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Pot Advertising, Leonard Cohen and Chimps: The Canada Letter

Legal recreational marijuana smoke wafts into Canadian skies in about eight months, a subject I wrote about this week. The authorities have a mound of details to work out on how legalization will work for sellers and buyers. But a much larger population — all Canadians — will encounter one area in particular: advertising.

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A greenhouse at the 7 Acres marijuana facility in Tiverton, Ontario.Credit...Cole Burston for The New York Times

How will promotion of Canada’s latest legal vice be regulated? The federal government has two models.

One is the system for cigarettes, which effectively bans most conventional advertising and marketing, requires stores to keep cigars and cigarettes out of sight and mandates that health warnings with gruesome photos dominate packaging. (A bill now before Parliament would also make the tobacco industry use generic packaging, without logos.)

Or the government could follow the regulatory pattern created for beer, wine and spirits. While those rules vary by province, pretty much anything goes other than showing actors and models actually sipping drinks, or making blatant appeals to children though, say, cartoon characters. And ads for spirits feature “consume responsibly” statements.

A group of 17 medical marijuana companies — which are all gearing up for the much bigger recreational market — released its advertising proposals this week. To no one’s surprise, they largely mirror the alcohol model.

They cast advertising not as a means of lifting sales but as something of a public service. In a news release, the group said that marijuana ads are “vital for the legal industry to have the tools necessary to push back against Canada’s thriving illegal market, while at the same time educating adult consumers about various product strains, responsible use, and how to differentiate between high and low quality cannabis product.”

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Marijuana buds being prepared at the Tiverton facility.Credit...Cole Burston for The New York Times

Most of the medical community and experts on drug abuse oppose widespread pot advertising.

“We have an opportunity to learn from where we are with alcohol,” said Rebecca Jesseman, a director and senior policy adviser at the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction, a federally funded agency. “We really need to take a more cautious approach.”

Among other things, Ms. Jesseman wants cigarette-like limits and packages that show warnings about marijuana-impaired driving and the health dangers of inhaling heated vapors.

The government won’t announce its plan until after the bill to legalize marijuana becomes law. Until then, Ms. Jesseman expects heavy lobbying by the industry.

“I do not envy the people in the government making the decision,” she told me.

Read: Ready or Not, Recreational Marijuana Use Is Coming to Canada

Andrea Kannapell, an editor at The Times, made the pilgrimage from New York to Montreal for the tribute concert for one the city’s best known native sons, the musician and poet Leonard Cohen, who died a year ago this month. Here’s her report.

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A mural of Leonard Cohen in the Montreal neighborhood that was his home.Credit...Andrea Kannapell/The New York Times

I confess that I went as a neophyte on Cohen, so this was a real voyage of discovery.

A colleague who is a much deeper scholar of his work told me about the tribute concert and connected me to the Leonard Cohen Forum, which offers aficionados the latest about events related to the singer. On a whim, I bought tickets to the concert at the Bell Center and also booked a spot on a tour the day before that was organized by a forum member.

On Sunday morning, more than 100 of us piled into two tour buses by one of the big hotels. People seemed to be from all over — the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, even Andorra and Cyprus.

The atmosphere was of a happy reunion — many of the pilgrims had been attending Cohen events for years, including an every-other-year visit to Hydra, the Greek island Cohen happened onto as a young man. There, he bought a house, wrote, and had one of his most iconic affairs (that’s the story behind “So Long, Marianne”).

Befitting his songs’ use of sacred terminology and often transcendent tone, our tour was bookended by houses of faith. One early stop was the synagogue of Cohen’s youth, Shaar Hashomayim, and our last was at the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel in Old Montreal (which plays into “Suzanne”).

At the temple, the very personable cantor, Gideon Zelermyer, gave an entrancing history of Cohen’s relationship with the synagogue and the evolution of the synagogue choir’s backing on “You Want It Darker.”

In the evening, at the 300-year-old chapel, the lights were warm and the altar painting of Mary was resplendent as two performers, Li’l Andy on guitar and Sylvie Simmons (Cohen’s biographer) on ukulele, sang a suite of his songs, elegies of loves indulged and lost, and his somehow uplifting regret.

As a fellow tour-taker, Ute Egle from central Germany, told me later, “If church would be like this, I would go more often.”

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The Bell Center in Montreal during a tribute to Leonard Cohen, who died one year ago.Credit...Andrea Kannapell/The New York Times

Here’s a review and a few clips from the tribute concert, which will be televised by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in January, featuring Sting, k.d. lang, Adam Cohen and Lana Del Rey. The Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal is presenting a special exhibition of Mr. Cohen’s work and the art he has inspired, including projections of lyrics from his songs on a grain elevator that dominates Montreal’s port, as well as a concert series of full performances of five of his albums.

After about a century, medical research on chimpanzees has effectively ended in North America. But moving the chimps now at universities and other research centers into retirement sanctuaries in the United States is taking longer than advocates for the intelligent and sociable animals had hoped.

Jim Gorman, a Times science writer, joined some chimps on the trip to their new home and has produced a moving, witty, not-to-be-missed story about their new lives.

Read: Lab Chimps Are Moving to Sanctuaries — Slowly

One of this week’s must reads from The Times appeared in Opinion. Until she received a cochlear implant seven years ago, Rachel Kolb had been profoundly deaf. During that time, she was frequently asked if she could hear music. Now that she finally can, Ms. Kolb has written an essay about the experience. Her reaction wasn’t what I expected. And after you read the essay, be sure to watch the innovative 360 video about Ms. Kolb’s relationship with music and the hearing world.

Read: Sensations of Sound: On Deafness and Music

Watch: 360 Video: Sensations of Sound

Two filmmakers from Vancouver, British Columbia, have gained access to what is perhaps the most mysterious hockey venue in the world: the Pyongyang Ice Rink in North Korea.

—My colleague Dan Levin made the trip to the Hart River in the Yukon Territory. Indigenous groups thought they had a deal to preserve its watershed. But the territorial government has a vision for the 26,000 square miles that emphasizes exploitation of gas, coal and other minerals. The dispute may shatter trust between indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians.

—Roy Halladay, the former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher who died in a plane crash, was mourned by many baseball fans. In an appreciation, Tyler Kepner, who interviewed Halladay for a book about pitching this spring, wrote that his "legacy, to me, is powerful and instructive in any field: The purity of the effort matters most.”

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for over a decade. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

Tell us what you think at nytcanada@nytimes.com. And, using the link above, please subscribe to the email newsletter version.

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