CARSTAIRS - The Town of Carstairs is the first municipality in Mountain View County to ban the consumption of cannabis in any public place – if and when recreational cannabis use becomes legal in Canada.
CAO Carl McDonnell told the Gazette that the policy committee has been working on the issue for some time.
"We mirrored the City of Calgary one," said McDonnell. "Really the bylaw is based on what Calgary was doing. They've already ran it through legal and the rest of it. It pretty much bans (consuming cannabis in) any place in public. It would be similar to drinking. You can't be walking down the street drinking a bottle of beer. You can't be walking down the street and smoking cannabis. It prohibits it in any of the public facilities and so on."
Residents could consume cannabis on private property, he said.
"As long as apartments and landlords and all the other rules apply," he said. "If we had say a music festival or a large event where you would have a designated smoking area then those organizers would have to apply for a permit to have a designated area that you could have the marijuana in."
In addition to the cannabis consumption bylaw, Carstairs council also approved the cannabis smoking and vaping bylaw.
"The consumption one (bylaw) is if someone has a joint and is smoking that, but you can also do this in a vaping device," he said. "So we had to look at bringing in one just for the vaping side of things."
The cannabis bylaws will not go into effect until the federal government passes the Cannabis Act (Bill C-45), which would permit persons to possess cannabis if purchased from an authorized person.
"The bylaw comes into force the day the Cannabis Act comes into force," he said.
The town has not made any other bylaws specifically in regards to cannabis retail sales or production, he said.
"We've left it open under our current land use bylaw because we're treating it like any other business," he said. "Until we see the final rules that come out from the province and federal government, we'll finalize ours after that. At this point, we're looking at the provincial guidelines such as 100 metres from a school, things like that.
"We're probably going to stick with that. We'll see if someone comes back if there's something odd within our land use bylaw. If it's going to be a legal, licensed product, I think it's incumbent on us to treat it like other products."
