EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a new Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Ontario's numbers show a slightly different trend than other high-population provinces, where sales started to flatten earlier, in early 2021, as shown in the chart below. A yearly trend of December highs and February lows are expected, experts explain; they connect it to an uptick in holiday-related cannabis sales.
Legal cannabis, like concrete, pineapples or anything else, must eventually have a more or less stable market size. Is that the ceiling the industry has hit? "There is opportunity that still is untapped," he says. "You can't buy a cannabis beverage or a cannabis product in a restaurant, you can't buy it in a hotel, you can't buy it in a bar. You can't buy a cannabis beverage, you can buy a beer, wine, hard liquor, all those great things. You can't buy an edible, you can't buy a preroll."
Large numbers of retail stores and falling prices for legal dry flower have made it easier recently for the legal market to compete with its illicit rival. According to the most recent survey data available, 71 per cent of Canadian cannabis users said they bought their cannabis from a legal source — 61 per cent from stores, and another 10 per cent online — a number that had risen 7 per cent in a year.