company will have many outlets in Ontario.

Cover Image: via VICE News and the Canadian Press.