His stock, though, was at $53.28, down 98 cents a share since that Raptors game, although Linton still didn’t watch the market closely. The stock was at $75 before legalization. He had made well over $200 million from his Canopy shares. And he was surfing a legal wave that had never washed ashore before in Canada or, outside of Uruguay, anywhere else in the world. Constellation wanted Bruce to give guidance. Linton thought his track record earned him their respect. “I hope you guys realize,” he had just told them, “my fourth quarter of the last three years has been greater than the prior quarters since. You realize that, right?”
The board demanded he be specific. Where was he going to trim expenses? When would he be profitable? How much revenue would he earn? What would he cut? “I’ll say whatever the fuck you come up with, because I don’t know the answer,” Linton told them in response.
After Constellation made their multibillion-dollar investment, they asked Linton for a five-year business plan. Linton laughed. “I can’t give you five weeks,” he said.
Bruce obviously was used to spinning fanciful narratives to bankers. “This is how much money we could make,” he’d say, and he believed it in his very core. He had already done so much; who knew how far this could go?
The bankers were always impressed with Linton’s story, but after 2015, they had a follow-up question when it came to projecting cash: “Can you get bigger?”
“Sure” was the answer each time. And there was always a case he could make for rosy futures, blissful fantasies. Linton was certain that 2.0 products would increase the number of Canadians buying his weed. Smoking was out of fashion. And rolling a joint was hard. Drinking a sparkling Seth Rogen beverage? Anyone could do that. Constellation Brands knew that better than most. And when more legal stores opened, stores like CAFE would finally close, the vaunted soccer mom category would come into the sector, and they’d spend more money on their average receipts. The future of pot wasn’t what’s strongest and cheapest. It was what’s healthiest. New product categories were the future, Linton believed. Which was awfully convenient, since the price of flower kept dropping.
In 2018, a gram cost, on average, $9.40. In the summer of 2019, that price was seven bucks. Adjust that for inflation and factor in all the new licensed producers who wanted to enter the market, growing pot inexpensively at their outdoor grows, and legalization had made weed as accessible and inexpensive as beer. It was cheaper now to buy weed than it was in 1961. And the pot was stronger, too. So the smart companies sold more than weed. Olli edibles, the bespoke products crafted by John Aird and team, were products designed for the shelves at Whole Foods. And the stigma around marijuana was dissipating. Canadians, in 2019, spent the same amount of money on pot as they did on wine: almost $2 billion. We were in the first inning of this cannabis thing. Eventually, Linton was preparing to tell his board, we’d all be ordering Canopy weed drinks at restaurants and bars.
Linton was flying into Toronto certain that he was going to export his intellectual capital into Europe and the United States. He felt momentum — but it was mixed with the frustration of having to explain himself to Americans who didn’t understand. They had just arrived at his party. It used to take Linton fifteen minutes to get approval, on Mother’s Day, from his Canopy board for $500 million in acquisitions. Those were serious people. Murray Goldman, real estate tycoon, wasn’t a naïf. Linton didn’t have the patience to explain himself to his new bosses, who now occupied four of seven board seats. And what was more, he didn’t have the vocabulary. He once said he doesn’t speak “corporate.” He shouldn’t have to. He’s Bruce.
Throughout the weekend, Linton had paid the meeting no mind. How could Constellation be upset about earnings and expenses when the numbers were within his forecast? They’d seen his books prior to his reporting. They knew his script and he was following it. But when Newlands made that comment in the press, Linton knew he was being poked. The question was how hard?
Sure, the situation was urgent. Fuck them. It had been urgent since they’d launched.
On Tuesday morning, Linton flew into Toronto, once again wearing his Tweed shirt beneath his blazer. He found this part of the job annoying: the hand-holding the board now required took up as much as half of his operational time. It was the same thing that aggrieved Terry Booth at Aurora. Founders used to running on jet fuel and their ADHD, being obeyed, and not having to answer for losses were now under scrutiny. Founders were asked to become accountants. Totally different jobs. But okay, Linton would play ball. Canopy had 27 percent market share when Linton walked into the emergency meeting. He’d signed off on Drake’s agreement, which would be announced in November, and brought in Snoop and Martha Stewart, along with Rogen and his Houseplant staff. He had the BioSteel deal cooking, which he thought would work great for Constellation, and he figured with BioSteel, he could leverage Constellation Brands to take on Gatorade. “Gatorade would need fucking Gatorade when I was done,” Bruce says.
The CBD drinks that he was planning with BioSteel, made without THC, could be distributed legally on Amazon throughout the U.S. With everybody jockeying for difficult American penetration, Linton had it. The drinks, which were coming out as part of the 2.0 rollout and were an impetus behind Constellation getting involved with weed, hadn’t yet been released. All Canopy needed to do, says Linton, was keep rolling. His R&D department was making strides in providing data suggesting that cannabis could be used as an effective medicine for cirrhosis and for sleep, which was something that cannabis researchers had been working on since the 1960s. And more than half of American states had a medical marijuana program.
In May, Linton had inked a deal in Germany with Cannabinoid Compound for $342 million. On the flight to Toronto, he had in his pocket a first-class plane ticket to Berlin, where he would tell a room full of investors, scientists, and technology experts how Canopy used technology in their agriculture, research, and development. Canopy was the largest pot company in the world and Linton was working hard at the time to get a special-occasion permit in Smiths Falls, so his drinks could be served to his neighbours at a licensed outdoor show. The government was still restrictive in its cannabis policies. But things were changing. Consumption was banned at festivals and concerts, but there was wiggle room being explored. In July 2019, the Festival of Beer in Toronto would open a cannabis-smoking section for the first time. Surely, if you allowed cannabis smoking, drinking a cannabis beverage couldn’t be far behind.
The board meeting was an emergency, but Bruce was animated, prepared. He walked into the office to silence. The kind of quiet that said tons. He was not stunned — more like sobered up. He had tried not to think about the meeting, but meeting time had definitely arrived. “It’s the kind of meeting where you don’t bring your computer because they’re going to ask for it back,” says Bruce, who sat down solemnly to absorb the news.
The board was recommending his removal. He was asked to leave his company. In fact — something he should’ve already known — the company wasn’t actually his; he gave it away when he took a $5 billion investment before legalization and acquiesced to Constellation Brands’ demand for a controlling number of board seats.
Sitting there, he heard this from people he had sought out as investors, who hadn’t been there when he’d bought the Hershey factory with his own money or fired Chuck Rifici; who had never spoken with Hilary Black or become involved with medical marijuana; and who couldn’t possibly understand what it felt like to work with Michael Haines on the tarmac outside of Kelowna when he was boarded by the RCMP and they uncovered hockey bags stuffed with BC weed.
It wasn’t their job to care about Bruce’s legacy and he should’ve known that. Still it stung. “You have to be super fucking calm because if you aren’t, you might find yourself reaching across a desk,” Linton says. The board showed him a draft of their press release announcing his exit. The release said he was leaving to focus on his family. It was like how Aphria framed the exit of Vic Neufeld: a lion past his prime going out to graze in the jungle, making way for new blood.
Linton suggested, instead, that he should move to the States and run Acreage, the American weed brand that Canopy was poised to acquire once the U.S. approved federal cannabis legalization. He was reaching. He said he didn’t want a job, though he was still sort of asking for one, and that he’d be happy to help finalize all the plans he had in the works. All those things he told the bankers he believed. But he was rebuffed at every suggestion.
He continued to try to find some oxygen for himself at the company he loved.
“Do you have my replacement yet?”
“Mark Zekulin will run the company for the time being,” he was told.
So, no, Linton thought, they have no fucking clue.
“Well, have you hired an executive recruiting firm?” he asked.
“No,” they said, and Bruce swallowed this. Clearly they’d made no decisions beyond their one big emergency decision: fire Bruce.
For Linton, the sticking point wasn’t about his package. He maintains it was never about the money. What Linton negotiated was the press release. Leaving Canopy to spend time with his children? “Fuck you I am,” he said.
The last thing he wanted it to look like was his retirement.
This is the message he wants people to know: “Constellation put a bullet in this dude. It’s not like he decided to walk out to pasture.”
Linton collected his things and walked out of the Tweed office without looking back. He met his son at Pearson Airport. He wouldn’t be joining Max in Germany. There would be no first-class ticket, no tech conference, no keynote for Bruce. At the airport, he was still wearing his shirt, and he hadn’t felt any particular emotion, other than simmering rage. He says when he’s angry, he represses that emotion because it clouds his wits, and he didn’t want his wits muddled during his termination process. “You have to compress a lot of urges,” he says, “or you might choke someone.”
Max asked him what he’d miss most about Canopy. Linton thought it over. He loved the microphones and the business cards. The travel, the restaurants, the ringing phones, and the public eye. He liked making work for other people, executing crazy ideas. Acquisitions, of course. And trying to build something new. He truly began believing in marijuana, and he liked being the face of an industry. But what he’d most miss, he told his son, were the tours of that Smiths Falls facility, showing people what he’d built and telling the story of the old, abandoned factory. About the time the mayor ran across the street to get a coffee for Mark Zekulin. How a closed-down Hershey plant with mice running around gave rise to a company that grew to be worth more than $20 billion in five years selling weed. It had been a wild ride and he could retrace it to all those tours at the old Hershey factory.
Bruce put his son on the plane and headed back to his house in Ottawa, wiping the first tears from his eyes.
Part IV Redemption
Chapter 17 Got ’Em
“I’m not going to let this go.”
Nick Lalonde
Linton getting axed from Canopy should have been the summer’s big weed news, though Trevor Fencott believed in his heart of hearts that Linton — weed’s King Kong on cocaine — was actually glad to be relieved of the burden. He had to have seen the reckoning coming. “The problem with promoters is eventually you have to deliver, and it almost always amounts to less than their vision,” says Fencott, who describes Bruce’s behaviour around his Canopy board as “death by cop,” daring them to take him out. “Eventually he was going out,” Fencott says. “This way, when a plan that has no chance of working didn’t work, he has someone to blame.”
Still, industry fluctuations around the termination of Bruce Linton were stifled because something that had much greater impact on the entire legalization experiment came just days later. In early July 2019, while Canadian cannabis companies struggled for legitimacy against supply shortages, a lack of retail locations, and the backdrop of the CAFE saga — like Linton’s firing, the concrete blocks in front of the stores were front-page news — another bombshell was exploding. This one began behind a plexiglass wall in Pelham, Ontario.
For months, Nick Lalonde had been complaining to superiors that he felt uncomfortable about the task he’d performed that winter: erecting plexiglass walls and hanging pictures in front of grow rooms at CannTrust that had not been licensed by Health Canada. Lalonde got into weed because he loved it. He smoked it, and he wanted to be part of the legal industry. He was a minimum-wage worker at a $470 million company (down from a billion) run by Peter Aceto, a former banking executive, and Eric Paul, CannTrust’s founder, a pharmacist turned entrepreneur with forty years of experience in health care. CannTrust listed on the Nasdaq exchange and counted Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Credit Suisse as partners. While Hexo partnered with Molson Coors to make infused drinks, CannTrust partnered with pharma giant Apotex to make medicine.
CannTrust, with its leadership pedigree, was considered by investors to be Canada’s best-run legal cannabis company. It was their differentiation. Hence their Nasdaq listing and American partners — a potential watershed moment for other Canadian cannabis companies looking to move away from independent Canadian investment banks to American companies like Merrill Lynch, companies that ran the world. There was more money, the industry hoped, flying into the sector behind the investments created by CannTrust. The industry moved as a block. When Linton netted Constellation Brands, Terry Booth met with Coca-Cola and Heineken, and Trevor Fencott secured Couche-Tard. Stigma would make it hard to break into the mainstream business world. Terry Booth says that even after Nelson Peltz signed on to the board at Aurora, Peltz saw the industry as askew.