Don Robinson says he is bringing the “best of big business practice” to just about the last place investors would think to look for it: the marijuana sector.

“We’re a marriage of industry experts who don’t have corporate experience with corporate grey-hair adult supervision,” he said of his new company Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd. “That marriage is really critical.”

Robinson, 61, has been in the food business for more than 30 years, most recently as chief executive of Toronto-based Cara Operations Ltd. Now he is running Golden Leaf, which began trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange on Wednesday. With revenues of more than US$1 million a month and growing, its sales already dwarf nearly all the licensed medical marijuana producers in Canada.

In a decade and a half of practising law, I’ve never come across an industry changing and evolving as rapidly as Canada’s medical cannabis industry.  It’s fascinating, but it’s also time-consuming to stay abreast of everything that’s going on.  So in case you are interested in what is happening in the industry (beyond the legalization debate taking place within election campaigning), here’s a quick update on my ‘top ten’ list of current issues:

Tom Mulcair is promising that an NDP government would move toward legalizing marijuana.

In a live interview with Vice Canada, the NDP leader said he would decriminalize pot immediately if elected and then look at making the drug legal in Canada.

"We are on track to full legalization, but it is more complicated than snapping your fingers. We are not going to have weed being sold at the LCBO tomorrow morning," Mulcair told the live studio audience.

In a parliamentary report published in June, the NDP pledged it would study the regulation and legalization of marijuana. Now the NDP leader is going further by suggesting legalization is inevitable.

Change is inevitable, so you need to be prepared to manage your business' evolutionary stages

ow aligned is your culture with your strategy? Few leaders are unaware of Peter Drucker’s famous saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ Yet few pay purposeful attention to culture—a potential mistake. Ignoring culture leads to an organization’s demise.

It’s tough to put your finger on organization culture like you would many other things in business—it can feel nebulous and illusive. Leaders often feel that culture cannot be managed, but this view leads to complacency. Left unattended company cultures evolve into weedy gardens that choke out the execution of strategy.

When it comes to Cannabis and its use for medical purposes, Canada has been examining the issue in one form or another for at least 16 years. It has of course lead to the current Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR) – with all of its promise and problems. Australia, on the other hand is now just beginning to think about what a policy regime would look like – and in their desire to “get it right” Australia is looking at Canada to derive some lessons learned.

Australia has a very unique opportunity to design a policy regime that can ignore the Canadian mistakes and avoid some of the rhetoric that has plagued the discussion and policy development while addressing the needs of patients and care givers.

Last month, we worked with the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, and “moms united and mandated to saving the lives of Drug Users” (mumsDU) to send out a policy questionnaire to all the political parties to get their opinion on issues surrounding an ever-changing drug policy landscape. Our intention was to gauge the direction each party would take Canada if elected on October 19.

Legalizing and regulating marijuana would help – not hurt – young people who suffer from mental illness or use the drug to self-medicate, say psychiatrists and addiction experts, who argue that is the only way for the public to have an open dialogue on the harms associated with the illegal drug.

Marijuana has emerged as an issue in the federal election campaign. The Liberals promise legalization, the NDP pledge at least to decriminalize it, and the Conservatives vow further crackdowns and are using the debate to attack their opponents.

Among the Conservatives’ main arguments against legalizing pot is that doing so would put youth at risk, pointing to evidence that the drug is linked to psychosis and schizophrenia.