Bruce Linton told me his story of being spooked. In 2015, the Canadian Cannabis Corporation (CCC) tried to buy Hexo and also tried to buy Canopy Growth. Back then, Linton checked out of the company on a Sunday to go talk to these potential partners and didn’t tell anyone where he was. Not out of secrecy. It just slipped his mind. However, when he walked into the building north of Toronto, Linton said, it was the first time in the industry when he actually felt scared. He was in an empty warehouse with people he didn’t know, talking about big money and — even if it was just weed, it was still drugs. Who were these people?
St-Louis tells me he had signed a definitive agreement deal with CCC, but backed out when they missed a payment. He considered himself lucky because the principals at CCC were eventually accused of misusing millions of dollars in investor funds. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were also two high-profile murders in Toronto in 2017 tied to CCC. St-Louis didn’t specifically call out CCC in our conversation or mention what company he was referring to in terms of the $40 million bribe, but he did add insight into a closed-door world.
“The black market doesn’t come with bats and threaten kneecaps. Organized crime comes up from behind and they compromise you. Set you up for blackmail. They come as friends,” Sébastien says. “Often you piss off a shareholder block that wants to do something that hurts other shareholders.” In the telling of the story, St-Louis went from the general to the more personal, as if catching his train of thought. “My political capital goes down — they have it out for me. That happens a lot. But I’m uncompromising.”
I can’t help thinking St-Louis, stoned on hero worship, was echoing his father when describing his legacy. Did you ever take a bribe? I ask him. How close did you come? “I’m squeaky clean,” he says. “I would never do it any other way.”
Sébastien St-Louis closed on Redecan on August 30, 2021. I spoke with him on October 7 and 8. Newspapers later reported, after our interviews were through, that on September 26, a Redecan lead adviser had written a letter to the Hexo board accusing Sébastien of “dilutive financings … misalignment with shareholders, and a lack of basic business skills to lead.” On October 20, 2021 — twelve days after our interviews and three days after the third anniversary of legal weed — the company announced Scott Cooper would be taking the reins of Hexo, the company Sébastien St-Louis founded. Cooper was the former Denver-based chief innovation officer at Molson Coors and subsequent leader of Truss, the joint venture between Hexo and Molson. Sébastien’s former COO, it was announced in the same Hexo press release, would also be stepping down.
When we spoke, St-Louis must have known that all of this was transpiring, but he never mentioned any of it. Afterward, the former CEO who had been so candid stopped returning my calls. He still has not returned them to clarify what transpired.
The following month, with Hexo trading below two dollars per share, a tabloid in Quebec ran a front-page story on Redecan’s ties to the Hells Angels. It was nothing more than some Instagram pictures, but rumours swirled of an investigation by the RCMP, who wouldn’t comment for this book, and neither would anyone from the Redecan team, even though I’d interviewed them before for an advertorial — paid editorial content — about their vapes.
Trevor Fencott says he always had a good relationship with Redecan and Will Montour was always friendly at the cannabis conferences, but while the Redecan gossip swirled in the media, a pot convention was held that fall in downtown Toronto. I met a financier through Bruce Linton who handed me a manila folder inside an envelope. We met by a hot dog stand in front of the Toronto Convention Centre. My contact wore gloves to hand off the papers, lest there be fingerprints. The documents were a series of questions without context that looked into allegations and associates of Hexo and the Redecan group.
The papers mentioned gambling, Hells Angels, the Bahamas, other licensed producers, investment firms in Canada, and individuals and banks called out by name. I have more experience with writing paid endorsements for cannabis-infused chocolate chip cookies than with revealing the Panama Papers, but I tried to follow up on the leads.
And found nothing.
John Fowler doesn’t put much stock into this stuff. He was also at the cannabis convention in Toronto, speaking alongside Alison Gordon. He says the allegations might have just been a ploy to beat up Hexo’s stock price so the next group of financiers could pick up the company on the cheap. It’s not against the law to have bad friends — most cannabis companies have some associations with people who trafficked marijuana before it crossed to the other side of the street of the law. Once a company goes legit, Fowler tells me, the legacy ties don’t just disappear.
Sébastien St-Louis announced he was leaving the board of Hexo on November 19, 2021, and has remained quiet since. The last thing he told me in our interviews was “I will be a billionaire — maybe, but I’m not chasing that. I’m chasing the win.”
Epilogue The Last Drag
The idea behind Canadian legalization wasn’t to create a frozen Silicon Valley, an industry that would sell Canadian weed all over the world. It was supposed to rectify bad laws that, from inception, were systemically racist. Legalization enriched people who already had every advantage, who needed no assistance because they were already rich. Justin Trudeau, when he started, seemed to represent such hope for a progressive society but, when he got down to it, became just another politician working angles to survive the next vote.
The end of cannabis prohibition is a good thing; we didn’t need a war on drugs to tell us that. Billions of dollars have been invested into the Canadian economy from cannabis taxes, and tens of thousands of jobs have been created. There is Canadian intellectual property in marijuana growing and distribution all over the world. Countries, including the U.S., can look at our pot laws and see for themselves that weed doesn’t lead to the end of the world. In Canada today there are far fewer Black and Indigenous lives being destroyed for the simple possession of weed.
On the last Friday in March 2023, four years after we first became friends, I asked Terry Parker, the victor of the medical cannabis suit back in 2001 that sent pot hurtling toward where we are today, if he’d ever heard of Terry Booth or Bruce Linton, Irwin Simon or Sébastien St-Louis, whose company would eventually be purchased by Tilray for $229 million (less than what St-Louis had paid for Zenabis when he first went on his ill-fated buyer’s spree). He had no idea who any of these people were. He knew Jodie Giesz-Ramsay, who had finally been granted a dispensary licence the previous fall, and he knew Hilary Black, who David Klein at Canopy eventually fired. Terry still grows his own pot in the closet of his fourth-floor Parkdale apartment, the place where he grew the weed that would end up changing so many lives.
After Rosie Rowbotham passed away and Lorne Gertner offered to pay for his gravestone, and after the Smiths Falls Canopy location was shuttered in February 2023 and bought back by Hershey (who has announced exactly zero plans to sell edibles), Terry and I walk into a Fire & Flower near where we live. Trevor Fencott is now out of his company — he accepted an award for retailer of the year after he was fired, and now he works in private equity. He still hates the Ontario Cannabis Store, the government entity he competed against that was 2023’s highest-earning cannabis company, while Fire & Flower, currently under Companies’ Creditor Arrangement Act protection, has lost more than $200 million since 2018. Trevor says he never wanted to be Bruce Linton, who remains a friend and stays at the Marriott when he comes to Toronto, even if he no longer can buy the companies making the hotel’s soap. He’s on the board of the Canadian Olympic Foundation, and when I ran into trouble, he put his lawyer on my case.
Terry Booth is sober and dating and says any claims that his Aurora weed was terrible are bullshit. He thinks his stock at Audacious is undervalued and he still wants Bruce to invest.
Bruce says he still may.
Inside the Fire & Flower with Terry, there are few Canopy or Aurora products on the shelves. Instead, it’s all buzzy new craft cannabis brands. There are more than one thousand licensed Canadian marijuana producers, and Ontario has almost seventeen hundred weed stores. By the time you read this, many of them will be closed. Cannabis is legal. But more people still prefer to buy craft beer and coffee, Tylenol and Gatorade. You can get a legal edible for five dollars, an ounce for a hundred bucks, and an Olli gummy with a juicy centre, like a weed fruit blast that tastes like bubblegum. Terry Parker, of course, isn’t recognized by the friendly sales staff. I give him a copy of KIND magazine — Lenny Kravitz is on the cover — and offer to buy him anything he wants from the shelves. But the original cannabis pioneer says he doesn’t want anything.
“None of this stuff would be here without you,” I say, and I mean it. I wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for him. “At least get some cannabis pretzels or — look at this — a diamond-infused pre-roll blunt. Try a peach iced tea with THC.”
“That’s okay,” Terry tells me, and he buttons up his army jacket and we walk out of the store onto Queen Street.
He’s going to go back to his apartment to smoke his own weed.
Index
Aceto, Peter, 142, 250–53, 262
Acreage Holdings, 173, 177, 179, 195, 228
Aglukkaq, Leona, 51–52
See also Harper, Stephen
AgriNextUSA (hemp company), 209
See also Canopy Growth
Aird, John, 59, 135, 158, 187, 192–93, 216, 241, 273
Alcanna Cannabis, 188, 269, 292
Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, 263
Aleafia, 195, 196
Altria, 132, 179, 197, 284
Aphria, 58, 120, 123, 142, 155, 161, 181, 187–89, 191, 195, 200, 203, 234, 244, 253, 261, 263, 275
on becoming Tilray, 284, 286, 295
and low-cost greenhouse production, 77