The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - June 01, 2018


Landlords should have a say in medical marijuana growth： MP McLeod


Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

155.0633

Word count

2,499

Sentence count

187

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Clement, and we will have
00:00:04.280 Cathy McLeod, MP Cam Loops-Thompson Caribou, and Bob Soroya, MP Markham-Unionville,
00:00:09.140 talking about medical marijuana and the problems in landlord and tenant situations. Stay tuned.
00:00:15.620 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:20.660 Is the Prime Minister actually saying that taxpayers should be on the hook when he breaks the law?
00:00:30.000 What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country
00:00:38.180 that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:42.160 All these deficits leading to nothing but burying Canadians in taxes.
00:00:47.440 And now, here's your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:55.340 This is The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Clement.
00:01:00.000 Member of Parliament for Paris-Saint-Muskoka, and we've got a great show for you today
00:01:04.100 with two of my colleagues talking about medical marijuana and some of the problems that are
00:01:10.040 surfacing in this area. I'm joined with Cathy McLeod, MP Cam Loops-Thompson Caribou,
00:01:17.820 and Mr. Bob Soroya, who's the Member of Parliament for Markham-Unionville.
00:01:22.500 Thank you for being on the show, both of you.
00:01:24.540 Pleasure for me, and it's my first time joining you.
00:01:26.920 Your first time, Bob's an old veteran.
00:01:29.520 Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this, and we do need it.
00:01:33.220 This is an important subject. We want to make sure we communicate with the people.
00:01:39.740 Thank you. I think that is terribly important as well.
00:01:42.620 I'm going to ask Cathy to set the scene a little bit, why we should be worried about this.
00:01:48.140 I know you've got a couple of stories, one in particular, about a constituent who has been
00:01:54.980 dealing with this. Now, when we think of medical marijuana, we think of the user of the product
00:02:00.020 who is getting some relief for a medical condition, but there are some unintended consequences.
00:02:06.640 So, Cathy, tell us what the problem is.
00:02:08.760 I think right now, everyone is really focused on the recreational regime, or what they're
00:02:14.420 calling Bill C-45, as the current government is looking at legalizing marijuana. What many
00:02:20.600 don't realize is that there's been a medical system in place for many years now, and it
00:02:26.440 is creating huge problems. To be frank, the Liberals have made a mess of it. So let me tell
00:02:31.960 you how it works. A doctor authorizes someone to use medical marijuana, and the person has a
00:02:38.120 choice. They can buy it from a producer, or they can grow their own. So, you're a landlord,
00:02:44.320 and I had a landlord that came into my office, and frankly, he was in tears. He had put all
00:02:49.640 his money into a rental home. Upstairs, he had a family with a young baby, and downstairs,
00:02:55.280 he had someone with a medical marijuana license who was growing for two people. They had the
00:03:00.700 authorization to grow 60 plants in the basement of his house.
00:03:05.100 60.
00:03:05.660 60.
00:03:05.860 60. 60. So first of all, the municipality knew nothing about it because of privacy laws.
00:03:11.920 He says, what are you doing? And the guy gives him his medical license authorization,
00:03:17.520 and the police say, sorry, there's nothing we can do about it. So of course, you can imagine
00:03:22.580 the family upstairs who had been really worried, and they'd had these smells, they moved out right
00:03:26.820 away. So he lost that tenant. Then he asked the person downstairs to stop, and the person downstairs
00:03:33.140 said, nope, I have an authorization to do this. So the long story short is many months later,
00:03:39.680 he had to pay this person to leave. The insurance stopped on his home right away. No insurance
00:03:45.580 company is going to cover a grow-up. Plus, he had thousands and thousands of dollars of remediation
00:03:51.200 work. And his house is always going to be a grow-up. So it's going to be designated as a grow-up on the
00:03:57.940 real estate side.
00:03:58.840 On the real estate side. So huge. This is a landlord who's put his life savings into his home,
00:04:04.500 and it has been destroyed because of the system that the liberals put in place for medical marijuana,
00:04:10.700 and it's absolutely unacceptable. So I just want to quickly reference, I have a private member's
00:04:15.060 bill that's going to say, you know what, if you want to grow out in your own home, go ahead,
00:04:18.780 ruin your home. But if you need landlord permission, if you're renting a home. So that's my bill that's
00:04:26.180 going to be voted on on Wednesday. Bob Soraya, let's get your take on this. You also have been
00:04:33.060 on this file a little bit, and you've heard some stories. Tell us what reaction you're getting to
00:04:37.720 this situation. Once again, thank you, Tony, for bringing this important subject forward, and
00:04:43.880 especially thank you to Kathy. Kathy, I hear these horror stories. I had a meeting with the Jork 1.00
00:04:51.600 Regional Police Chief four months ago, five months ago, and I had another one a few days ago, this past
00:04:58.480 Saturday. The police is so afraid of this nonsense, grow up in their homes. He told me some of the
00:05:07.360 story. Let me share one story with you. Let's say somebody is allowed to have six plants or seven
00:05:13.260 plants to do it. When they go there, sometimes there are hundreds of plants. When they tell them
00:05:19.600 what's going on, they said, oh, no, no, no, we're just starting this one up. This crop is just starting
00:05:24.640 up. This crop is six weeks old. This week, 12 weeks ago. So we can have six or eight or 12, whatever
00:05:30.860 the number of plants are at a time. 40 percent, 40 percent are the success rate when you take it to the
00:05:39.100 court. The laws are so loose. The judges are throwing these things out. These other problems I hear from
00:05:50.320 people, people grow in the apartment buildings. When they're growing in the apartment buildings, again,
00:05:56.140 with the same medical permit, Medicaid license, the neighbors, the babies, the kids, they cannot stand
00:06:03.580 the smell. Those are the issues imagined. It really is an industrial style of growing that is going on
00:06:13.000 in these units, it seems like. It's not just a few plants, like under the proposed legalization of
00:06:19.740 marijuana for non-medical purposes. There's a limit of four plants per household, but there's no limit
00:06:27.640 here, really. So what the current rules of the federal government are is you can grow for up to
00:06:34.300 four people in a home. So you can grow for yourself and three others. Let's say someone has a prescription
00:06:40.700 for five grams of marijuana a day. That means that's going to be 30 plants, or I think it's about five
00:06:48.640 plants a gram. So you can imagine you're growing for four people times five grams a day. How many plants
00:06:56.100 you can actually legally grow? And Health Canada has authorized that. And to be frank, it's unacceptable
00:07:03.100 if it's in someone else's home. If I can add something up, the property, how expensive the
00:07:11.440 properties are in Vancouver, Toronto, and all over the country. Imagine somebody pays $800,000, $750,000
00:07:18.800 for the condo unit. What happened? He put some tenant in there. Three months later, six months later,
00:07:25.880 he get a call from the police, say, what's going on in your place. Imagine nobody's going to touch
00:07:31.600 that unit again. This will always be known as a grow up. That means the price of that unit is reduced
00:07:40.780 by at least 25 percent, if not 50 percent. And the insurance don't cover it. It is a bad situation.
00:07:48.560 Absolutely. This thing should not happen.
00:07:54.560 So in your case, Bob Soroya, Member of Parliament, the York Regional Police, the Regional Police in your
00:08:01.600 riding in your territory, approached you or had a conversation with you saying, this is a real problem.
00:08:06.280 Oh, absolutely. Not only this thing, the overall problem with this canvas will. First of all, you need $17,000 to train one police officer.
00:08:20.280 Only 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.
00:08:33.600 They 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.
00:08:49.480 But 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.
00:09:00.680 And 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.
00:09:08.320 Surrey, 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.
00:09:19.840 There are fire safety and hazard risks, and the municipality has no ability to look into them.
00:09:25.980 Not to mention the long-term mold risks.
00:09:28.140 Well, 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.
00:09:40.380 And certainly, we also hear of fires on a fairly regular basis, and hear later that it was a grow-up.
00:09:46.380 So tell us again, let's unpack your private member's bill a little bit. What's the solution that your bill proposes?
00:09:55.140 It'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.
00:10:12.560 Some landlords, if they lived in the country, there might be a greenhouse, they might have a field, they might be just fine with it.
00:10:18.680 But essentially, it's giving protection to the landlords.
00:10:23.020 Provinces...
00:10:23.340 Usually, this multi-unit residence is what you're most worried about, I would say.
00:10:26.500 Well, I think single-family homes is where there's huge issues in neighborhoods.
00:10:31.540 So it's not the answer, but it's one piece of the puzzle to protect landlords.
00:10:36.080 And 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?
00:10:49.320 So 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.
00:10:57.900 So 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?
00:11:11.720 Municipalities are very concerned about that issue also.
00:11:14.700 And 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.
00:11:29.880 And maybe the medical marijuana experience should have animated the discussion on C-45, but four plants, they could each be 25 feet tall.
00:11:39.820 There's a lot of things that can be done if you don't have the right definitions.
00:11:45.780 Bob?
00:11:46.300 Tony, look at this.
00:11:47.940 In Oshawa, this past week, there was two instances for the same school.
00:11:54.100 One week, the grade 6 student came with the gummy bears.
00:12:00.340 The four kids get sick.
00:12:02.220 Imagine if the gummy bears are sitting on the table.
00:12:04.880 I grab one or two too.
00:12:05.920 And they were actually, they had marijuana in the gummy bears.
00:12:09.340 Of course, there was a marijuana in it.
00:12:10.700 The second instance was there was marijuana in the cookies.
00:12:18.080 So when people see these things, people grab it, people eat it.
00:12:22.260 Same thing.
00:12:23.140 All this experiment started back in Colorado.
00:12:26.240 It came from Colorado to Canada.
00:12:29.760 Colorado basically become the marijuana capital of the United States.
00:12:34.240 Now, look at this one.
00:12:35.660 And the Colorado governor said this past week, he said he won't rule out banning marijuana again.
00:12:44.140 They have the numbers, the dollar figures attached to it.
00:12:48.660 The additional police force, additional police officers, the machines, the hardware, the software, the training, many, many others.
00:13:02.800 If I can link it up with Ontario, with the York Regional Police, they need $54 million, $54 million to train all the officers.
00:13:13.620 That's just one police service.
00:13:15.280 Just one police force, $54 million.
00:13:18.300 The local provincial government previously said they will give 60 percent, 40 percent cost over the people from York Region are on the hook.
00:13:29.500 Same thing with Toronto.
00:13:30.960 In some cases, maybe $200 million, $300 million, $500 million, depending what the cost for the entire police force for training is.
00:13:39.100 It'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.
00:14:00.640 There's so much trafficking out there, so-called medical or social and all those things.
00:14:07.300 It's a bad experience as far as I'm concerned.
00:14:10.700 The liberals, us or anybody else, the Canadians deserve better.
00:14:17.180 Now, thank you, Bob.
00:14:20.100 Kathy McLeod, it's your private member's bill.
00:14:22.740 If people want to get involved, what's the call to action?
00:14:25.860 Can they contact you, or can they sign a petition, or is there a way to help support your bill?
00:14:31.000 So 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,
00:14:44.400 because the Liberals have indicated that they're not going to support it.
00:14:48.060 They say people need to have right for access to their medical marijuana,
00:14:51.780 whereas I say we have to balance landlord rights with other rights.
00:14:56.120 So 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.
00:15:05.160 Absolutely. Thank you for that.
00:15:06.680 And indeed, do contact conservative.ca as well if you support Kathy McLeod on having this private member's bill go forward.
00:15:14.300 And certainly, if you happen to be in a riding that is NDP or Liberal, contact them.
00:15:21.540 I know the Conservative caucus will be supporting you, Kathy.
00:15:24.580 This is a big issue, as outlined by Bob Soroya just a few minutes ago.
00:15:28.780 We will be supporting you, but we want to put the pressure on the Liberal Party and the NDP to do the same thing.
00:15:35.840 I want to thank our guests for this podcast.
00:15:38.800 We've had Kathy McLeod, Member of Parliament, Cam Loops, Thompson Caribou.
00:15:43.380 Mr. Bob Soroya, the Member of Parliament for Markham Unionville.
00:15:47.160 Both of you, thank you for being on the show today.
00:15:49.300 Thank you.
00:15:49.740 Thank you, Tony.
00:15:50.460 Thank you.
00:15:51.540 Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:15:56.100 To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada,
00:16:01.320 search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.
00:16:06.880 Thank you.