Staff work in a cannabis grow room at Canopy Growth's Tweed facility, in Smiths Falls, Ont., on Aug. 23, 2018.When Canada legalized recreational cannabis in 2018, there were still many unknown implications for health care, industry and the country at large. So the government made a promise: after three years, it would review the law to ensure its policies worked.
“We obviously have a significant sense of urgency which is fuelled by the fact that after five years … about 80 per cent of our surveyed members cannot get to cash flow positivity,” said George Smitherman, president and chief executive of the Cannabis Council of Canada.
“Specifically, they noted that the hypercompetitive cannabis market for producers and retailers, combined with the various regulatory fees, distributor markups and fees, and taxes are stifling companies of all sizes.” Federal excise taxes and customs duties brought in $160-million in the 2021 to 2022 fiscal year alone, while provincial and territorial excise taxes totalled $592-million, and sales taxes generated $458-million, the report said.
“What the industry wants is the ability to advertise their products more generally to the public and I can tell you from a century of experience with tobacco that there is no way of doing that without also promoting it to you, which is a no-go under the Cannabis Act,” said David Hammond, a professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo.
They’re being cautious in part because the Canadian Institute for Health Information has said cannabis-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations both increased 14 per cent between 2019 and 2021.
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