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Including retailers, restaurants and bars, Ontarians today have thousands of points of sale for alcoholic beverages and, even then, consumers still want better access to wine, beer and spirits. For cannabis, there are at least 1,000 black-market “points of sale” in Ontario today. Quite apart from the tax revenues to be had — Statistics Canada data from 2016 suggest profits in the area of $5 billion from cannabis-consumption sales — if the policy objective is to get consumers to choose the legal channel, it has to be available widely and in your hometown.

Under Ontario’s current public model for cannabis retail, the population per store is approximately 90,000. That is 2.6 times the Canadian average of approximately 35,000 people per store based on cannabis retail licence commitments made by other jurisdictions. At that rate, Ontario should have at least 390 retail cannabis stores to get to the national average. In legal U.S. states, the population per store hovers at just above 20,000 — four times the Canadian average, suggesting perhaps that Ontario needs closer to 600 cannabis stores.

Looking at other public-private cannabis retail models in Canada, Alberta has committed to 250 stores out of the gate, Saskatchewan to 51, while Manitoba and B.C. have set no limit to the number of retail licences they will issue. According to a new report by Marijuana Business Daily Canada, Alberta has an estimated 526,000 consumers, Saskatchewan 125,300 consumers and Ontario 1.7 million consumers. Using this data, Alberta will have one store for every 2,100 consumers, Saskatchewan one store for every 2,456 consumers and Ontario one store for every 11,333 consumers. Ontario would be severely out of whack with the rest of its private-retail-model sisters at 150 stores by a factor of four to five.