Pot for Pot … Holes

The provinces and federal government convened meetings yesterday to discuss how to allocate their riches to be earned from the bounty of excise taxes to be made from marijuana sales when the drug is legalized July 2018.

My understanding is that they will work on a 75%/25% provincial/federal split.

(Let’s put aside the basic fact that they won’t make anything because we’re talking about WEED and it will be easy and legal to grow on your own without having a thousand middle-people ripping you off).

It’s obvious that all of the potential stakeholders can’t wait to spend their ‘pot’ of gold (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Unfortunately, they’ve left a critical partner sitting outside, begging to be let in on the discussions.

Municipalities are going broke and are being forced to pay for all of the road-building, shovels-in-ground bullshit programs that the feds and provinces have downloaded to them over the last decade.

Here’s a great example of an absurd ‘Sophie’s Choice’-like dilemma: Stratford planners and councilors recently announced that they will remove one sidewalk from streets that have two sidewalks in order to save funds over the long-term and to pay for much needed infrastructure requirements including replacement of water and electrical systems. Of course, the numbers make ZERO sense: they see an annual cost saving of $29,000 with an estimated cost of $1 million.

This is truly insane.

No municipality should have to make such a ridiculous choice.

What’s frustrating is that most smaller cities in Canada and the US are designed to act like a giant centrifuge: the spin and spin and fling people out to the periphery.

It’s done this way because it’s the easy choice.