The numbers don’t look good for Londoners waiting for the first pot shop in the city to open.

Of the seven individuals and companies chosen Jan. 11 in a lottery to get the first crack at opening cannabis retail stores in the region stretching from Niagara to Windsor, four intend to open stores in Greater Hamilton, says Olivia Brown, a cannabis consultant from that city.

Another successful applicant is named the Niagara Herbalist, suggesting that store would be located in Niagara Falls or Niagara Region.

That leaves just two stores for the rest of the region.

None of the names of the successful applicants — Steven Fry, Lisa Bigioni, Ranjit Basra, 2674253 Ontario Inc., Santino J. Coppolino and Christopher Comrie — are known to cannabis advocates in London and Windsor, who say it’s likely the cities will be shut out in this first round of stores intended to open April 1.

“The way the licensing worked is you didn’t put in a licence for a municipality, you put in a licence for the region and then the (successful) individual gets to determine which municipality they want to locate in,” said Jon Liedtke, operator of the recently closed Higher Limits cannabis lounge in Windsor.

While he said he’s not sure the Ontario government would allow four of the seven licences to go to one municipality, he said it’s doubtful many of the lottery winners will be able to open in any case.

The deadlines are simply too tight and the financial penalties for missing the deadlines are too punitive, he said.

It would take one to two weeks to incorporate, two to five weeks to secure insurance, and many more weeks to find an appropriate location, Liedtke said. He said the applicants probably can’t make the April 1 deadline.

If they miss it, they’re subject to a $12,500 fine, in addition to a $6,000 licence fee. And if they’re not fully operational by the end of April, the $50,000 from the letter of credit they’re required to supply would be kept by the government.

Liedtke said industry insiders he’s spoken to believe only three to seven stores in the entire province will open by April 1.

More than 17,000 individuals and businesses submitted applications to the province to run one of the first 25 cannabis stores in Ontario.