The Ontario Cannabis Store will, once again, have a monopoly in the province.

Brick-and-mortar cannabis shops will be removed from Ontario’s list of essential services, Doug Ford announced on Friday afternoon. The emergency order will go into effect Saturday night and will last for at least the next two weeks. 

Ontario, which had just begun to ramp up its offerings of cannabis retail locations, including several stores opening across the province just this week, will now rely on the OCS for all legal weed. 

Cannabis has become a highly sought-after item in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with retailers across the country reporting a surge in purchases. According to Daffyd Roderick, the director of communications of the OCS, the provincial wholesaler is ready for what will likely be a large increase in traffic in the weeks ahead.  

“OCS has taken a number of steps since the beginning of the pandemic to increase capacity to manage a larger volume of online orders,” Roderick told The GrowthOp in an emailed statement. Those steps include adding extra shifts at the distribution centre which will be operating 24/7 and expanding their direct-to-door shipping options. 

“We’re committed to providing the best possible service despite the unique challenges of this situation,” Roderick said. 

George Smitherman, the president and CEO of the Cannabis Council of Canada, told The GrowthOp he thought it might have been an oversight when he first read the revised list and saw that cannabis retail was omitted. He was expecting the province to move toward a click-and-collect model, not close retail entirely. 

“When we read the list and there was no reference to cannabis retail, but the status quo for beer, wine and liquor — I was left puzzled,” he said. “I’m still operating with a tiny bit of hope that the government could see that the essential nature of cannabis is well established and that there is an appropriate opportunity for cannabis retail to operate in a fashion which is abiding our best instincts around keeping our people safe.”

Jaclynn Pehota, special advisor to the Association of Canadian Cannabis Retailers was also surprised by the announcement. 

“I was a little bit taken aback,” she said. “I was assuming that there would be mitigating measures put in place prior to the actual closure of the stores.” She points to click-and-collect as one possible option, as long as there is an option to pay ahead of time, or using the private sector to offer delivery and increased shipping.

Some retailers, like Friendly Stranger, which has plans to open six stores in the province this year, had already moved to a click-and-collect model. They made the change two weeks ago, while also increasing their cleaning and sterilizing measures.

“While we respect that the government is trying to limit the amount of interactions between people, we are disheartened with their decision to close retail cannabis shops in Ontario,” James Jesty, president of the Friendly Stranger Holdings Corp., told The GrowthOp. 

“We have not only been following the rules, but going above and beyond to ensure consumer and staff safety. Cannabis is essential to many Canadians and they should be able to have the option to support their local cannabis retailers, should they choose. With this decision, we feel that this will redirect people back to the legacy market and unregulated cannabis.”

Smitherman agrees. He encourages retailers to remind the province that one of the measures that underscores legalization is the effort to move customers out of the legacy market and into the legal framework.

“We’re trying to build market share here from sources of cannabis that are not going to be abiding by any public policy health regulations,” he says, before highlighting that products on the illicit market, while readily available, are not regulated. 

“The cannabis consumer has ready alternatives that are not offering the same kind of quality-tested product that our legalized framework is so we have a big public policy imperative which needs to be kept in consideration.”