Law Times

Law Times • June 27, 2016 Page 11 www.lawtimesnews.com FOCUS Regulating marijuana Public health focus for pot shops? BY YAMRI TADDESE Law Times A s Toronto City Hall mulls over the idea of regulating the city's proliferating medical marijuana dispensaries, a Uni- versity of Ottawa professor rec- ommends a strict focus on pub- lic health. "From a public health stand- point, there will be conf licts with what governments would want to do," says David Sweanor, professor at the Centre for Health Law, Policy & Ethics at the University of Ottawa. Sweanor compares regulating marijuana to the approach with alcohol after prohibition. Government monopoly over alcohol retailing is aimed at controlling the use of alcohol, Sweanor says, "but if you look at what happened over time, the interest in controlling alcohol became subservient to the inter- est of generating revenue from alcohol. "We went from fewer and non-self-serve stores to much larger, brightly lit [stores with] discounts, Air Miles, [and] col- our f lyers on specials that arrive once a week," he adds. "Maga- zines promote alcohol distribut- ed by the monopoly. There was seemingly very little concern for the adverse uses of alcohol." Simply having governments control the sale of drugs isn't necessarily the best protection, Sweanor says, just as allowing the private sector-run business- es has its pitfalls. "In either case, it's the pursuit of profit coming before health," he says, adding he recommends a structure "where the goal is clearly public health benefit rather than slip into something that's about vested commercial interests of either private-sector purveyors or government monopolies." That's why Sweanor says the city should set up an arms- length entity that's controlled by the government but run with a public health purpose and over- sight. The mandate of this entity would be reduce harm instead of maximizing revenue, he says. Sweanor admits it's difficult to determine the best approach to regulating dispensaries. "There's an awful lot of us wrest- ling with that," he says. In May, Toronto Mayor John Tory asked Tracey Cook, the executive director of munici- pal licensing and standards, to review the city's medical mari- juana dispensaries and make recommendations on licensing or regulating them. His request comes after concerns over a growing number of dispen- saries cropping up in some of the city's neighbourhoods and doubts about their legitimacy. Vancouver now requires that medical marijuana dispensaries be 300 metres away from schools, community centres, neighbour- hood houses, youth facilities serv- ing vulnerable youth, and other marijuana-related business. Med- ical marijuana dispensaries also have to get a $30,000 licensing fee. The Globe and Mail reported that as many as three-quarters of the city's illegal marijuana dispen- saries were ordered to close down by late April. Sweanor says part of his con- cern is that at least some of the business owners that have been forced to close down or those who voluntarily shut down their stores may be driven into the il- licit market. "Where did that business go?" he asks. "One of the challenges of try- ing to end an illicit business is . . . that it's critically important to bring that business within the legal realm. If you put big barriers in the way of legal business, when you already have a well-established illicit business, you drive people back to the illicit business," he says. "This is one of the problems we're seeing now in Canada with recommendation that we're go- ing to need really, really strin- gent regulation of legal mari- juana sales. The stringent regulation, to the extent they make it more difficult to buy the legal and il- legal product, you're really just sustaining the illegal market," Sweanor continues. Neil Boyd, director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, says the idea of municipalities regulating dis- pensaries is a good one. "Because the amount of money [the dispensaries] are receiving from customers is fairly substantial, a lot of these dispensaries are willing to jump through hoops to make sure that they're not within a certain distance from a school, that there isn't a proliferation of these shops in one neighbour- hood because that can contrib- ute to a change in the character of the neighbourhood," Boyd says. "Those are all reasonable restriction." LT New UberX rules relief for lawyers BY YAMRI TADDESE Law Times A s city councils across Ontario debate on ways to regulate private car- for-hire services such as Uber, some lawyers say Toron- to's recently approved regulations strike the right balance in a high- ly controversial matter. The regulations, which fol- lowed fierce and lengthy de- bate, will come into effect in July. Among other things, it will mean new licensing and insur- ance requirements for UberX drivers and the ability for taxi services to use a surge-pricing scheme similar to the one Uber currently uses. The regulations are relative- ly easy to implement and ad- dress prime concerns around insurance and passenger safety, Toronto municipal lawyer Ajay Gajaria says. "I think that Toronto city council did a good job of ad- dressing those two areas of regu- lation," he also says, adding the amendments "strike a balance by permitting a popular and sought-after service from the public standpoint but also ad- dressing the concerns and the debates around insurance, pas- senger safety, and information sharing with the police." UberX, one of several ride- booking services provided by Uber, does not currently require drivers to obtain commercial auto insurance. City council de- cided to require that, in order to operate, drivers of private trans- portation companies such as Uber must obtain a minimum of $2 million of collision and pas- senger hazard insurance. That part of the regulation comes as a relief to personal injury lawyers who've struggled with ways to involve Uber in lawsuits when UberX drivers, operating with- out commercial auto insurance, get into accidents. The insurance requirement is "absolutely the right thing to do," says McLeish Orlando LLP personal injury lawyer John Mc- Leish. One of his clients was in- jured in a collision with an UberX driver carrying passengers. In that case, the UberX driver's auto insurer refused coverage because the driver was not permitted to use the vehicle for commercial purposes, McLeish says. "If [UberX] drivers try and drive under their existing stan- dard auto policy, they have no insurance," McLeish adds. Luckily, McLeish says his in- jured client can request cover- age through the underinsured provision of her own insurance policy. But perhaps unbeknown to many UberX drivers, McLeish says the underinsured insurance company can later make a direct claim against the UberX driver who operated without proper insurance. Toronto's vote to pave legal routes for companies such as Uber followed a similar move by Ottawa. Although Calgary passed regulations permitting private transportation companies, Uber has called that city's fee and back- ground requirement too onerous to continue operations. Mean- while, pending ruling on an in- surance matter in Edmonton is holding up Uber operations, al- though city council passed regu- lations permitting the service. According to Toronto city council, Torontonians take more than 45,000 trips per day via un- regulated vehicles-for-hire. LT David Sweanor says the city should set up an arms-length entity that's controlled by the government, and run with a public health purpose and oversight. Ajay Gajaria says regulations for UberX drivers address concerns around insurance and passenger safety. 11th Annual Canadian Lawyer InHouse General Counsel Roundtable Visit canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse Sponsored by: www.weirfoulds.com to see our video coverage of these topics: Managing in-house, online June 27 Managing external counsel, online July 4 ůƚĞƌŶĂƟǀĞĨĞĞĂƌƌĂŶŐĞŵĞŶƚƐ͕online July 11 Handling RFPs, online July 28 Untitled-1 1 2016-06-22 4:00 PM

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