On Vancouver Island, Cory Russell tends a meticulous grow at Island Genetics with one rule on the wall written above the trim table: quality over quantity. As chief cultivation officer and a founding member of the B.C. Cannabis Alliance, he's blunt about the system stacked against producers like him.
"The government distribution models add complexity," Russell says. "Everything goes through a middleman to dispensaries with limited shelf space. Small producers don't put up the same units as large producers, so it's hard to get sales velocity – and without that trajectory, registering new [stock keeping units] gets harder."
Critics argue the province's central distributor functions like a bottlenecked warehouse; space and speed favour companies with deep inventory, national sales teams, and cash to burn. The parallel to alcohol is obvious – and revealing. Craft breweries won market share when policy made room for them: tiered markups, tasting rooms, and routes-to-market that didn't punish small batches. Cannabis, Russell argues, inherited the bureaucracy without the on-ramps. "Tax rates are the exact same," he notes. "Independent cultivators get hammered because we don't have the liquidity or public funds. We're paying a lot into the system, but it doesn't come back to us."
He says even licensing remains fraught: quoted five-figure, non-refundable "application fees" and no access to the job grants or economic development programs other agri-food sectors routinely tap.
Read more at BCIT News
