Among thousands of workers currently being furloughed in North America, Canopy Growth will also temporarily lay off some 200 employees, as provinces across Canada are entering shutdowns amid the virus outbreak.

“We’ve temporarily laid off 200 retail workers and have started re-opening some corporate-owned locations using a click and collect model and reduced hours,” Canopy Growth vice president of communications, Jordan Sinclair, told BNN Bloomberg.

“As you can appreciate, the situation is changing quickly and subject to different rules in different provinces,” he added.

The Ontario government’s decision to remove cannabis retail from the essential businesses list has left the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS) as the only option for weed lovers.

The Ontario Cannabis Store will, once again, have a monopoly in the province.

Brick-and-mortar cannabis shops will be removed from Ontario’s list of essential services, Doug Ford announced on Friday afternoon. The emergency order will go into effect Saturday night and will last for at least the next two weeks. 

Ontario, which had just begun to ramp up its offerings of cannabis retail locations, including several stores opening across the province just this week, will now rely on the OCS for all legal weed. 

The Ottawa Food Bank is getting a boost from one of Canada’s largest cannabis producers and one of the world’s most influential hip-hop groups.

In a video posted earlier this week on Twitter, Michael Maidment, the CEO of the Ottawa Food Bank, said the organization was in need of cash donations.

The Ontario government’s decision to shut down cannabis stores in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic will only send customers back to the black market where they’ll buy unregulated products, says one prominent retailer.

Cameron Brown, spokesman for the The Hunny Pot, says his company has two stores open already and four under construction. The company’s location in downtown Toronto was one of the first to open in April 2019 and has been doing brisk enough business that more stores are on the way.

He said after Premier Doug Ford announced pot shops would be closed due to COVID, his store in Toronto and another location in Burlington were swamped.

Shoppers lined up at Ottawa’s cannabis stores to stock up before the stores are ordered to close during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Ontario Government removed cannabis stores from the list of essential businesses allowed to stay open during the COVID-19 pandemic.  All non-essential stores must close by 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, April 4.

There were long lines at the Stash & Co. Recreational Cannabis on Bank Street and the Fire & Flower Cannabis store on York Street Friday evening.

Inventory data from the Ontario Cannabis Store's online store shows that the sales bump seen earlier in the month may have trailed off after taking stock over the past weekend, BMO Capital Markets analyst Tamy Chen said in a report released on Tuesday.

For example, inventory levels of dried flower on the OCS website fell by 13,000 items during the week of March 13, Chen said. Those levels bounced back two weeks later to show a decline of just 2,300 items, a sign that cannabis producers were better equipped to replenish their inventory, she said. Similar inventory moves were observed with vape products on the OCS website.

Canadians are being encouraged to stay home as much as possible amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But cannabis-loving Ontarians have had to venture outdoors to a brick-and-mortar pot shops if they wanted to receive their weed in a timely manner this week.

The Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS) has announced planned service delays associated with shipping products to clients. “With the end of our financial year, it is time for our annual inventory review with the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario,” reads a statement posted to the OCS website.

s misinformation on COVID-19 continues to spread almost as fast as the virus itself, one Canadian company wants to separate fact from fiction on whether compounds in cannabis can help treat the disease.

Toronto-based Cannalogue, a medical cannabis e-commerce firm, has applied to Health Canada to conduct a clinical trial to see if cannabidiol (CBD) can reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms in patients.