Landlords tend to have a lot of rules around cannabis, smoking, and vaping. Here are some important things to know for tenants.
First and foremost, landlord-tenant relations tend to be laid out in provincial legislation. So depending on where you live in Canada, you should check out your province’s or territory’s legislation tenancy act. It should have further details on using cannabis as a tenant. For example, British Columbia‘s Residential Tenancy Act allows no-smoke clauses to extend to smoking cannabis.
Though different parts of Canada have different rules, there is also a lot of overlap between tenancy acts from region to region. Because of this, there are some general guidelines to know if you’re renting. First, whether you can smoke cannabis or not depends on your landlord. If your tenancy agreement states that you can’t smoke, then you have to follow that rule. But, these agreements do not necessarily extend to other forms of consumption. For the most part, if you’re just eating edibles or taking cannabis oil, landlords cannot forbid you from doing so.
There do exist some exceptions to this rule of thumb, though. In Saskatchewan, landlords can legally ban the possession of cannabis. So again, if you want to know more specific details, it is best to consult your province’s/territory’s tenancy act.
What About Medical Uses, Vaping, or Growing?
To get the easy one out of the way first, rules around growing are similar to ones around smoking. Landlords can forbid tenants from growing anything on their property, which extends to cannabis cultivation.
As for medical marijuana, rules vary a lot more. For example, in New Brunswick, medicinal cannabis follows the same rules as recreational cannabis. If your medicinal usage involves smoking cannabis, landlords can ban you from using it, but they cannot stop non-smoke forms of consumption. Whereas in B.C., due to legal precedents, the province deems access to medicinal marijuana as a basic right and landlords have a duty to accommodate a person’s medical needs.
Finally, for vaping, rules tend to sit in a grey area. Some provinces and territories extend smoking rules to vapes. But in other places, there are no concrete legal clauses around it. In such cases, it’s usually up to the landlord to decide whether vaping is allowed or not. And if there’s a lack of clarity in your tenancy agreement, it would be best to talk to them to clear things up.