Ontario making cannabis retail delivery, curbside pickup permanent March 15

Canada’s biggest market for adult-use sales revealed new details about its permanent program for cannabis retail delivery and curbside pickup, which will be enacted March 15.

Ontario originally announced in October 2021 its plans to make delivery and curbside pickup permanent.

The final rules still “will not permit cannabis retail stores to operate entirely or predominantly as delivery businesses,” the province’s cannabis retail regulator, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO), warned licensed marijuana stores on Tuesday in an email that was obtained by MJBizDaily.

The change comes with some new rules for cannabis deliveries, according to the email, including:

• A requirement that delivery orders be placed with a specific retail location and “be fulfilled from that same store with products that are stored on-premises.”
• Preventing cannabis from being removed from a store unless an order has been received.
• Requiring cannabis from incomplete deliveries to be returned to the store on the same day.
• Delivering cannabis only when the originating store is open to the public. There is an exception for some stores, such as those in shopping malls where the owner requires the store to be closed during cannabis retail business hours (9 a.m.-11 p.m.).

The Ontario government first permitted curbside pickup and delivery on a temporary basis in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020.

Ontario later extended that permission via an emergency order, then extended it again before allowing the order to expire in July 2020.

Curbside pickup and delivery were once again permitted in late 2020 as the pandemic continued.