Canada’s progressive federal policy has given its country’s cannabis companies a huge advantage over global competitors with access to banks, capital, customers and the ability to export. These advantages have made Canadian cannabis companies major world players around the global market. At home, there is both good news and bad news for the burgeoning industry. First the bad news: barriers to entry have stifled industry participants and bottlenecked the supply chain. And now, the good news: March saw cannabis sales hit a record high in the Great White North and those numbers should only improve as bureaucratic hangups eventually get ironed-out. March sales were CA$60.54 million ($45.08 million), up from CA$51.66 million ($38.47 million) in February and the previous record of CA$57.34 million ($42.7 million) last December.
The Motley Fool reported on the record-breaking sales and obstacles slowing down the industry, here are the three main hurdles according to their coverage:
The first problem has been caused by the regulatory agency Health Canada. Tasked with overseeing the licensing, processing, and sales application process, Health Canada has been hit with a monstrous backlog of paperwork that it’s had no effective means to work through. Marijuana Business Daily notes that the agency had a licensing backlog of almost 840 applications in January 2019, with the average cultivation application taking many months to review, and sales applications taking almost a full year to approve, as of May 2018. Without these licenses, pot companies cannot grow, harvest, process, distribute, and sell their product.
Read more at internationalcbc.com
