To get traction in a legal pot industry that’s overwhelmingly white and male, Mississauga entrepreneur Omar Ali first had to go by a different name.

Omar Ali found out the hard way that if he wanted to succeed as a licensed Ontario pot producer and seller, he might have to go by a different name.

After several applications for permits, municipal approvals and financing for his pot production company fell on deaf ears, Ali, 39, started to feel as if a stigma attached to his name was holding him back. So he decided to switch strategies, and started adopting his wife’s more French-sounding surname: Monpetit.

People were more receptive to Michael Monpetit, he said.

“This is the reality of the cards that we were dealt,” said Ali, speaking to the Star by phone from the Mississauga offices of SESS Holdings Inc., which he co-owns, serving as CEO and master grower for a brand that grows up to 20,000 plants at any given time, with buyers in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.

“I literally had to change my name just to get into this business,” he said.

Ali is one in a rare group of racialized executives having success in Canada’s nascent licensed cannabis industry. More than three years after legalization, he and other experts and entrepreneurs continue to point to financial and social barriers that are blocking more Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs from entering a legal pot industry that’s still overwhelmingly white and male.

According to the Centre on Drug Policy Evaluation (CDPE) and the University of Toronto, 84 per cent of executives and boards members at more than 200 licenced Canadian cannabis producers or their parent companies were white. Of the remainder, Black executives were particularly under-represented, at just one per cent of the total.

Also disproportionately absent from cannabis leadership positions: women, especially racialized women.

Vivianne Wilson, who is founder of GreenPort Cannabis Store on College Street, it’s no surprise to see dismal levels of diversity among cannabis executives, including retail store ownership, because the work wasn’t done to “make sure this program stood up in a way that enabled a wider group of people to participate.”

Wilson, the first Black woman to become an independent owner and operator of a licensed Canadian cannabis retail business, added: “It’s disappointing to know that this industry has become extremely corporate.”

It’s a gap that needed to have been addressed sooner, she said, because “right now to get into the industry, you’re coming into a saturated market.”

The diversity problem in the legal cannabis industry is especially concerning because racialized groups are the same people who had been disproportionately hurt by criminalization, said University of Toronto professor Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a senior author of the CDPE study.

Given the “discriminatory nature of our drug laws, today, and especially as they relate to the enforcement of cannabis laws previously, there is no sector in our society that I think deserves attention around equity, diversity and inclusion as much as cannabis does,” Owusu-Bempah said addressing more than 400 industry professionals at a recent Health Canada forum on diversity in the pot business.

“I find it offensive that Black and Indigenous people are so under-represented in our legal cannabis industry, precisely because these are the groups that were disproportionately targeted by police and prosecuted by the courts for offences under drug prohibition,” Owusu-Bempah said.

He said federal and provincial agencies need to find ways to channel under-represented people into the industry by allocating licenses for racialized groups and using a percentage of tax revenue to support that programming.

One step, he said, would be to expand the Navigator program meant to help Indigenous applicants — two per cent of executives, according to the CDPE study — to offer the same kind of culturally sensitive guidance to Black and other racialized groups.

Mike McGuire, director of licensing and securities division of the controlled substance and cannabis branch of Health Canada, described the forum, held late last month, as part of in a broader government effort to “remove systemic barriers from government programs and policies.” McGuire said a priority is to “increase the participation of Indigenous, Black and racialized communities,” through community outreach and information sessions.

“We recognize that barriers might look different across communities,” McGuire said.

“We know this is just the start of a conversation,” he said.

Health Canada also recently launched a survey of all cannabis license holders to collect its own data on who occupies leadership positions in the industry.

Both Wilson and Ali say they are making a point to tear down some of those barriers themselves, by hiring more people from racialized communities.

“We felt the punishment of the system prior to legalization,” Ali said.

“I have to give these people chances.”

Growing up on Jane Street, Ali said he was close to people involved in the Black market, but he decided to walk away from that world after watching people in his neighbourhood get arrested for possession, and his cousin get deported back to Guyana for drug trafficking.

A serial entrepreneur, Ali started a real estate business with his brother, Wahid Ali, and by 2017 the duo started to assemble a plan for their cannabis business — but getting any bank to support their dream with a loan seemed insurmountable. They had to remortgage three homes — both brothers’ and their mother’s — just to raise enough capital to get the ball rolling.

The pair had to take “every cent out of our account to try and lease a facility,” he said

Today, SESS operates from a 40,000-square-foot facility and employs more than 80 staff, more than 90 per cent BIPOC, Ali says.

“People need to know there is a real struggle,” he said.