A Vancouver city councillor says he now has a security plan in place after being the target of online personal attacks and receiving threats from a person upset with the city’s crackdown on marijuana shops.
Kerry Jang of Vision Vancouver, who has been his party’s point man on the marijuana dispensary file, said he received a phone call Friday from a person who threatened to “get him.” He believes the person was at a protest outside city hall when the call was made.
“I could hear the protest in the background,” said Jang, referring to the event where about 30 people gathered to protest the city’s ticketing of pot shops. “If someone’s angry, that’s fine. But then it took a different turn – ‘I’m going to come and get you, we’re going to find you,’ things like that, which crosses the line.”
On Monday, Jang said he was alerted his Wikipedia page was altered. The hacker, or hackers, referred to Jang as a prohibitionist and added lewd and racist material to the page. Combined, the two incidents caused Jang to contact the city’s corporate security team.
“They’ve been taking measures to make sure me and my family are safe,” said Jang, who declined to elaborate but said Vancouver police were notified about the incidents.
Const. Brian Montague, a VPD media liaison officer, said in an email to the Courier that “it would be inappropriate for us to confirm anything publicly unless it resulted in a criminal charge.”
On Monday, the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries issued a press release, saying it condemned the threats and stood in support of Jang and his family.
“Threats directed towards our elected officials are completely unacceptable,” said Dieter MacPherson, president of the association. “We live in a democracy and our elected officials deserve the same right to safety and security as enjoyed by every Canadian.”
MacPherson noted the city’s new regulations are contentious but said they are “a big step” towards ensuring people have access to safe, consistent and affordable medical cannabis.
As a politician, Jang said, he’s accepted that not everyone will support decisions that he or other members of council make. But this time, he said, his “clinical sense” was the threats were real. Jang is a professor of psychiatry at the University of B.C.
The phone call to Jang came on the same day the city set as a deadline for all pot shops that didn’t meet new regulations to close their doors.
In June 2015, Jang and council approved a series of measures to regulate the growing number of illegal marijuana dispensaries in Vancouver. At the time of the decision, about 100 illegal pot shops were operating in the city.
Jang has always made it clear the city’s goal was never to regulate the marijuana, but to bring some order to the shops and have them undergo a rigorous review before obtaining a business licence.
He said, for the most part, the industry is following the processes in place to obtain a licence, including closing their doors if they didn’t fall into a permitted zone or were too close to a school or community centre.
“These are the very regulations that they wanted,” he said, noting council heard a lot of support from the industry during last year’s public hearings on the issue. But, he said, there is a “fringe element” that doesn’t support the regulations and he believes it is behind the recent incidents.
“It’s disconcerting and that’s only because of the unpredictability of all this, and when it crosses the line, you kind of wonder,” he said.
Pot activist Jodie Emery attended last Friday’s protest at city hall, where she told the Courier that Jang was biased against the pot shops because of his work in addictions.
“So now we have someone whose expertise is in drug addictions?” Emery said. “Obviously, his bias against marijuana is showing when he gleefully smiles and says today is the drop-dead date [for shops to close]. That’s the kind of attitude and prejudice.”
To date, the city has issued 44 tickets to pot shops who failed to close. At least 22 shops abided by the city’s April 29 deadline and closed their doors. The first business licence issued to a pot shop could come before the end of the month. It costs $30,000 per year for a retail business licence and $1,000, if the dispensary qualifies as a “compassion club.”
mhowell@vancourier.com
@Howellings
