City notebook: Marijuana legal this month, stay tuned for the aftermath (or not)

By Collin Gallant on September 29, 2018.

Coloured leaves and cool climes are suddenly upon us and, so too, soon will be the day when marijuana will be legal.

The calendar flips to October on Monday, making it just about two weeks until Canada will become the second nation to make possessing small amounts of the drug legal for adults.

Oct. 17 is a day many thought would never come, as well as a day many hoped never would.

But as politicians are wont to say these days, this is the reality they have to deal with.

Monday is also the day council will determine local restrictions for the drug’s public use, after 80 years of prohibition and its long graduation to very common but mostly unspoken widespread use today.

Some, like the estimated four million Canadians who use it, don’t see much happening this month that’s not happening now.

Others envision massive billows of smoke consuming whole communities.

The truth is no one knows what this will look like.

It beats me, anyway.

But the run-up has predictably been a race with a hot potato.

Last spring the only relief on the faces of decision makers charged with building zoning laws for stores and rules for public use came when it was said, “I hear they won’t make the July 1 deadline.”

Well they didn’t, but all systems appear go for Oct. 17.

The last chance for City of Medicine Hat councillors to enact local rules for public use begins at Monday’s council meeting.

The mostly-conservative town that welcomed the plans to build the biggest pot greenhouse in Canada about six months ago will likely err on the conservative side and ban its use but for private property.

That’s not including some provision for medical users, which sort of speaks to the complexity of the entire thing.

As it was recently put, the whole issue is a Rubik’s cube, turn one side and a whole lot of stuff happens.

“I hope it turns out to be Y2K,” the speaker added with a sigh.

That great panic over a predicted widespread failure of computing systems at the turning of the millennium didn’t materialize.

For the record, Alberta’s provincial public use laws — which are the default in case of no local bylaw — are in line with standing anti-tobacco efforts, and are similar to those in Saskatchewan and Ontario.

Catching up

James Marshall is back at it, recently unveiling a 10-mural array in Swift Current to mark that city’s 100th anniversary. There’s one mural for each decade, and it’s been in the works since the centennial celebrations took place in 2015. The Medicine Hat artist now counts more than 300 installations across southern Alberta, Canada and as far away as England.

A look ahead

Council will hash out public-use marijuana rules when it sits Monday. An original move to combine restrictions to curb tobacco use will now be discussed in terms of a more stringent ban on public property and buildings.

An update on the multi-year plan to replace in-road infrastructure throughout the downtown and the plan for future years will be presented at a committee meeting on Wednesday.

100 years ago

A.L. Sifton — Medicine Hat’s MP, Alberta’s former premier and a current member of the War Cabinet in Ottawa — gave a rousing patriotic speech at the Empress Theatre on Sept. 26, 1918, the News then reported.

The war would be won, he said, and the Dominion Government would see a Canadian Northern Railway line built between the Hat and Hanna.

Transportation would be much more valuable to Medicine Hat, said Mayor Brown, than local Dominion land or immigration offices that had been closed recently.

Looking ahead to a post-war world, a News editorial stated that to level retribution and continue undue restriction on Canadians of German descent “would be contrary to all teachings of Christianity and would degrade Canada.”

A week earlier, the board of trade considered a letter from “the Anti-Hun League” and there was a growing call for potential employment, wage and mobility rules for all Austro- and Germanic-Canadian citizens.

A sudden increase in deaths from Spanish influenza was reported in Quebec, Boston, New York City and Camp Niagara, a military base in Ontario.