The Competitive World of Medical Marijuana

Master horticulturalist Francoise Levesque tends to the thousands of marijuana plants at Tilray, one of 35 federally licensed producers of medicinal marijuana that have brought pot growing “from the basement into the light.”

“We are pioneering, in a way, how to do things,” says Levesque, who was growing tomatoes before joining the Vancouver Island company.

But pioneering is rarely easy work.

Tilray won a coveted licence in 2014 for the previous Conservative government’s mail-order medical pot system, but, like many of the licensed producers, has since endured a boom-and-bust cycle.

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Operations at Tilray, one of Canada’s medical cannabis producers. (Tilray)

Encouraged by Ottawa to move quickly, it invested $26 million in its Nanaimo warehouse and had big expansion plans; a year later it laid off a third of its staff, in part because of foot dragging by the Tories to green-light the facilities and also due to...

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