The difference is in Canada it's actually fully legal at all levels of government, so the transaction is a normal point of sale transaction, it can also go through a credit card as a normal purchase without being subjected to the expensive cash advance interest rates, and so on. It can even be a tax-deductible and reimbursable business entertainment expense under similar conditions to alcohol.
Its super weird how america can make things half legal. In canada the responsibilities are divided up between different levels of government. None of this legal at one level but not another level bullshit.
The same is true in Canada. There are things that are federally illegal that are not illegal at the provincial level. There are also local laws that supersede federal law. E.g. There is no federal law against woodburning for home heat, but many local jurisdictions have banned it for air quality reasons, and provinces also have pollution laws. You can have something be illegal in one town, and legal outside of it, or illegal province wide but legal in another province.
What is going on is that not that weed is 'half-legal' in the states. It is fully illegal. What is true is that the federal enforcers have more or less decided to leave people alone when the state allows the use of Marijuana. Pre 2017, the exact same thing was happening across Canada where local jurisdictions allowed cannabis use and sales, and the RCMP basically turned a blind eye. Vancouver is the most obvious example, where there was actually a decline in the number of dispensaries after weed became federally legal.
> There are also local laws that supersede federal law. E.g. There is no federal law against woodburning for home heat, but many local jurisdictions have banned it for air quality reasons, and provinces also have pollution laws
That's not what supersede means.
There is no federal law about wood burning stoves because the constitution assigns environment to the provinces.
It was supposed to be that way in the US but then populists decided they wanted the federal government to do all the things the constitution said it couldn't.
If you mean provinces in Canada's context, then no, the number of provinces does not fit on one hand. In fact it barely fits on two, and that's only if you don't count the territories as well.
A bigger factor is that the Canadian prohibition was only controlled at the federal level in the first place, like all Canadian criminal law, so only the federal government had to legislate to change it. The provinces have however done lots of subsequent legislation to regulate the details (e.g. distribution channels and the exact minimum age limit) in a wide variety of ways.
