After Bruce Linton made the deal for Bedrocan, two other things quickly fell into place. The first one began with a phone call from the TSX. Companies could now move to four-letter ticker symbols and they wanted to know if Linton wanted “WEED.”
“We were calling on life insurance companies to put some of their funds in us, and though they ignored us, I wasn’t jonesing to call us ‘WEED,’” Linton says. “But also, fuck it — there was zero institutional money behind us, and of course, I couldn’t let someone else have ‘WEED.’ In the end I just said, ‘Fuck it. Let’s make the brand.’”
The deal for Bedrocan was announced in the summer of 2014 and made Tweed Marijuana the largest medical marijuana company in the country. Tweed’s stock rose 15 percent on the deal, and though Bedrocan’s shareholders would receive 33.9 million shares in their deal, Linton cemented his early legacy and the template for Canadian weed companies. It’s like when two celebrities hook up. Their popularity is squared. Linton’s new market cap was over $150 million. He had combined the market caps of two rival companies and, in doing so, raised the value of the entire enterprise by 15 percent. He was catalyzing energy at last. “What you’re buying,” he told me, “is acceleration.”
After the Bedrocan deal, Tweed would need a new name. With Linton’s jockeying and laissez-faire approach, the Tweed brand was beginning to seem stoneresque, a strange bedfellow for Bedrocan, which was scientific and pristine. “The companies Tweed and Bedrocan had to be sisters, and I was fussing with the idea of an umbrella, but that’s a rainy-day instrument. Canopy is a pleasant environment — let’s go under the canopy and have iced tea.”
On September 21, 2015, Tweed officially became Canopy Growth. The company now had a funded capacity of 573,000 square feet.
Mark Zekulin moved his young family closer to Smiths Falls, and after Linton fired Rifici, he made Zekulin CEO, while he became president and chairman of the board. But, to put it mildly, the company was still working out kinks. Canopy Growth may have been worth a paper $150 million, but operationally the business was green. The previous year, when Rifici was still CEO, Tweed Marijuana was licensed to sell its first gram. At the Hershey factory, the head of operations put the bud in the jar. Zekulin, then the president of the company, and Rifici, the CEO, drove the jar to the post office. Heading back to Smiths Falls, they received a phone call from the head of operations, worried that the size of the THC sticker was too small on the packaging. “I might have screwed something up,” he said. “Don’t send the weed.”
Rifici and Zekulin turned the car around and raced to the post office to retrieve their bud.
Health Canada was incentivized to crack down on rule breakers to establish its governance of the sector. Episodes like Kelowna had embarrassed regulators, so now the approach was “Lose your licence, you’re done.” You might have to wait two years to be licensed again, and there was already a queue of new companies waiting for their licences. Zekulin stepped on the gas. You couldn’t send out a jar with wrong labels. An inch could cost your whole company.
“We could just see the headlines: After First Gram Sold, Tweed Marijuana Experiences First Recall,” Linton recalls.
The first fulfillment of a legal gram of Canopy Growth marijuana required three members of the company’s C-suite to deliver. It took the three of them to affix the sticker. Into this climate things were about to super-size.
Chapter 7 Justin Time
“I’m in favour of legalizing it.”
Justin Trudeau
“This is fucking batshit crazy.”
Amy Weinstein
Justin Trudeau began planning his run for the Liberal leadership in 2012, a year after NDP leader Jack Layton succumbed to cancer and a year before Stephen Harper introduced the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations. Trudeau, forty on his ascent, was the anti-Harper and the Canadian answer to the Obama wave. Obama, in his memoir Dreams from My Father, says he has used weed “and maybe even a little blow.” Harper, faced with slogans of “Hope” and “Change” galvanizing North America, was seeing his popularity plummet. In addition to his punitive crime policies, under which prison populations increased and 3.8 million Canadians were convicted of a criminal offence, there was a sense that the country was moving forward without him.
In September 2015, a viral photograph of the body, washed up on a Turkish beach, of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian refugee who had family in Canada, became emblematic of Harper’s immigration rules. These weren’t all Harper’s problems, but his whole ethos — setting up a hotline to document “barbaric cultural practices,” praising “old-stock Canadians” during a leader’s debate, and banning the niqab during citizenship swearing-in ceremonies — seemed to confirm that Harper was a man out of time.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau once rolled with John Lennon. Now his son Justin was our ascending Obama. A feminist, in 2017 he was on the cover of Rolling Stone. Pierre had backpacked the world and spent time in Morocco, and gave off the impression that late 1960s peddlers wouldn’t mistake him for a narc. Meanwhile, Margaret Trudeau, Pierre’s wife and Justin’s mother, was a famous and beautiful sophisticate, enjoying the Studio 54 nightlife and probably smoking hash in 1977 at the El Mocambo in Toronto with the Rolling Stones. Whether that story is true or not, certainly those kinds of whispers weren’t gravitating around Stephen Harper’s mom. Justin Trudeau was cast as a daisy to Harper’s stone.
Conversations about cannabis legalization had stalled after Paul Martin resigned. Many thought if there was going to be an end to cannabis prohibition, it would be the handiwork of Jack Layton during the NDP’s moment of popularity, known as the Orange Wave. But Layton never supported full recreational legalization. Instead, like Jean Chrétien, he only went as far as “decrim,” which would make possession of up to fifteen grams of cannabis a ticketed, but not arrestable, offence. Layton didn’t want the NDP to be the opposition party. He wanted to be the party in power, and the marijuana platform would not, in his estimation, put him on a path to victory. He already had Zöe — Harper’s imaginary leftist voter — voting for him. His job was to get the vote of her stepmom. Layton turned out to be wrong.
When he declared his bid for leadership, Justin Trudeau had spent four years as a Liberal MP in Papineau, Quebec, and he was left of the NDP on the cannabis file. Like his parents, a member of the in-crowd, Justin Trudeau even went further in disclosing his personal drug use than Obama, in 2013 telling Huffington Post reporters that, while in office, he’d puffed on a joint that his friend sparked at his house when the kids were away with their grandparents. For the Liberals, the third-place party, he became Man of the Moment, trouncing Joyce Murray and Martha Hall Findlay in the leadership election. There were other factors, but cannabis was to become an important wedge issue that separated Stephen Harper from power.
On July 23, 2013, Trudeau announced a key pillar of his election platform, cannabis legalization, at a campaign stop in Kelowna — so many pot-growing, pot-smoking, pot-everything moments happen there. Fresh-faced, his hair skimming the collar of his purple short-sleeve shirt, Trudeau saw a man in the crowd with a sign calling for the legalization of marijuana. “I see my friend waving a sign about decriminalizing cannabis. I’ll take that as a question,” shouted Trudeau, looking like a summer camp counsellor with a day pass in the bright British Columbia sun. “I’m actually not in favour of decriminalizing cannabis. I’m in favour of legalizing it.… It’s one of the only ways to keep it out of the hands of our kids because the current war on drugs, the current model, is not working. We have to use evidence and science to make sure that we’re moving forward.” Mr. Trudeau knew what he was doing that morning. Unprompted, he announced a campaign promise that would place Canada alongside only Uruguay in its approach to marijuana: the end of prohibition — federal recreational legalization, full stop. Not a business story, but a story about public health.
Legalizing recreational pot had always been the goal of the medical marijuana movement. Alan Young says legalization for medical purposes was just a Trojan horse — a way of moving toward full legalization. Trudeau, by 2013, was seeing massive changes take place in how weed was being treated to the south. In the U.S., Colorado and California had already legalized medical marijuana, and their dispensary model and licensed distributors were seen as a tourism- and tax-generating success. America’s system was governed by the states. Pot wasn’t federally legal, and the weed brands couldn’t bank or ship their weed across state lines. But a legalization experiment had been started. And there had not been a Reefer Madness–like increase in debilitated drivers or a youth drug epidemic in either state. Instead, there was an economic boost, favourable publicity, and an orderly road map for a progressive end to prohibition.
Meanwhile, across Canada during the Harper years, we already had public companies on our stock exchange selling weed. For most of the Canadian pot pioneers, the activists and the growers, the promise of recreational legalization felt like a victory, like a lifestyle validation. They had been right about weed all along.
There was only one problem: assuming Trudeau was elected and his campaign promise proved true, where would Canada get all its weed? With only the medical system in play, there was already a scarcity of supply. If Canadian producers couldn’t grow enough marijuana for 20,000 people, what would happen when legal recreational weed arrived, when 20 percent of the population might want a doobie, more than 7 million people trying to get stoned? In the second quarter of 2014, Canada had 7,914 medical cannabis patients. By the end of 2016, there were 129,876 medical cannabis patients.
The compounded annual growth rate was more than 15 percent. Health Canada data said that the licensed producers should have been distributing 18,087 kilos of dried marijuana, which should have been more than enough. Yet patients ordering from any of the legal companies often found strains were sold out. Of course, delivery discrepancies could have been — but were not — a red flag for the valuations of the public Canadian cannabis companies. Investors were looking at the numbers and seeing what the salesmen wanted them to see. Would Canada be able to produce enough marijuana? To find out, Trudeau was going to have to pass his groundbreaking bill.
Andrew Leslie is a retired lieutenant-general in the Canadian armed forces who fought in Bosnia and Afghanistan and was recruited by both Prime Minister Harper and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to represent their sides in federal politics. After leading troops abroad, Leslie headed up disaster relief programs in Manitoba and Montreal. It’s Leslie who said, regarding his intended transformation of the Canadian military, “more tooth and less tail.”
According to Leslie, who had no moral qualms about cannabis and, as a father of two teenage children, believed that kids — “a staggering number of Canadian youth” — were already smoking unregulated pot, legalizing marijuana wasn’t a radical policy platform. He joined the Liberal party after Trudeau announced his plan to legalize cannabis during his first term if he got elected. Leslie says his Liberal colleagues in the House of Commons fell in line with Trudeau’s mandate. “Anybody who aspired to be a Liberal candidate in 2014 had to sign a statement that they supported three of Mr. Trudeau’s key objectives — one of them being legal pot,” Leslie said. The only opposition to the bill came from the oldest 10 percent of the caucus, but Leslie figured those who were unhappy bit their tongue, recognizing that it was a societal trend that wasn’t worth trying to disrupt.
In November 2015, after the election, Leslie would become the chief Liberal whip, and it was his job to make sure Trudeau had enough votes to pass the Cannabis Act, Bill C-45, which would legalize marijuana.
For the Conservatives, during the election campaign, pot became a wedge issue that they hammered home, as the Conservative political operative Ken Boessenkool explains, especially in immigrant communities. In attack ads translated into Mandarin and Punjabi, Prime Minister Harper decreed that the Liberals want your kids on drugs. In response to this messaging, Trudeau’s team smoothed out their own marijuana value proposition; rather than an issue of societal advances, legalizing pot became a matter of protecting Andrew Leslie’s teenage daughters. The Liberals don’t want to give your kids drugs, they assured voters. Your kids are already on drugs. What the Liberals want to do is make sure that the drugs they’re using are safe.
Kelly Coulter was the national campaign director of NORML Canada — the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws — and became the first woman on their board in 2010. According to Coulter, NORML Canada first set its sights on Jack Layton. “Jack was a pretty groovy guy,” she tells me, but admits being frustrated by his approach to this file. Despite appearances, Layton just wouldn’t go in on legalization. He even worked to silence fellow NDPers who wanted to push the legalization, not decriminalization, objective. Dana Larsen, cannabis book author and former BC politician, ended up relinquishing his NDP membership when his cannabis views were deemed outside the Jack Layton party line.
So Coulter began courting Trudeau, even before his campaign speech in Kelowna. Coulter says Trudeau was initially onboard only with decrim, but she helped him reframe the issue. She met with him in 2012 in his office on the Hill. “It was a tiny MP office, very intimate, and he’s quite tall, and I remember that when we were sitting, our knees were bumping,” Coulter tells me. “The first thing he says is ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m all in favour of decriminalizing,’ and as he’s saying that, I have a bad poker face, I feel my head shaking: NO. His eyes look at me like, ‘Are you disagreeing with me?’”
Coulter didn’t want decrim. She wanted an end to cannabis prohibition, and she produced an encyclopedia’s worth of handouts in favour of legalization: pamphlets that described the safety of the legal medical marijuana market, the Canadian companies working in the space, and the rigour of the entire manufacturing and distributing process. She said something that caught Trudeau’s attention and that he’d repeat in his own interviews down the road: “Al Capone would love decriminalization.” Decriminalization creates a grey zone, she told him. Organized crime thrives in the margins. Confusion creates a bad-guy revenue stream.
“I saw the change in him: I can sell this,” Coulter recalls, with considerable glee. Trudeau had a legal pad and, like McSalty when he first met Linton, took ravenous notes: If we make a safe, legal recreational market, we will hurt criminals while we tax their products and reinvest the harmonized sales tax into drug education. Investing in the country while protecting your kids. Trudeau smiled. He was going to use the drug laws to create a new Canadian revenue stream, from weed. Coulter was going to walk down Sussex Drive smoking a jay.
“I felt like the Cheshire cat that had just swallowed the canary,” she says. “We got him.”
In the run-up to the elections, Trudeau discussed the marijuana file with the Huffington Post; Harper and Thomas Mulcair both refused to have that conversation. In the interview, published on August 22, 2013, the future prime minister mentioned his meeting with Coulter: “That line of argument did [go] a long way towards convincing me,” he said.
He also disclosed his family’s cannabis history. Michel Trudeau, Justin’s youngest brother, was the most carefree of the Trudeau children and the one most familiar with weed. Trudeau said that when his brother fell to his death on a rock-climbing expedition in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park in 1998, he was awaiting trial on a cannabis conviction. He’d been in a car accident, the future PM said. The police arrived. “One of the cops cleaning up the scene found a little cigarette box with a bit of pot in it,” said Trudeau. At the time, 475,000 Canadians had criminal records because of marijuana possession. His brother could’ve been months away from receiving his own, and if he happened to avoid being convicted, it would be due to his privilege. Black and Indigenous men had more than three times the odds of conviction than white men, even though research shows that all races enjoy the same rate of pot smoking. Trudeau’s brother just happened to get caught.
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah says the Black and Indigenous populations are targeted. Expungement of non-violent cannabis convictions, he believes, should have been part of Trudeau’s original Cannabis Act. The case against his brother was one of the reasons he was in favour of decriminalizing pot in the first place. Trudeau was building his election platform. But unlike what we would later see in American cities like Oakland and New York, which made special efforts at reparation to give business opportunities to communities directly affected by disproportionate cannabis policing, there were Canadian communities Trudeau was leaving behind.
“Trudeau and his policy makers didn’t even think about us,” says Owusu-Bempah, adding that legalization in Canada still hasn’t done enough to make amends with the communities most punished by biased criminal policing around marijuana. “There’s no doubt the Cannabis Act was a good piece of legislation and cost Trudeau a good amount of political capital — it was always a risk. I just wish his staff had been more diverse and race had been thought through.”
Indeed, Trudeau, though seeing the world through privilege, was taking a risk with marijuana legalization. In his biography on the prime minister, Promise and Peril: Justin Trudeau in Power, author Aaron Wherry said something that was repeated by Andrew Leslie: Trudeau, when he puts his mind to something, is fearless. Once he locked into legalizing pot, there was no turning back.