MPs Cathy McLeod and Cam Loops-Thompson Caribou and Bob Soroya join me to talk about the problems faced by landlords and tenants in dealing with growing medical marijuana in their own homes and offices. We also talk about a story of a landlord who lost his entire life savings when his tenant found marijuana growing in his basement.
00:03:58.840On the real estate side. So huge. This is a landlord who's put his life savings into his home,
00:04:04.500and it has been destroyed because of the system that the liberals put in place for medical marijuana,
00:04:10.700and it's absolutely unacceptable. So I just want to quickly reference, I have a private member's
00:04:15.060bill that's going to say, you know what, if you want to grow out in your own home, go ahead,
00:04:18.780ruin your home. But if you need landlord permission, if you're renting a home. So that's my bill that's
00:04:26.180going to be voted on on Wednesday. Bob Soraya, let's get your take on this. You also have been
00:04:33.060on this file a little bit, and you've heard some stories. Tell us what reaction you're getting to
00:04:37.720this situation. Once again, thank you, Tony, for bringing this important subject forward, and
00:04:43.880especially thank you to Kathy. Kathy, I hear these horror stories. I had a meeting with the Jork
00:04:51.600Regional Police Chief four months ago, five months ago, and I had another one a few days ago, this past
00:04:58.480Saturday. The police is so afraid of this nonsense, grow up in their homes. He told me some of the
00:05:07.360story. Let me share one story with you. Let's say somebody is allowed to have six plants or seven
00:05:13.260plants to do it. When they go there, sometimes there are hundreds of plants. When they tell them
00:05:19.600what's going on, they said, oh, no, no, no, we're just starting this one up. This crop is just starting
00:05:24.640up. This crop is six weeks old. This week, 12 weeks ago. So we can have six or eight or 12, whatever
00:05:30.860the number of plants are at a time. 40 percent, 40 percent are the success rate when you take it to the
00:05:39.100court. The laws are so loose. The judges are throwing these things out. These other problems I hear from
00:05:50.320people, people grow in the apartment buildings. When they're growing in the apartment buildings, again,
00:05:56.140with the same medical permit, Medicaid license, the neighbors, the babies, the kids, they cannot stand
00:06:03.580the smell. Those are the issues imagined. It really is an industrial style of growing that is going on
00:06:13.000in these units, it seems like. It's not just a few plants, like under the proposed legalization of
00:06:19.740marijuana for non-medical purposes. There's a limit of four plants per household, but there's no limit
00:06:27.640here, really. So what the current rules of the federal government are is you can grow for up to
00:06:34.300four people in a home. So you can grow for yourself and three others. Let's say someone has a prescription
00:06:40.700for five grams of marijuana a day. That means that's going to be 30 plants, or I think it's about five
00:06:48.640plants a gram. So you can imagine you're growing for four people times five grams a day. How many plants
00:06:56.100you can actually legally grow? And Health Canada has authorized that. And to be frank, it's unacceptable
00:07:03.100if it's in someone else's home. If I can add something up, the property, how expensive the
00:07:11.440properties are in Vancouver, Toronto, and all over the country. Imagine somebody pays $800,000, $750,000
00:07:18.800for the condo unit. What happened? He put some tenant in there. Three months later, six months later,
00:07:25.880he get a call from the police, say, what's going on in your place. Imagine nobody's going to touch
00:07:31.600that unit again. This will always be known as a grow up. That means the price of that unit is reduced
00:07:40.780by at least 25 percent, if not 50 percent. And the insurance don't cover it. It is a bad situation.
00:07:48.560Absolutely. This thing should not happen.
00:07:54.560So in your case, Bob Soroya, Member of Parliament, the York Regional Police, the Regional Police in your
00:08:01.600riding in your territory, approached you or had a conversation with you saying, this is a real problem.
00:08:06.280Oh, absolutely. Not only this thing, the overall problem with this canvas will. First of all, you need $17,000 to train one police officer.
00:08:20.280Only 40 police officers in the entire York region are trained. So they have 700 police officers, the frontline officers, they call it. Only 40 are trained.
00:08:33.600They don't have hardware. There is no machine, so check it. Going back to the houses, no training, underfunded. And on top of it, they're saying, we hardly can do what we can do today.
00:08:49.480But we're supposed to go door knock and say, how many plants do you have? Can we check your plants? It's impossible task for the police force to do this.
00:09:00.680And it's not just police forces that are really concerned. Municipalities have been raising this as a huge issue for years and years and years.
00:09:08.320Surrey, for example, says, we don't even know where these medical marijuana, legally licensed grow-ups are. So we can't do fire inspections. We can't make sure that they haven't rejigged the wiring.
00:09:19.840There are fire safety and hazard risks, and the municipality has no ability to look into them.
00:09:25.980Not to mention the long-term mold risks.
00:09:28.140Well, there's many risks. So municipalities have said, this is crazy, to be quite frank, that we have 60-plus plants, and we don't know where they are, and they're in homes and communities.
00:09:40.380And certainly, we also hear of fires on a fairly regular basis, and hear later that it was a grow-up.
00:09:46.380So tell us again, let's unpack your private member's bill a little bit. What's the solution that your bill proposes?
00:09:55.140It's not a big solution to all the problems, but it is one solution saying, if you have a medical license to grow marijuana, and you rent a home, you need the landlord's permission to grow your medical marijuana.
00:10:12.560Some landlords, if they lived in the country, there might be a greenhouse, they might have a field, they might be just fine with it.
00:10:18.680But essentially, it's giving protection to the landlords.
00:10:23.340Usually, this multi-unit residence is what you're most worried about, I would say.
00:10:26.500Well, I think single-family homes is where there's huge issues in neighborhoods.
00:10:31.540So it's not the answer, but it's one piece of the puzzle to protect landlords.
00:10:36.080And so what happens under your bill, if somebody does not disclose, and they start the grow-up, does that give the landlord extra powers to deal with the situation then?
00:10:49.320So what we've asked is, in the bill, is for the government to make regulations around what the consequences would be and how it would work.
00:10:57.900So obviously, there's things to work out, but to go back to Bob's point, when the recreational regime comes in and there's a four-plant limit, how are you going to determine, is there four plants, 10 plants, 20 plants?
00:11:11.720Municipalities are very concerned about that issue also.
00:11:14.700And I'm not trying to mix the two, but this is an issue we're hearing about all the time now as the C-45, the marijuana legalization bill, goes forward about what the definition is on some of these things.
00:11:29.880And maybe the medical marijuana experience should have animated the discussion on C-45, but four plants, they could each be 25 feet tall.
00:11:39.820There's a lot of things that can be done if you don't have the right definitions.
00:13:18.300The local provincial government previously said they will give 60 percent, 40 percent cost over the people from York Region are on the hook.
00:13:30.960In some cases, maybe $200 million, $300 million, $500 million, depending what the cost for the entire police force for training is.
00:13:39.100It's a bad idea, this DEA enforcement administration, supervisor from Colorado said this week, said the 15 percent of the total force time is spent on the trafficking cases.
00:14:00.640There's so much trafficking out there, so-called medical or social and all those things.
00:14:07.300It's a bad experience as far as I'm concerned.
00:14:10.700The liberals, us or anybody else, the Canadians deserve better.
00:14:20.100Kathy McLeod, it's your private member's bill.
00:14:22.740If people want to get involved, what's the call to action?
00:14:25.860Can they contact you, or can they sign a petition, or is there a way to help support your bill?
00:14:31.000So this bill goes to a vote on this Wednesday, and I think the best thing you can do to support this bill is contact the Liberal members of Parliament and say that you'd be outraged if they won't support it,
00:14:44.400because the Liberals have indicated that they're not going to support it.
00:14:48.060They say people need to have right for access to their medical marijuana,
00:14:51.780whereas I say we have to balance landlord rights with other rights.
00:14:56.120So get in contact with your Liberal MPs from across the country and say that you'd be very concerned about a no vote to this bill.