Williams Lake First Nation is looking to set up a retail cannabis shop in Merritt.
Chief Willie Sellars said there were many factors to consider, how many retail stores are there in the region, a good location and a landlord to work with them, and a municipality that wants to work with them as well, which all seems to have fallen in place
“We had a great relationship and dialogue with the landlord. We presented to the Merritt Mayor and City Council on Tuesday, we’ve reached out to local First Nations and started to create that dialogue as well. So far so good, I mean it’s all going to fall on of course the province and you know getting our licence approved, our application did go in.”
Sellars added that they’ve looked at an older, vintage hotel located right downtown with a rustic historic vibe to it that goes with their boutique-retail experience.
“It’s an older, vintage hotel located right downtown in Merritt,” Sellars said, “It checked all of the boxes for us, there’s a suite upstairs that we’ll be able to house some of our management staff, we have membership that lives in Merritt, there’s a number of local First Nation communities that surround the City that we’d be able to employ and train. There’s also a bustling economy there that we would be able to tap into to give people the opportunity for employment which is what it’s all about, is creating jobs.”
Sellars added looking to expand was always the vision at Williams Lake First Nation when they signed that agreement with the province.
“The section 119 agreement with the province of British Columbia we have the ability to open up 8 stores or have 8 retail licences were we want in the province.” Sellars said, “Right now we have our Unity store in the City of Williams Lake, when we open up our farm-to-gate facility at Sugar Cane Cannabis is going to be another storefront there so that will be another licence. So that means we have 6 more licences to open up retail stores across the province and the first one that we’re looking at is of course Merritt and we’re hopefully going to grow from there.”