Pot-growing hearing on backburner

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On the issue of medical marijuana, the City of Kamloops has opted to let the federal government act first.

Marvin Kwiatkowski, the city’s  director of development and engineering services, said a public hearing on restricting medical grow-ops originally planned for this month is being pushed back to spring, to ensure it falls in line with new Health Canada regulations.

In November, council agreed to take to public hearing a bylaw change that would restrict medical marijuana grow-ops to industrially-zoned land.

Not long after that, the federal government announced it was moving ahead with an overhaul of its own Medical Marihuana Access program. Rather than allowing those with prescriptions for medical cannabis to apply for licences to grow their own supply, new regulations would set up a series of commercial grows to provide product to users.

A 75-day public comment period on the new changes runs until Feb. 28.

“They are the overriding regulatory authority on this issue, so we’re going to let that play out first and then we’ll finalize our bylaw,” Kwiatkowski said.

While a staff report on medical marijuana will be on the council agenda on Tuesday, Jan. 15, it will update council on what’s happening at the federal level and doesn’t move the Kamloops process ahead.

Kwiatkowski said postponing the public hearing will allow staff to tweak the bylaw if needed, though at this point, he said doesn’t see anything in the new federal regulations that conflicts with the local restrictions.

CHANGES:

The Conservative

government’s

marihuana for medical purposes regulations can be read online here.