The BC Supreme Court has struck down an attempt by the City of Richmond to stop the chair of a medical cannabis company from building a greenhouse on a farm in the Agricultural Land Reserve.
The decision, centering on a 21-acre plot of land near No.9 Road and Westminster Highway, has implications for cannabis companies and the municipalities hoping to forbid them from growing weed on agricultural land.
“The municipality [Richmond] tried to regulate something that they didn’t have the power to regulate,” said Joan Young, a lawyer with McMillan LLP who has written about the case. “They can use their bylaws in all sorts of ways, but they can’t override provincial laws.”
Avtar Dhillon, a family doctor by training and executive chairman of Emerald Health Therapeutics, a Victoria-based medical cannabis firm, owns the Richmond farm in question along with his wife.
In early 2017, he began constructing two greenhouses and an electrical building. The City of Richmond, suspecting he may use the greenhouses for medical cannabis production, denied him the building permits and also issued a stop work order.