Tumbler Ridge is home to one of three Geoparks in Canada. It is also home to one of only 13 licenced private, non-medicinal cannabis stores in the entire province.
It could have been the first, at least in the Peace, but municipal elections put the store a month or more off schedule, says Christine Vandeburgt.
She and her husband Kees opened the new store on Saturday, February 23.
“Once we got approval in principle from the province, the District needed to pass a motion saying they would support our business with the hours we applied for,” says Vandeburgt. “We talked to them before we even applied to the government. The whole process started with the outgoing council, because it was so close to the election. We got our approval in principle two days before the election.”
That was a big deal. The amount of paperwork to get the store up and running was monumental. “It’s a major paperwork commitment. The application process is long. They do background checks. Financial. Personal. Everything. If they ask for it, you have to give it to them. We even had a guy, an ex-fraud investigator. He did an interview with us one on one, individually. He said he’d even snooped my Facebook page to see what sort of people we were. The application fee alone is $7500, and then the licencing fee is another $1500, I think.”
So, having invested so much time and money into the project, the couple was keen to get started. But, Vandeburgt says, she discovered the new council wasn’t going to have its first meeting until the third week in November.
She asked the then council if they could have a special meeting to expedite the process. The former mayor Don McPherson called the meeting, “but nobody showed up except the mayor and one councillor,” she says. “Both the outgoing council and incoming council were in support. It was just about timing.”
She says if they had managed to get the motion dealt with then, they would have had the store open my mid-December. Not only did they miss two months in sales, including the Christmas rush, but it put them behind the store in Pouce Coupe. “When I talked to the fraud investigator, he asked if we were getting excited. I said ‘yes, I’d like to be the first in the province.’ They hadn’t issued any licences at that point. He said we wouldn’t be first, but we were the second person he had interviewed. So we would have been first in the region.”
Being first wasn’t just for bragging rights. “We believe that would have been a drawing card to Tumbler ridge,” she says. “If we were the first, we would draw people from Dawson, from Chetwynd…that doesn’t just help us, that helps the rest of the town.”
Ridge Cannabis came into being because of fortunate timing. “It all started because PRC’s lease ended and we needed to find something to put over there,” says Vandeburgt. The couple not only own the Dollar Store, but the entire business, including the newly vacated space. “It’s hard to make ends meet in this community and we have a mortgage to pay and that sort of thing. The timing just seemed to be right. We lost PRC at the end of June, and marijuana was going to be legal in October, so that’s when we started thinking about it.”
Unlike some people, who see the legalization of marijuana as a political and moral victory, Vandeburgt says she just saw it as a business opportunity. “I was a little hesitant at first about the whole marijuana thing,” she says. “I didn’t know if that was something I wanted to get into, but it was an opportunity we couldn’t pass on. I tried it in high school, but that’s it, so it’s a big learning curve.”
Fortunately, most people know what they want, which is good, because legally, they are not allowed to give people advice. “We can tell them how much THC or CBD is in it. But we can’t give them any advice, which makes it easier. If you want to know something, you’ll have to research it on the internet. We’re learning the lingo. It’s a learning curve. People who know about pot will come in with other people who are newbies and they’ll tell them all about it, and I’ll just listen so I can learn.”
She says the biggest surprise so far has been how well received the new store has been.
“For us, it’s about the opportunity that fell into our lap at the right time. It’s something we thought would be exciting. To be a pioneer, because it’s a brand new industry in Canada. It’s all about business for us. If there are people saying bad things, they’re not saying it to our face. There are people who say ‘I was against legalization, but now that it’s legal, you guys just took advantage of an opportunity and ran with it, so good for you.’ I expected more negativity, but people have been very open and warm and happy about it.”
The store was expected to open February 25, but everything was ready, so they opened the doors two days early. “I announced it on Facebook about an hour and a half before we opened, so we didn’t have any line-ups or anything. That was a good thing, because everything is new. The POS is new, the debit machine is new…so we didn’t have any panic figuring things out.”
The store will be open 9-11, seven days a week, for now. “The hours are regulated by the Liquor Control Branch, and that’s what we’re allowed. We decided it would be easier to figure out what hours works now and scale back, rather than try and guess later.”
Currently, the store sells cannabis Flower, oil, capsules, pre-rolls and paraphernalia. “By October 17 of this year, the next wave will be coming through: edibles, concentrates and topicals, so we can add that to our inventory,” she says. “But other than that…we can’t sell swag, like hats or tee-shirts. We can’t even sell incense. It’s very regulated. I assumed the regulations would be similar to liquor, but it’s way tighter. I think in the future it’ll come more in line with that, but time will tell.”
