March 7th - 2008

Ottawa gets grow house registry

A new online registry will allow potential homebuyers in Ottawa to find out if the house they want to buy has been used as a marijuana grow house or crystal meth lab.

A new online registry will allow potential homebuyers in Ottawa to find out if the house they want to buy has been used as a marijuana grow house or crystal meth lab.  In early February, Ottawa police started posting addresses of former drug operations on their Web site, similar to the service provided to residents by several other Ontario municipalities.
 
Thanks to the combined efforts of the Ottawa Real Estate Board and Crime Prevention Ottawa, the locations of dismantled marijuana grow operations and crystal meth labs will appear on www.ottawapolice.ca for three months after the criminal investigations associated with specific addresses are concluded. The information posted will include the date, the address, the controlled substances seized and the charges laid.
 
Other polices services and municipalities in Ontario that already have online registries as well as those that provide either lists or bulletins or other ways to access the information include:

  • London at www.police.london.ca
  • The town of Caledon at www.town.caledon.on.ca, under town hall, departments, building and bylaw enforcement.
  • Durham Region at http://www.drps.ca/netscape under What’s New.
  • Mississauga – Peel Police will not publish a list due to the privacy law. However, members can call up and give an address and then find out if that particular property is on the list.
  • Niagara Region members can call the Niagara Regional Police and ask if a specific property has been a grow house.
  • In Peterborough, members can only have information verified by the Drug Enforcement Officer.
  • The Toronto Police Service does not provide lists of know grow houses. REALTORS® can contact the station close to the house in question, but there is no standard policy across the service on how to deal with the requests.
  • Windsor-Essex County Real Estate Board obtains an annual list of grow houses in the area which is circulated to members.

Most other real estate boards in the province have been trying unsuccessfully to implement a grow-op registry in their municipalities. However, the Ontario government has a "Green Tide Action Group" (GTAG) that OREA has been an active member of for several years. Discussions are on-going with the province for the creation of a provincial registry system. For more information see page 26 of the OREA Fall 2007 Legislative and Regulatory Update on the Government Relations page at www.orea.com.

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Ontario Real Estate Association

Jean-Adrien Delicano

Senior Manager, Media Relations

JeanAdrienD@orea.com

416-445-9910 ext. 246

Ontario Real Estate Association
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