This is a reminder to Quebec and Ontario’s General Population that all Tobacco and Cannabis stores are presently closed, and no tobacco or cannabis products are sold anywhere on Kanesatake’s Territory.
Despite our efforts to keep tourists or tobacco / cannabis customers aware of the fact that all stores in the community have closed since March 23rd 2020, many people still venture, in vain, everyday to look for such products.
Our community, like many other indigenous communities in Quebec and Canada, have erected checkpoints in order to refrain access in our region, and to send any non-local back home where they should be self-isolating.
We have had many tourists come to our door steps. We’ve even had people presenting signs of sickness knocking on the doors of elders in our community in order to find-out if some stores were open. We also intercepted people from the highly infected regions of Montreal and Laval trying to come do their shopping in our village under the pretext that our region has less cases of infection. This type of behavior, at a time like this, is unacceptable and very irresponsible to say the least.
Today, because of such people, an additional checkpoint had to be erected in order to completely shutdown travel through our territory.
We cannot highlight and stress enough the fact that, in the best-case scenario where you come to our region, you will be turned around and leave empty handed. The worst-case scenario involves leaving our territory with a $1,000$+ fine in hand since SQ patrols have increased in and around our territory and they are on the look-out for such travel deemed unessential.
We thank you in advance for your cooperation.
