'Fairly dire' choices by Ford government led to Ontario's cannabis problems: expert

Year two of Canada's experiment with legalcannabis has begun, at least in Ontario and Quebec, with layoffs.

Just last week two big producers,Ontario's CannTrust and Quebec's HEXO, combined to leave more than 300 hundred people out of work.

Jesse Staniforthis the editor of Weedweek Canada, a free newsletter that tracks what's happening in the cannabis sector. He says the first year has been rough, thanks in part to errors made by Doug Ford'sprovincial government.

Staniforth spoke with the CBC's Conrad Collaco about how the cannabis sales system could be fixed.You can read an abridged and edited version of the interviewor listen to the full audio interview by hitting the play button above.

Jesse Staniforth, editor for Weedweek Canada

CC: Why, after just a few months selling cannabis, have HEXO and CannTrust started laying off workers?

It was alarming to see them cutting their workforce but it wasn't unprecedented because they've been warning for quite a while that they have been up against packaging bottlenecks. They have all the same problems that every producer has that there aren't enough stores for them to sell their productand they've had some difficult weeks going into last week.

This isthe culmination of a difficult time for them but they are also fairly optimistic. When they made those cuts last week they said that they're doing this to become profitable within the next year and I would argue there's probably a good chance that's going to happen.

We've been paying close attention in Hamilton to the troubles that CannTrust has had as we'reclose to the Pelham, Ont.facility where unlicensed cannabis production rooms were discovered by Health Canada. These struggles for CannTrust and HEXO, what do they mean for the industry as a whole?

Was there a problem in the way the Ford government set up the cannabis sales system in Ontario?

Absolutely. I mean the choices that the Ford government made with regard to cannabis retail were fairly dire and I think in Hamilton you guys have gone from having, I think,60 illicit cannabis dispensaries to now 24 in the province of Ontario,24 legal cannabis sellers. There are more than three times as many in the city of Calgary alone. The real issue there is that Doug Ford came into office and he had a plan in front of him for cannabis retail which was going to be like the LCBOmodel, developed by the Wynne government, and he didn't like it. He decided to move immediately to private retail.I believe it was fewer than two to three months ahead of legalization. The decision to do somethingso quickly and with so little planning was enormously problematic.

Then he compounded that by determining the best way to give out these licences was through a lottery system that gave them, not to the most knowledgeablecannabis professionals, but to whoever happened to win the lottery. As a result of this we have people likeAbiRoach in Toronto who runs the HotBox Lounge.She's been doing this for 20 years and is the person that I would go to when I wanted information about cannabis.She cannot, for some reason, become a cannabis retailer herself despite being the one person in the province of Ontario that I want to see running a cannabis store. This is a huge problem.

We've heard from other expertswho say that Alberta may be the province that got off to the best start with cannabis. What did they do that Ontario didn't?

Is that how Ontario's system should be fixed? More stores?

It's one of the fixes. There are a lot of different fixes. One of the issues that everybodywho is a cannabis consumer must bear in mind is that cannabis is not a new market. It's just a new legal market. We have an enormous, established cannabis economy where people are used to buying very high quality cannabis at a fairly low price and they're finding that legal cannabis is often not really as good. Now, sometimesthere are lots of exceptions to that rule but in many cases people are unsatisfied with the quality and it tends to be about twice as expensive.

So, the companies that figure out how to really deliver the quality that their consumers want first, those are the companies that are really going to establish themselves in this market again. There's no marketing and because there's very littlebranding that you can do the only way you can get your name out right now is by making absolutely top shelf products.