“This will be the next canola,” said Danny Fieldberg, who grows industrial hemp on his certified organic farm outside of Medicine Hat. “Once it gets going, there will be no stopping it.”

Like canola — which was selectively bred by a team of researchers in the 1970s and has grown to become a billion-dollar industry for Canada — industrial hemp is primarily grown in the three Prairie Provinces. Also like canola, hemp can be used to produce a cooking oil, as well as edible seeds, protein powders and more.

The potential of the global cannabis industry is so vast that it could eventually make the sky-high valuations of some Canadian licensed producers look like bargains, according to a new report from Bank of Montreal.

In the report, the bank’s cannabis sector analysts, Tamy Chen and Peter Sklar, sought to determine just how big the total addressable market Canadian producers will be competing for in the coming years, one that doesn’t stop at Canada’s borders.

Now that cannabis has been legalized, it's hoped that the suspicion surrounding hemp production is on the way out with the general public.
 
In reality, agricultural organizations have no problem with hemp and would be happy to see more production as well as processing facilites.
 

Regina's top cop says there's been no big increase in impaired driving now that it's legal to smoke cannabis, but more people are smoking in public. 

"We have seen a lot of consumption in public. We have not done any enforcement, we've done a lot of education and a lot of communication with regard to that," Evan Bray said. 

"I actually had a personal encounter with an individual the other day. It was a very positive one. The individual actually had a medical purpose for consumption and was able to show the documentation of that."

Bray said he hasn't seen an overall shift in how people behave.

He said some people caught smoking recreationally in public said they didn't know the rules, while others were willfully breaking them. 

The Co-operators Life Insurance Co. is introducing optional medical cannabis coverage for its largest group plan sponsors.

While the coverage can be added as an optional provision under an extended health-care plan, it requires prior authorization and is subject to an annual maximum.

The insurer will consider cannabis an eligible expense under a health-care spending account, as long as the plan member has met all the guidelines set out by Health Canada. It stipulates that, since medical cannabis doesn’t have a drug identification number, it isn’t eligible for coverage under a prescription drug plan.

The name of the store is High North, but it might as well be named High and Dry because for all but about four hours of the first two weeks since marijuana was legalized in Canada, there was no pot to sell.

Trevor Tobin, one of the owners of the Labrador City shop in Newfoundland and Labrador, said they went 10 straight days without supply.

“The producers keep saying there will be some bumps in the road, but right now it’s not a bump in the road. It’s a big pothole,” he said.

Navdeep Dhaliwal was surprised when he first stepped foot in Lesotho last January — the climate was temperate, the landscape was lush, and the first footprints of a legal medical marijuana system were already in place.

“A close friend in the industry put me in touch with guys in Lesotho. So I went to meet with them, and I was really very surprised and impressed by the operation they had going there,” said Dhaliwal, president of Canadian licensed producer Supreme Cannabis.

KushCo Holdings, a company that sells packaging and supplies to the cannabis industry, would love to borrow money from a real bank.

Driven by a craze that is assuming almost cult-like proportions, money is pouring into the sectors of the cannabis industry that are focused on cannabidiol (CBD) products.

A new animal study has identified new pathways by which cannabidiol (CBD), the non-intoxicating compound in marijuana, affects the brain and nervous system without getting users high. If replicable in humans, the finding may strengthen the argument that CBD could be a safer alternative to standard pain and anxiety meds for many patients.