Landlords of renegade CAFE pot shops move to have charges dismissed

They're the illegal cannabis shops that just won't quit. And now the City of Toronto's latest tactic in its battle with the CAFE chain might be doomed, with a businessman complaining it's become a pot mess and he's caught in the crossfire.

Since the first branch of CAFE — short for Cannabis and Fine Edibles — opened downtown in 2016, police and city officials have been trying to shut down the business, which doesn't have a provincial dispensary licence or adhere to federal law.

Raiding the renegade weed store's now four locations, seizing their supplies of bud, changing the locks, welding the doors shut and, finally, piling huge concrete slabs in front of the entrances to bar access — none of it has worked. Each time, the same stores have reopened.

In its latest attempts to force closed the sleek coffee shops that double as illicit pot dispensaries, the city is resorting to the courts, where it's heaped charges on the landlords who own the buildings where CAFE operates. The provincial Cannabis Control Act makes it illegal for a landlord to "knowingly permit a premises" to be used to sell illegal weed. 

"We've gotten to a point where we need to rely on the court process to deal with this," Carleton Grant, executive director of the city's licensing and standards division, told CBC Toronto last month. 

For individual landlords, the charges carry a potential maximum penalty of a $250,000 fine and two years in jail for a first conviction, and then $100,000 per day in fines plus two years in jail for subsequent convictions. 

But the provincial cannabis law also provides a defence to any landlord who takes "reasonable measures to prevent the activity," and one of CAFE's landlords, who's facing seven charges, told CBC this week that he's tried everything he can to get rid of his scofflaw tenants, and the city refuses to help. 

"It's basically the city trying to make their problem, my problem," Mohsen Ghelichkhani said. "This is such a clusterf--k."

Ghelichkhani owns the premises of CAFE's flagship store at 66 Fort York Blvd., a live-work condo unit in CityPlace. He claims he tried evicting his tenants via Ontario's Landlord and Tenant Board, but the LTB balked when it saw that the dispute was about a commercial operation.

Then he tried to hire a bailiff to force out CAFE, he maintains, but the bailiff wouldn't take up the case because the lease they signed five years ago is a residential one, and residential disputes have to go to the LTB.

"Then I go back to the city and I'm like, 'Well, what am I supposed to do now?'... I flat out said, 'Tell me what to do? And I will do it. It's as simple as that.' And you know, nobody gets back to us, except giving us more tickets," Ghelichkhani said.

"They've come up with zero solutions. I mean, they've tried themselves as well. They've put concrete blocks, security, police officers, raids, change the locks, change the door. And now they throw their hands up in the air and then just go 'OK, well, we're going to put pressure on you.'"

He said his understanding is that while he still owns the property, because of a closure order imposed by law enforcement when they raided CAFE back in 2018, "the city has had possession of the property. So they're really giving themselves tickets."

"That plays a big part in any alleged inaction of the landlords," Ghelichkhani's lawyer Noel Gerry told CBC News.