The mayor of Kamloops says the city is being more progressive compared to other municipalities in dealing with prospective legal cannabis stores in the community.

Ken Christian says council is happy to deal with each application that comes up and let the market dictate how many stores the community can handle.

“Kamloops is just a little ahead of the curve. Some others communities are probably waiting and then they will licence 20 at once. Where as we have been sorting of working our way towards 20. What we are seeing now is a number of different people with different ideas in terms of marketing recreational cannabis. It is just like people who would be marketing pizza or marketing craft beer. As that rolls out some will succeed and some will fail.”

With nine cannabis stores approved so far, and another four to come soon, only the one government store is actually open with the others waiting for provincial or civic approvals.

Once all these stores are online does be anticipate problems?

“If there are issues we have with each of these licences good neighbour agreements so that if we see a congregation of people smoking in front of a retail place that retail place will not be open that is not part of the agreement. They have to look after their customers and their customers behaviour as such not disturb the neighbourhoods where they are located.”

Attorney General Dave Eby has said the slow pace of provincial government approvals for legal cannabis stores is due to background checks to ensure there are no links to organized crime.