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SUMMARY
This report analyzes the regulation of cannabis in Canada, as well as the political, economic and social impact of the policies adopted. Using data allowing a comparative analysis of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, we take into account the political choices made by stakeholders at the federal and provincial levels and known effects of...
Citations
... First, thirty loosely structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders in the summer of 2020 to form a general understanding of implementation across Canada 1 . Key findings from this first round of interviews are presented elsewhere (Lévesque, 2020). From these interviews, a guide for semistructured interviews was developed (see Appendix A). ...
... Various strategies were employed to find relevant documents. Many of them were identified at an earlier stage of this research project (see Lévesque, 2020), and it was thus appropriate to go back to original or updated versions of those documents. Other documents were identified in discussions with the participants, as many of them followed back on the interview with a list of references that they use in their everyday work or that their organization had produced. ...
... Municipalities. Throughout the legalization process, municipalities in Ontario and elsewhere have argued that they would bear most of the enforcement costs without receiving any of its economic benefits (Benoit & Lévesque, 2020;Lévesque, 2020). In response to this issue, the Ontario provincial government established the Cannabis Legalization Implementation Fund, which intended to distribute at least CAD 36 million in four payments. ...
https://en.ofdt.fr/BDD/publications/docs/ASTRACAN_RAPPORT_ONTARIO_GB.pdf.
More than three years after recreational cannabis legalization at the federal level, provinces a mari usque ad mare are now well into the implementation phase. Ontario, the most populous province and largest cannabis market in Canada, is at the forefront of this process. Cannabis policy implementation is a multi-faceted challenge and involves a large set of stakeholders. For one thing, implementation has been a constant process of negotiation between health and economic objectives. From this constant negotiation has stemmed new concerns, and potential shortcomings of the current policies are slowly being revealed. Cannabis policy implementation is an intriguing case of what Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) term the “implementation gap”, i.e., discrepencies and distorsions between the initial policy and its concrete unfolding (Benoit & Lévesque, 2022). Furthermore, it is the ideal field for studying the relationships between actors at multiple levels of governance (federal, provincial, municipal) and from diverse types of organizations (public, for profit, NGOs, etc.). Ultimately, the multiplicity of actors and concerns involved make it a thorny and contentious policy issue.
What is Ontario’s cannabis policy framework and, most importantly, how has it been put into practice? How is the cannabis market structured in Ontario? What are the key trends in the retail space? What are the implementation challenges that stakeholders face with regards to public health, the economy, and vulnerable populations? These are the main questions that this summary report seeks to answer. More broadly, this report attempts to highlight and understand the adverse and unplanned outcomes of legalization in Ontario.
... Ultimately, the beneficiary of such polarization in the case of Quebec might be the CAQ government, since cannabis legalization was met with more popular reluctance than in any other Canadian province (Kurl & Holliday, 2017). As shown elsewhere (Lévesque, 2020), stakeholders of policy implementation in Quebec (e.g., public servants) were also more reluctant to legalize than their counterparts from other provinces. ...
Cannabis legalization is often referred to as a moral issue. However, given the limits of morality policy as a distinct policy subcategory and the contemporary dominance of technocratic politics, one could wonder if it is really framed as such within political institutions. In this article, I ask how moral frames compete and interact with other frames in debates over morality policy. Working with a moral/epistemic dichotomy, I conduct framing analysis on parliamentary debates in Quebec, Ontario, and Maine, which have recently reformulated their cannabis policy. Although trends in framing vary across cases, moral frames are consistently less salient than epistemic frames. Furthermore, a pattern of complementary framing is found, whereby actors combine moral and epistemic frames. Overall, this study shows that cannabis policy is often framed as nonmoral, and that its moral component is nonexclusive. I conclude by discussing some implications of these findings in the post‐legalization landscape.
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In the last decade, there has been a significant surge in cannabis legalization, with Uruguay (2013), Canada (2018) and 19 U.S. states (2012-2022) having developed recreational cannabis policies. A growing literature analyzes legalization from a policymaking or public health standpoint. Yet only few studies have explored its discursive component . This article contributes to filling this gap by developing conceptual tools for cannabis policy discourse analysis. I first examine the history of cannabis policy in North America and find two main discursive clusters, i.e., moral and epistemic discourse. I then discuss existing typologies of cannabis regulation models and select that of Beauchesne, which distinguishes between three models: prohibition 2.0, public health and harm reduction, and commercialization. At the intersection of discursive clusters and these regulation models, I identify six mutually exclusive frames of cannabis policy: moral panic, medical/health, reparations/vulnerabilities, harm reduction/risk mitigation, laissez-faire/liberalism, and illicit market/revenue.
