While the fight to qualify for Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) compensation amid the COVID-19 outbreak continues, licensed cannabis producers may be able to get up to $500,000 in short-term loans under a new $5 billion Farm Credit Canada (FCC) stimulus.

Leaders of Canada’s cannabis industry are pleading with the federal government for help to curb the damage the coronavirus pandemic is having on the sector.

Cannabis companies are currently left out of the federal government’s $82 billion stimulus package, something Rick Savone, SVP Global Government Relations for Aurora Cannabis Inc, hopes will change sooner rather than later.

“Those measures the government has announced, albeit early measures, still don’t seem to exclude many people but they definitely exclude the cannabis industry,” Savone said, adding Aurora Cannabis alone employs nearly 3,000 people.

“Were in a crisis where there’s no more time to deliberate these things,” he said.

Canadian officials are turning to the cannabis industry to see if laboratories typically used to check for cannabinoids can be also used to test for COVID-19. 

In an email sent to licensed cannabis industry executives on Thursday obtained by BNN Bloomberg, Health Canada acting director general Joanne Garrah asked respondents if there was any spare lab capacity to assist the country with COVID-19 testing. 

"Health Canada is working to identify lab capacity that might be available across the country in various sectors, including at licensed cannabis production sites, to assist with supporting COVID-19 testing," the email stated. 

Mohawk communities in Canada have closed their cannabis dispensaries and tobacco shops in an effort to reduce the flow of visitors amid the continuing outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19. But despite the move, non-Indigenous people continue to visit, worrying residents that the virus will show up in their communities.

As the legal marijuana business continues to expand, staff at one Canadian cannabis company are looking to unionize in what would be a first in the country’s legal pot industry.

International labor union United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has been in contact with workers at Ontario cannabis producer WeedMD to start negotiating contracts, according to national representative Kevin Shimmin.

The novel coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, China in December last year. Officially called COVID-19, the virus since then has become a global pandemic. In an effort to control the spread in Canada, it was announced recently that non-essential businesses will shut down in Ontario and Quebec. Pot shops, deemed essential, will remain open.

Cannabis, as it turns out, is an increasingly popular choice of those prepping for isolation.

Approximately 4,000 times these past two weeks, I’ve thanked my lucky stars cannabis was legalized before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe and sent us all cowering in our bong dens.

On the outskirts of Toronto, next to the Pearson International Airport, there is a 16,000 square foot cannabis testing laboratory whose owner says it can process 500 coronavirus tests a day. With an investment for additional equipment, that number could rise to more than 1,000 tests a day. 

“Testing right now is just way too slow, it’s unbearably slow,” John Slaughter, the CEO of High North Laboratories told The GrowthOp. “So we started looking internally to see what would it take for us to do that kind of testing and found out it wasn’t really much. We were right on the cusp of it anyway.”

For the second time in two years, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) has delayed a critical vote on the reclassification of cannabis. The CND met in Vienna, Austria from March 2-6. The vote is now expected to happen in December 2020. The discussion about reclassification of the plant, however, has been going on for a little longer than that.

In Canada, odors in vehicles while driving will count as “reasonable suspicion” for police to request an oral fluid sample at roadside. But what about the U.S.?

Legal cannabis is still a relatively new industry in North America. Complete legalization of cannabis took place in Canada in October 2019. The laws in Canada and the U.S. with relation to legal cannabis continue to differ for the main reason that the U.S. has not yet federally legalized cannabis (it is only fully legal medically and for adult use in 11 states), although over three-quarters of the American public report being in favor of complete legalization.