Pelham Town Council received its latest cannabis odour report during Wednesday’s meeting, one that could see local producers fined $2,500 daily for a first odour bylaw offence.
The report, which is scheduled to come back for passage in a few weeks, then pegs a secondary offense at $5,000, and a tertiary fine of $7,500.
The first challenge, however, lies in effective enforcement.
The report stated that the Town has received 309 odour complaints regarding cannabis producers since the beginning of 2020. However, bylaw enforcement staff backed up those complaints up with just one single detection using the “Nasal Ranger” odour device.
The Nasal Ranger did, however, detect high odour readings on 34 random tests during that time.
The explanation would seem to be that because most odours are temporary and transient, bylaw enforcement was unable arrive on site in a timely manner to back up hundreds of citizen complaints.
As such, Mayor Marvin Junkin asked if the current bylaw enforcement staff could be available to be on-call during off hours to respond quickly to complaints – as opposed to hiring what he termed an “odour expert” in a full-time position.
“Is that possible?,” Junkin asked. “As opposed to spending $80,000?”
CAO David Cribbs confirmed it was possible, and again stressed the difficult situation Pelham is in thanks to Health Canada’s lack of intended enforcement since cannabis was legalized by the Trudeau government in 2015.
“We have a federal government that is supposed to be regulating. Thank you federal government for setting us up with that,” Cribbs said, sarcastically.
“We don’t have guiding case law … just because a complaint phone call comes in, doesn’t mean it will result in a charge.”
It is also practically a given that cannabis producers will fight the Town over odour enforcement in court once enough fines have been levied. Ward 2 Councillor Brian Eckhardt, a former NRPS police officer, said that the Town’s case in those scenarios will need to be airtight.
“Any time that we are going to lay a charge, we’re going to get challenged on that. We have to be prepared to meet that challenge,” Eckhardt said. “(Cannabis producers) have a lot at stake in this, and they have a lot of money … this is gonna be big news, and that investigation has to be done properly.”
Junkin summarized the issue by adroitly saying “the whole thing stinks.”
