The grey area lies in the fact that you could be both a biker and a designated grower authorized to sell Mettrum and Tweed their “root material,” which could get very close to being actual weed. What was the specific definition of root material? At what point in a plant’s maturation cycle did root material become illegal drugs? Was it the RCMP’s job to inspect every bud and, if so, how?
At the time, the RCMP’s director of strategic communications said, “This highlights the deficiencies in the new regulations.” And the new regulations were designed to replace the old regulations — which also had deficiencies.
The government apparently wanted the Kelowna episode kept quiet because it looked as if the two ministries, health and justice, were working against each other. The newly licensed producers ended up leaving the scene without their cannabis materials. But no charges were filed. Linton sent out a press release. “We have completed acquisition of seeds and plants to offer a wide variety of choices,” it read, which further infuriated the police in BC, who were informed by head office in Ottawa to stay mum.
Linton not only bought more product than the competition, but he then sent out a press release after he’d embarrassed the RCMP, who, six months later, had to return the now-dead cannabis to Mettrum and Tweed.
None of this did anything to slow the business. By the end of 2014, Mettrum had more than two thousand patients and had done more than $2 million in sales. MedReleaf had sold $1.5 million of medicinal marijuana and Bedrocan had sold over $1 million.
Young Lion: Linton at the start of his Canopy journey, in Smiths Falls.
Linton tells me that he always saw himself as different from his competition. The competition says that he did this to a fault. Bruce didn’t care about patients, they tell me. He only cared about his stock price and used “farm accounting,” valuations today based on tomorrow’s yields, which, his competitors derisively say, he must have known would never come because the estimates were too high. When that happened, go the whispers, Linton simply moved the goal posts again.
Still, while other weed brands were trying to attract patients, Linton went after retail investors and took his company public.
Bruce Linton wasn’t interested in growing marijuana, not solely.
He wanted to grow Tweed into the biggest brand in the world.
Part II Reward
Chapter 6 Bruce Being Bruce
“In the end I just said, ‘Fuck it, let’s make a brand.’”
Bruce Linton
“The narrative always needs advancing.”
Again, Bruce
Bruce Linton isn’t flashy. I had breakfast with Trevor Fencott at the Soho House. Bruce and I got eggs in the basement of a mall. He isn’t on social media, and he doesn’t obsessively check the market. He’s like a scientist determined to see his theorem proved true. He’s driven by convictions. Not moral convictions, but ideas, visions — epiphanies, energy, and a lack of self-doubt. Chutzpah, to prove himself right.
“I didn’t set out to say, ‘Oh, I’m from Canada. Can I please come in sixth?’ No. I set out to be the biggest in the world,” he told me. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”
It’s not greed that fuels him, but size — ego in seeing his team win. He didn’t have any personal reasons to get into cannabis, and he says he had lots of other ideas at the time he first thought of Tweed. Linton, instinctive, who told me he almost certainly has ADHD, had been a serial tech entrepreneur since the early 1990s. He was interested, for instance, in parking meters, and also raw sewage, and, of course, he planned to continue to play the capital markets by launching IPOs in global tech. In 2011, he applied to run the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene program at the Gates Foundation — the only job he ever wanted, he says, that he was rejected for.
Married with two sons, generous and loyal, book-averse, with a good sense of humour and self-made wealth, today, fifty-eight years old, paunchy, and game, Linton had built a tech company, CrossKeys Systems, which he took public, then launched WebHancer and became CEO of Martello Technologies, which also had an IPO. He read about the pot laws changing in the Globe and Mail, and, though he had no experience in the culture, it struck a chord.
“Are you fucking telling me I have a direct-to-consumer marijuana business opportunity where the government is handing out a few licences and you keep all the margin, not Shoppers Drug Mart?” asks Linton in one of the many walk-and-talk interviews we conducted while he was bored out of his mind during Covid-19. “It seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Linton’s house is big, but it’s not palatial. Stephen Arbib from MedReleaf in comparison lives like a Roman emperor. Bruce Linton lives like a suburban dad whose dental practice, for instance, does very well. His home is at the end of a cul-de-sac outside Ottawa. It’s red brick and Victorian and has a longish driveway where he parks his old Ford. He relies on his personality — accessible and outspoken, chatty and shrewd — to provide the pizzazz, not his things. There are three pot plants, grown by his son, in Bruce Linton’s backyard, and they’re scrawny, almost sad, which is no surprise. Linton says he’d never seen pot, let alone smoked it, before applying for his medical marijuana licence. He simply followed his curiosity. Linton says he got into tech because he didn’t understand it. Marijuana would be exactly the same thing.
“I was almost disinterested in the amount of money we might make. It never crossed my mind,” he says. His co-founder, Chuck Rifici, is a former chief financial officer of the Liberal Party of Canada, a position he was appointed to in 2011 by Bob Rae. Linton and Rifici started Tweed, the fifth Canadian company to receive a medical marijuana licence. Given Rifici’s political connections, it has always been speculated that Tweed benefitted from favouritism, receiving inside information from the government, especially as Justin Trudeau came on the scene. Despite an introduction from Gertner and trading emails with Rifici, I could never get Rifici on the phone — in 2021, Rifici was rumoured to be in negotiations for the purchase of Pornhub — and Linton, of course, says any rumours of favouritism are completely false.
Linton tells me he first hired Chuck Rifici for a previous business, a Quebec-based company called Sitebrand, as a favour to Rifici’s wife. “She was going to get married to Chuck, who was out of work and looking, and so I put Chuck in as CFO over there.” That was back in 2007, and Linton says Rifici did a good job as CFO, but after he left the company, the two men lost touch. Linton eventually ran into Rifici’s wife again, and they had a similar conversation. “She’d gone on mat leave with their first kid and I bumped into her and said, ‘How’s things going?’ ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Except Chuck’s out of work again. Do you have anything?’”
Linton had something: parking meters. But he also had this cannabis thing, and when he met with Rifici in the late fall of 2012 — “I want to fix parking, but this pot thing is obvious, too” — he found Rifici willing to work with him on a start-up called Tweed Marijuana. Almost a year later, on November 9, 2013 — after CanniMed, Peace Naturals, Mettrum, and Bedrocan — the company was licensed to sell medicinal weed. There was no inherent reason why Tweed would be any different from the rest; Bruce Linton being Bruce Linton gave them their edge.
When Rifici was fired in August 2014, he sued for mental distress.
Linton’s pot thing would prove more valuable than he initially intuited. To grow pot you had to first build your grow house, which was expensive, and you had to do that before you received your licence. You needed capital to enter the market, before you could begin earning revenue, and institutional investors didn’t want to touch marijuana. So the field of competitors was thin. Stigma kept the usual executives away from the sector, so there was a lack of professionals in the space. As Michael Haines and Trevor Fencott learned at Mettrum, the people who knew how to grow pot didn’t have the money, and the people with money didn’t want to touch weed. It was an opportunity if you had money, and could stomach the stigma, and the risk.
From the beginning, medical marijuana companies all had an extremely high burn rate. Facilities cost tens of millions of dollars to build, and there’d be no revenue until the company was licensed to sell pot, had grown its product, and had found people — without advertising, which was restricted — to buy it. Despite being a literal weed, marijuana is tricky to grow, and Health Canada had instituted stipulations on pesticides and tools of the black market trade, where many of the new legal growers would hail from. From the beginning, Linton thought pot as medicine would be huge.
“All you had to do was look at our initial patients, people needing something for sleep or dealing with multipurpose pain,” he says, alluding to anxiety, depression, or even aching joints, all afflictions some say cannabis can help mend — and all “diagnosable” for legal Bruce Linton weed. “They needed something to move them through the day and night, rather than another pill.”
Linton figured the audience of people who could benefit from a non-pharmaceutical pain medicine was vast. Plus, people loved weed. “I figured if we pay X for a building and grow these crops and sell them, it could pay for itself in less than two years.” Linton believed that if he moved quickly, he could have an eighteen-month return on an investment of a few million dollars into his first production facility; if he moved slowly, other people would catch wind of his industry and the prices on assets would increase. “At the time, facilities were almost a free asset,” he says, “but you had to move quickly, before the rest of the world caught up.”
Linton has an aptitude for press and raising money, and he leaned on his contacts from the start-up world. The Bank of Montreal and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce were non-starters for a marijuana company — the stigma of pot in 2013 was such that even the private equity firms wouldn’t invest a penny. “When investment bankers who only get paid by raising you money tell you to bootstrap it for a year and that you shouldn’t raise money, it’s because they hate you,” says Linton.
Lorne Gertner agrees. “If you were looking to raise money for your pot brand in 2013, they showed you the door.”
Sean McNulty was thirty years old and working at the private equity firm MMCAP Asset Management when he first met Linton. McNulty was the perfect marijuana enabler. He had a chip on his shoulder, walking around Bay Street with a University of New Brunswick degree.
When Linton first entered the MMCAP office, they took the cannabis sector so lightly they sent in McNulty, their most junior guy, to meet him. Since grade ten, McNulty had smoked pot daily, and he’s twice played in the World Series of Poker. Sean, known as “McSalty,” is amiable, with an open face, and says he knows how to call a bluff. But as soon as he sat down with Linton, he saw a winning hand. Linton says he never saw someone write as quickly as McNulty taking notes during their first meeting.
“Investing in cannabis was one of the most compelling investment opportunities in the history of capitalism,” McNulty says over Zoom, from the castle in the Cayman Islands where he now lives. “You’re changing the source of supply on an already super-popular product, and there’s no brands, no leaders, and Canada, of all places, is home to the capital markets.”
In the United States, the capital markets couldn’t invest in American pot companies. But the Canadian capital markets could help finance Canadian cannabis brands. They just needed to be convinced to do so. Linton would be the perfect person to connect the world of money with the world of weed. “I didn’t understand why more people weren’t instantly able to see what I did,” says McNulty. “Literally, there’s no other place in the world except Canada where capital markets are financing legal companies that sell weed.”
When McNulty heard Linton’s pitch, he was all in. He told the Tweed president that MMCAP would finance the company with $100 million and take Tweed public that spring. Sean McNulty saw Linton’s dream. It was the deal he’d gotten into finance for, and, unlike Linton, he personally had experienced the healing properties of cannabis, which benefitted his everyday life. He thought the deal was too good to be true.