i'm not going to take the conspiracy theory view on this.

if you pay enough attention to queen's park, you know those characters. wynne. sousa. naqvi. these are people that have never smoked marijuana, have never been around marijuana and have lived their entire lives in this out-of-touch bubble where marijuana is something done by undesirables: addicts, criminals and just run-of-the-mill poor people.

the thing underlying the legislation, more than anything else, is class. the new rules around marijuana are ultimately designed so that wealthy people don't run into it when they're walking their dogs. if there's a public health component, it's not about cutting costs so much as it's about keeping it away from people that see it as this scourge of the proletariat class.

let's ask this question: what do you think that the government expects on july 1st? because, it's probably not what you think.

i would suggest that the government probably expects marijuana users to carry around a concept of shame with them - that this is going to be a discreet thing that nobody admits to each other, nobody talks about and is just broadly kept out of polite conversation. they may consequently expect people to prefer mail order so that they don't have to show their shame in public; it would be the kind of thing that would lead to audible gasps in the room, should it come up.

so, they likely believe that they are being fiscally prudent in not investing too heavily in a product that they do not believe belongs in polite society and will consequently not develop a serious market.

what is going to happen on july 1st is going to legitimately shock a lot of people inside the government, and it may lead to a tweaking of policy. it's going to be hard  to imagine the government resisting calls for more stores to meet demand, anyway - not so long as it thinks it's future depends on balanced budgets (of course, it doesn't).

this is what happens to liberal governments, in the long run: they end up to the right of public opinion, and refuse to come to terms with it. at that point, they must go. then, when they split the vote and lose to the conservatives, they don't understand what happened.

we should be able to get the ndp in this time, so long as the ndp co-operates by remaining on their left flank.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mike-schreiner/ontario-liberals-pot-monopoly-is-designed-to-fail_a_23208862/