Restaurant Review: Seafood abounds at Ardo, Corktown’s Sicilian eatery

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8:20 am

Full disclosure: I spent time in Sicily last fall, and I didn’t love the food there. Ten days of unexciting tomato sauce, eggplant and overcooked fish was too long. Before Sicily we were in Emilia Romagna and afterwards in Milan. Both stops in the north were serious belt-wideners, thanks to the seduction of cheesy polenta, deeply fulfilling risotto, wild mushrooms and white truffles.

I remain confused about the charms of Sicilian food. In principle, I love tomato sauce and seafood and eat both often. In practise neither was so great in Sicily.

Then there’s Ardo, the super-popular newish Sicilian restaurant in Corktown. It’s friendly and pleasant-looking, done in pale colours with warm lighting, Sicilian tchotchkes and a great buzz. Lots of people, lots of noise. And a few ringside bar seats overlooking the fast-moving and superbly fragrant open kitchen.

Some of the items are wonderful — arancino is usually a stodgy bland rice ball but here it’s a super-crisp ungreasy rice cone beautifully flavoured with peas, caciocavallo cheese and a beef, chicken and veal ragú. Less inspiring is the fried eggplant roll stuffed with caciocavallo cheese in tomato sauce. We ate this sort of dish in Sicily almost daily. They love to roll things up around cheese. It got old fast, and it’s still bland.

Then there’s the pasta, as Sicilian as it gets. Sarde is spaghetti with Sicilian fennel, blanched raisins and oily crispy toasted bread crumbs, saffron scented. On the side are two crunchy-fried fresh sardine filets. We love the sardines and wish the sauce had more oomph. Thanks to Sicily’s close proximity to North Africa, they add sweet and aromatic spice to savoury (the raisins and saffron with the spaghetti), and they often favour couscous as a pasta. The couscous comes in tomato and fish broth with fish, clams, shrimp and overcooked squid. One wants to be but is not excited.

When I was in Sicily, I drank far too much espresso and ate too many cannoli. But it was a hiking trip, so the cannoli got walked off going up and down magnificent mountains. I did, however, bring home an addiction to cannoli. And the ability to distinguish between good and bad cannoli. The latter has been pre-filled and the crepe is thus soggy. The former is filled when you order it and served right sway, resulting in a cloud of whipped sweetened ricotta inside a super-crisp deep-fried crepe. The cannoli at Ardo are exemplary, clearly fresh-filled — crisp and creamy and splendidly adorned with candied orange, roasted pistachios and fine dark chocolate.

I could happily dine on arancino and cannoli and call Sicilian food at Ardo a win. Think of it: My edit of Canada’s four food groups is hereby issued: cheese, cream, meat and chocolate.

From Parris with Love

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2:27 pm

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Toronto’s Amanda Parris was in the Don Jail waiting to visit a friend. The experience, the questions she asked herself about the other women in the room and their own lives, led to her writing her first play, Other Side of the Game, premiering on Oct. 18 at the Aki Studio at Daniels Spectrum and running until Nov. 5.

“I suddenly realized that these were stories I’ve never really seen portrayed anywhere, and I just got really curious about it,” Parris says.

At the heart of the play is the hip-hop philosophy of ride or die, a loyalty to something or someone no matter what happens.

“It’s the idea that threads it all together, of women who for whatever reason believe that a part of their purpose is to have an undying loyalty to something other than themselves,” she says.

“What does that require of them? What do they end up growing into? What do they end up sacrificing?”

The play also portrays the idea through the lens of the black civil rights protest movements of both the ’70s and today, but Parris explains that she started working on it before Black Lives Matter even existed.

“When we were talking about the idea, part of our motivation was to wake people up to realize we should still be fighting today because there were a lot of unresolved issues,” she says.

“And then Black Lives Matter came around, and we were like, oh OK, the world did it without us, which is great, but it will be interesting how the play is received today.”

In addition to her play, Parris is also putting the final touches on the third season of her CBC-TV show The Exhibitionists, set to premiere this fall.

What to Eat this Minute: An uptown paradise for crème brûlée lovers

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10:34 am

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There’s something so satisfying about cracking into a pot of crème brûlée. First one must suss out the best entry point, then comes a quick and precise tap of a spoon’s edge and finally — crack! — a swoop into the custardy depths. It’s hard to find a dessert that delivers quite the same panache as the French classic. And it wasn’t until now that Torontonians had a shop devoted to the luscious caramel-topped custard.

From cars to Crème
Daniel Wong wasn’t exactly on the path to opening a crème brûlée café. Originally hailing from Vancouver, Wong built a career for himself painting cars out west. Although he’d always had a deep appreciation for food, his cooking skills were non-existent. But working in an industry known for its homophobia eventually took a toll on Wong, who identifies as gay, and he realized a career change was in order.

“I never knew how to cook, so I decided to study culinary arts,” Wong says. Jumping into a French culinary program, Wong figured that, even if he wasn’t taken with the food industry, the course wouldn’t be in vain. Instead, the budding chef found himself obsessed with crème brûlée. “I was just fascinated by it, and the torching part,” Wong says, drawing parallels between the two lines of work he’s partaken in. “It’s a good canvas to work on. With cars, you customize your own paint, whereas with crème brûlée, you mix the batter and make it into whatever you want.”

Keep it local
A few years and a move to Toronto later, Wong’s shop can be found just off the main stretch of St. Clair West. Inside, the café is laid-back, with high ceilings, custom artwork and plenty of seats. Wong himself can be found behind the counter, darting back and forth between customers, scooping Liège waffle batter into a hot press and, yes, torching crème brûlées to order.

The cornerstone
A menu of the available flavours sits next to the cash. Sweet-toothed patrons can order iterations of the dessert in everything from white chocolate rose to lychee vodka to, of course, a classic vanilla bean.

Although the building blocks of the dessert — cream, eggs and sugar — are simple, the cornerstone really is temperature control. “You can’t rush crème brûlée,” Wong says. “The lower the temperature, the longer the time, the smoother your product is going to be.” With that silky consistency perfected, Wong is able to play with flavours. The Vietnamese coffee version is infused with a very intense French roast and condensed milk, whereas the ube option pairs the purple yam with a coconut milk mixture.

“My customers are usually pretty excited,” Wong says without any airs. “It’s a whole experience.”

“It’s life changing!” pipes up a customer on her way out. And there you have it.

Craque de Crème, 1360 Bathurst St., 647-699-8233

Don’t be so salty: TBH this lexicon is lit AF

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9:53 am

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“Ugh, she’s so extra!” said my teenage daughter Bridget, 18.

“Extra fun? Extra cool?” I responded in my nerdy mom voice.

“No, extra as in ‘extra.’ ” As in OTT (over the top, ahem), as I would have said back in the day.

I asked Toronto teen Grace, 15, to give me a rundown on all the hip words kids today are using. I’ve provided some helpful tips on how parents might work these words into their own convos.

Bare: To add an exaggeration. As in “That movie was bare good.” Like using the word “very,” but with a “b” and dropping the “y.” In a parental sentence: “Putting together kids’ lunches is bare annoying.”

Dope: Good. “Those sunglasses are dope.” Wait for this one: in 2018, you can say, “This dope law is dope, Justin.”

Lit: Fun or getting hyped. “This concert is lit.” This is a tricky one for parents to use because frankly the things we think are lit are not. “These new tax laws are lit.” Just doesn’t work.

Jam/Mixer: A small party. Add the word “fam,” and you have a “famjam” or a family get together. Personally, I’d like to try dropping this one on my mother-in-law because I have a sneaking suspicion she’s not listening to me anyway. “So, see you at the Thanksgiving famjam. Can I bring some wine?”

Rate/Back: To agree. “I back that.” First of all, I feel like this is an expression you’re unlikely to hear your teen direct to you. But parents might be able to get away with, “I back that!” when the suggestion of a Thursday night glass of wine is made from one to another.

Dry: Acting mad. “Why are you being so dry?” Funnily enough, being dry could cause parents to get mad or be mad. (See “I back that,” above.)

Although Grace was able to provide me with “on the street” advice above on what teens are saying, the Zeitgeist tells me you’ll want to add these to your own internal urban dictionary.

Squad Goals/Goals: Thanks to Taylor Swift, you don’t have a group of friends anymore, you have a squad. If your squad is bare lit and has many jams, you’re hitting a dope goal. I back that.

AF: Teens (and moms) have always tried to find a way to say the F-word without actually saying it. This “AF” means “as f**k.” “My mom was as bare dry AF over my report card.”

Salty: A little bit snarky or snippy. The important thing here is that you will witness/experience this behaviour very, very often with a teen or a tween, but pointing it out is the equivalent of saying to a toddler, “I think you’re tired.” They’re going to get dry.

TBH: To be honest. Teens have the belief that if they add, “I’m just being honest,” they are no longer in trouble for saying something incredibly rude.

Mike Holmes is T.O.’s handiest man and he has a new show on HGTV Canada

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9:48 am

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Expert contractor, philanthropist and HGTV personality Mike Holmes is once again offering his expertise to families in search of their dream home.

In his latest HGTV show, Holmes: Buy It Right, he helps couples avoid home-buying blunders that come from failing to look at a house’s bones and focusing on cosmetic aspects instead. “We all need to learn how to buy intelligently, and that means knowing what to look for, knowing how to trust your instincts, knowing to see the red flags,” he says.

Holmes cites the roof, siding, grading, windows and doors as the first things to inspect when viewing a house and says, “This show is going to help a lot of people.” Holmes: Buy It Right airs Sunday nights at 9 and 9:30 p.m. on HGTV Canada.

HGTV star Kortney Wilson takes us inside her closet

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9:07 am

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I never thought my closet would become a place for a champagne toast with my girlfriends. In fact, I designed it to be a fully functioning and practical space and just got caught up in the pretty details of it all. Here’s how I turned my bedroom into my dream closet.

My husband, Dave, and I are used to reworking closets. Storing one’s stilettos and seasonal hats wasn’t really a priority in homes of the early 1900s, so when we renovate houses, we are accustomed to turning smaller bedrooms into much needed 21st-century kind of storage. When I told Dave that I had the idea of turning our master bedroom into my walk-in closet and the office next to our bedroom into our new sleep space, it was a bit of a head scratcher. So much so, that I moved the bedroom one day when he wasn’t home to help him visualize it. Then, we began the process.

I had friends who had spent tens of thousands of dollars on custom closets with beautifully detailed doors and built-in dressers, but I had a different vision. I wanted to be able to walk in and see all of the items at a glance, instead of having to open up drawers and sliding doors. I had our carpenter build open shelving, just as he would for pantries, accommodating items I would hang high, low and fold in between.

Then came the island. I really wanted a glass countertop so I could place all of my jewellery in the top drawers and see everything at a glance. My initial plan was to find two large and identical dressers and put them back to back. The idea was to replace the dresser tops with glass. It proved to be more expensive than to just build what I wanted from scratch, so I had our kitchen cabinet guy, Chris, take a stab at it.

I chose a minty green hue for the body of the island, added a combination of hardware from Anthropologie and some gold feet that are merely decoration, making it look less like kitchen cabinets. I hung a brass-finished chandelier for a little glam and painted the original mantel white.

The pink brick that I uncovered years ago plays nicely against the green and grey accents and gives the room the texture that it needed. The addition of a fuzzy stool and a grey and white–striped chair from West Elm has made it perfect for those champagne toasts with my girlfriends.

I’ve always been hesitant about putting my closet on display. It’s a personal space, and it seems a little over the top to most (heck, to me). It’s not one of those necessities, like say, your kitchen, but I’m proud of the space. After sharing a two-by-four-foot closet for most of my life with my sister and graduating to sharing a slightly larger walk-in closet with Dave, it has been a joy to start my morning off in a space that reflects me.

As a realtor, it’s one of the surprising areas that I find can make or break a deal. If the house is great, but there is no storage, the buyer can be turned off. I dedicate a good amount of time to the closet design in each house. I’ve been known to paint the backs of the built-in shelves, accent with wallpaper, give one of the walls a punch of colour or fancy it up with a really great light fixture or an interesting piece of art.

As a rule of thumb, a little colour, a bit of texture, some simple fabric and dash of pattern mixing all contribute to pulling a room together. The master closet shouldn’t be the exception. A large closet is a luxury. So is cheesecake. If you’ve got the room, go for it.

Celebrity housewife Kara Alloway pokes fun at her fame for a good cause

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10:30 am

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Kara Alloway, star of the Real Housewives of Toronto, can now add music video star to her resumé. Yes, that’s right. She is the star of a music video for Jordan Grant, a University of Waterloo student who jokingly says he has a master’s degree in parody songwriting. Although we must say, this parody is spot on.

Grant wrote the song for Alloway to poke fun at all things housewife, and aptly titled it “Real A$$ Housewife.”

In three weeks, the video has racked up thousands of views, all for a good cause. Alloway is selling Real A$$ Housewife T-shirts on karaalloway.com where all proceeds will go to U For Change, an inner-city mentoring program for post-high-school, at-risk young adults, some of whom helped produce the music video.

Restaurant Review: Joanne Kates finds Café Cancan’s food isn’t as glorious as the decor

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3:55 pm

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It was with something bordering pornographic lust that I crossed the threshold of Café Cancan, son of Piano Piano, Victor Barry’s divine downscale Italian pasta ’n’ pizza parlour. Even the door is a good omen. Turquoise, my late mother’s favourite colour.

But that’s not why I was excited. My lifelong feelings about French food border on the worshipful. I know people who don’t like butter, I have friends who cringe at the thought of foie gras, and my beloved partner, being a better person than me, abhors cream sauces. I wish I were one of those people. Think of the calories I wouldn’t have to consume! Imagine the battles I wouldn’t have to fight. The bulge would be somebody else’s problem.

But I never met a form of butter or meat fat that I didn’t crave. Cream is like silk to me. Hence French food and I, a love couple.

Entering Café Cancan, a small bistro in what used to be the Harbord Room, is like falling down the rabbit hole into a fin de siècle Parisian wonderland. It’s a pink room wallpapered with big blousy pink peonies. You can almost imagine Edith Piaf tossing back Pernod at the bar. The tiny dining room is charming, but my heart belongs to the back terrace: Marble tables, white wooden banquettes and a roof of Edison lights against the dark sky.

Would that the food were as glorious as the decor. Taking on a classic like French onion soup is really throwing down the gauntlet. The stock is too subtle, there’s an excess of bread cubes and not enough of the sweet savour of long caramelized onions. We love the creamy rillettes of smoked sturgeon on roasted flatbread with dill, parsley and pickled shallots, but few glories follow it.

The duck confit is greasy even for me. And I find it weird to be served pretty much the same garnish with our two mains: raw green apple, raw endive, pickled cauliflower and halved raw grapes. With the skate wing the cauliflower is browned, and with the duck there are slightly burnt hazelnuts. Rather like the overcooked frites, which only came after a reminder.

They do several different eclairs for dessert, so gotta do it. Here we meet the nadir of French cuisine: An eclair filled right before serving is crispy crunchy choux pastry with creamy filling. Filling it in advance? Recipe for disaster. Despite my love for Canada’s two key food groups — peanut butter and chocolate — I am disappointed by the sadly soggy peanut butter chocolate eclair.

How is it that Mr. Barry can succeed so delectably with downscale Italiana at Piano Piano and not with a casual French bistro? Maybe because that’s just the nature of Italian versus French cuisine, the former being full of brio and ease, the latter being a labour of technique layered under the love. More technique please.

Arkells frontman Max Kerman on his Annex roots

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9:20 am

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Max Kerman is walking by his old high school, Harbord Collegiate, as he responds to interview questions on the phone, explaining that he started dabbling in songwriting at 16.

Kerman is the lead singer of the Arkells, a band that has quickly risen to fame since they released their first EP in 2007. Now they have a huge fan following, are working on a new album (which will be their fifth studio album) and have even worked with Drake’s dad, Dennis Graham. Yup, they have a song aptly titled, “Drake’s Dad” with Graham starring in the music video.

For Kerman, the path that led him here started back at Harbord Collegiate. The lead singer had a band in high school and remembers writing parody songs for the announcements, which gave him a small taste of singing songs for a live audience. Also during high school, Kerman remembers renting a portable recording device but feeling frustrated when trying to figure out how to use it — which in the end, didn’t stop him.

“I recall thinking that, if I’m willing to get this frustrated over something, it must be something I want to do.”

And it’s a good thing he stuck with it. The Arkells’ current single “Knocking At The Door” just reached its 14th week at number one at alternative radio in Canada.

The band also just added four new Canadian tour dates for November in markets they haven’t previously hit on this tour, including Quebec City, Oshawa, Kingston and London.

Achieving the kind of success the Arkells are currently experiencing isn’t always easy, something the band is well aware of.

“It still feels a bit like we’re playing hooky,” Kerman says of being in a successful band. “I know it’s a precious job and how lucky I am, and that motivates us. We don’t take it for granted,” he adds. “We feel like every fan we’ve won over with really trying. Success so far has been a natural progression.”

The band’s original five members — Kerman, Mike DeAngelis, Tim Oxford, Nick Dika and Dan Griffin — all met while studying at McMaster University.

The name, Arkells, came from Arkell Street in Hamilton where they lived and would practise their music. The band still calls Hamilton home. In 2011, Dan Griffin left the band and Anthony Carone joined.

In the early days the band would play small shows at clubs, and in 2007, they performed an afternoon set at Yonge-Dundas Square as part of North by Northeast (NXNE).

Shawn Creamer, owner of the Dakota Tavern, heard that set and started giving their CD out to managers and labels he was friends with. Eventually the band signed their first record deal in 2008.

They’ve released four albums and have won multiple Juno Awards including New Group of the Year in 2010, Group of the Year in 2012 and Group of the Year and Rock Album of the Year in 2015.

Apart from the awards, there have been many other career highs for the Arkells, including selling out two nights at Massey Hall in one day last year and playing to a crowd of 16,000 on the Budweiser Stage, a show that sold out in three days.

“That stuff is still crazy to me,” says Kerman of those career milestones.

That being said, he stresses that most of the things the Arkells have done as a band have felt significant.

“I like the idea that we’re a band that tries to outdo ourselves. You’re only as fresh as your last show, so we’re always trying to put out something that was better than what came before it,” he says.

Kerman explains that, currently, the band’s goals include evolving its live show and reaching more people with its music.

“Part of the business of being in a band is that your success is where you are in the moment,” he says. “Whenever we play, we always hope it’s to more people than last time. It’s not a numbers game, but the more people we reach, the more fun it is.”

Since the early days of the Arkells, Kerman’s approach to songwriting has evolved, something he attributes to not only the fact his musical palette has grown, but that he’s been able to refine his songwriting process.

“I think one thing that sticks out is that the songs I write need to pass the internal gut check. If it doesn’t feel good, honest and real when you’re singing the lyrics, you have to keep digging,” he explains.

Those songs can and do affect people on an emotional level, though Kerman notes that isn’t the goal when he’s writing, just a bonus.

“You’re not thinking too much about how one of your songs affects someone, but as the band’s audience has grown its been pretty special to know that our songs resonate with people,” he says.

In the years since the Arkells began its ascent, the bandmates have learned some important lessons, chief among them that it pays to be around the right people.

“We’re lucky to work with really good people, and I get energized by being around them,” he explains. “Be around good, hard-working, smart people that help to further your own vision. The result of our band is a lot of people who care about what we do and can make the band work better as a whole.”

Once their current tour comes to a close, it isn’t likely the band will slow down for long.

“We never take much downtime because we really like the job and because I would probably get really antsy with more than a day off,” Kerman says. “Look at any of the great bands: they’re great because they work a lot. Everyone else works all the time, and we’re no different,” he adds.

“There’s always work to be done, and we’re ambitious, and we like the challenge of being creative, whether it’s about writing a new song or coming up with a new T-shirt design.”

How They Met: Bachelor Canada host on how he found love while travelling

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Andrew Mannsbach

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10:48 am

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Noah Cappe, host of Bachelor Canada, is no stranger to the world of television. He’s an actor who has had roles in Good Witch and Bitten, and he currently hosts Food Network’s Carnival Eats. Here he talks about his own love story with his wife Keri. Bachelor contestants could use some pointers from Cappe.

How they met
We met in Israel on a trip called Birthright Israel. I was 23 and Keri was 19, and we found out we lived 40 minutes away from each other back in Toronto. We stayed in touch once we got back and made the effort to see each other as much as possible, and we’ve been together ever since.

The first date
Our first official date was at the movies. We went to see Tomb Raider. We had been hanging out until then at her dorm room at the University of Toronto (because I have seven siblings and was living at home, so I didn’t want her hanging at my home), so this was our first public date. She had so much money on her university food account, so I used to spend all her money getting Snapple drinks. Still to this day movies are a huge part of our relationship. When I’m in town for a week or so, we make it a point to fit in at least a movie or two.

Memorable moments
We didn’t move too quickly and took things step by step, discussing everything together along the way. We had several memorable moments, one in particular was how we each said “I love you” for the first time. Keri came over after a night out with her girlfriends and was telling me a story about how she was telling her friends how she loves me, but she never actually said it to me. So I didn’t say anything. Later that evening I drove her home, and she got mad at me because I didn’t say I loved her back, but I didn’t think that she technically said it. So during our screaming fight she said, “I love you,” and I said, “I love you too!”

The proposal
Keri was volunteering with Frontier College (a literacy organization for underprivileged people) at the time. She was directing their annual play, and I was narrating the play and had one of my brothers filming it. At the end of the play, when everyone was taking their final bows, I came onstage to introduce Keri and thank her for putting on the show. I started talking about how we’ve been together for 13 years and how I couldn’t think of a better place that represents us and our relationship, so then I got down on one knee and proposed then and there in front of everyone. It caught Keri by surprise and I used stones from her grandmother’s jewellery to make her ring.

The weddings
We’ve been married three times. The first time was a commitment ceremony in Toronto at an art gallery. It was very intimate, only 50 people on a Thursday night with our family and closest friends. Then the next morning we brought 20 people to a cottage up north and celebrated there with brunch and a mini party. Second time was in Scotland. My grandfather who had passed away was from there and had left me a bit of money saying, “Don’t spend this on bills.” So we went there, just the two of us, and renewed our vows on the top of a gorgeous mountain. The third time was at City Hall just the two of us. We hadn’t signed papers until then, so we were making it legal.

The kids
We don’t have any kids right now, but we’ve begun the adoption process. Until the adoption is finalized, our children are our two cats — Dr. Peter Venkman and Mr. Gary Wu.

Balancing careers and marriage
It’s all Keri. The wear and tear of spending half the year on the road without your partner, home, family, etc., is very hard for me, but Keri never makes me feel guilty. She only provides support and love, so to have her say, “Do what you need to, and when you get home, I’ll be waiting for you” is incredible.

The home
We live in Seaton Village, right beside the Annex. We’ve been here for almost four years — the longest we’ve ever lived anywhere. We are in the initial process of renovating so that we’re ready to raise a kid here.

Stintz on Midtown: Mayor Tory needs to bring ambitious ideas to Midtown park planning

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9:02 am

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Big city mayors are expected to have big ideas that transform their respective cities. Mayor Tory launched his big idea for a new major park in downtown Toronto, to be built over the rail corridor between Bathurst Street and Blue Jays Way. The Rail Deck Park project is similar in concept to Chicago’s Millennium Park.

It is a bold, creative and ambitious plan, not just because it has not been done anywhere else in the city or the country, but also because it is currently unfunded.

The need for more park space is not just a downtown issue. It is also becoming a Midtown issue. The pace of growth in Midtown is not surprising given that the Yonge-Eglinton area has been rated as the best neighbourhood in the city to live based on indicators such as housing, schools, employment, shopping and access to transit. Interestingly, access to parks and green space was not one of the indicators.

In spite of the many attributes of the Midtown area, it has been identified through multiple planning reports that the area is deficient in park space relative to the population and need.

The solution to more parkland in the area is to apply the same creativity to Midtown as the Rail Deck proposal applies to downtown. The former bus terminal at Yonge and Eglinton provides a creative solution to more parkland for Midtown.

After 10 years, the bus bays have finally been demolished, and the land is currently being used for LRT construction.

Once the LRT becomes operational in 2021, the Toronto City Council–approved plan was to sell the land to build a mixed-use development. But that was before the current condo boom. There is a strong case to be made that the highest and best use for the land today is not for more housing but for more green space.

Turning the land into parkland is not only a creative solution, it may be the most practical one.

There are many constraints on the land that make development difficult, including multiple ownership and the fact the air rights above the property are owned by a private developer who has not indicated a desire to sell.

The intense development in the area creates both the need and the funding opportunity. Through the use of development levies and fees, the city can begin a reserve fund to help pay for the cost of building the park.

The one thing this creative solution needs is a champion. Perhaps next year’s municipal election will provide an opportunity for that champion to emerge.

Road to Legalization: Forget pot brownies and edibles

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12:48 pm

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The provincial government made a big announcement on Sept. 8 regarding the proposed regulations for the sale and distribution of recreational cannabis. Provided that the legalization bill passes on the federal level by July 1, 2018, the Ontario government has proposed a strict LCBO-based model involving the distribution and retail of cannabis by a subsidiary company or the Cannabis Control Board of Ontario (CCBO).

The Ontario government hopes to open 150 stand-alone stores by 2020, 80 by July 1, 2018, while also implementing an online distribution platform. These stores would exclusively sell cannabis, a provision that addresses the concerns of the possibility of cannabis and alcohol being consumed in tandem, as this can have potentially negative consequences.

Inside the CCBO, trained staff would follow stringent guidelines to verify consumer age and provide over the counter service (similar to how tobacco is currently accessed), as well as education about responsible cannabis use.

In the spirit of this highly rigorous framework, the Ontario government will take its direction from the feds for all things related to product offerings, packaging, advertising and restricting access for youth.

This proposed plan, although not surprising, has some worried about the future of the recreational cannabis market.

“It’s not going to succeed. There are more dispensaries operating currently than the government plans to operate in the next one to three years,” says Jodie Emery, an outspoken voice on the issue and previously the owner of a chain of illegal retail dispensaries in Toronto and Vancouver under the name of Cannabis Culture.

Emery’s belief that the proposed distribution model will not be able to compete with the current illicit market that has flourished since Prime Minister Trudeau’s initial announcement, in 2015, to federally legalize cannabis is shared by others in the industry. Further, Emery says, this plan will limit the opportunity for entrepreneurs, innovators and small business owners to participate in the market in a meaningful way.

This outlook may appeal to that voice inside that longs to experience a less-controlled legalized regime, but it’s also essential to acknowledge that legalizing cannabis on both federal and provincial levels is a monumental task.

Colorado, among other jurisdictions, has gone through several revisions to their approach over the last three years. Starting out with a significantly open policy, Colorado has since clamped down on the legal cannabis market.

Although the LCBO-based model for rolling out the legalization of an adult-use cannabis market may not be the most popular option initially, it is a framework that will give the people of Ontario legal access to cannabis, and that, in and of itself, is an incredible thing.

“Ultimately, we have to be happy with what we have. Just because it might be a bit restrictive doesn’t mean we can’t look at it as an opportunity for improvement,” says Ian Rapsey, the chief creative officer at Cannabis Wheaton.

Rapsey is hopeful that the LCBO model could provide opportunities for brands and products to rise above the noise through innovation.

Although the exact details of the proposed plan have yet to be ironed out, the province could be looking at providing an experience similar to alcohol.

Although you may not be able to buy weed brownies on July 1 next year, the Ontario government will need to address, over time, the issue of product diversity in order to compete with what is currently available on the illicit market.

The conversation about how cannabis legalization will look in Ontario isn’t over just yet. In fact, it’s only just begun.

But if you’re looking forward to legally acquiring your favourite infused products or a moon rock joint for the weekend, you’ll have to wait a little longer.