Last month, the B.C. labour board conducted a union vote at Tilray's cannabis facility in Nanaimo. While the ballot box is currently sealed, it could become the first cannabis producer to be unionized in Canada.

Stateside, the United Food and Commercial Workers union already has collective agreements at cannabis production facilities in California, Oregon, Minnesota, New Mexico, Washington and Colorado.

Call it a sign of the times: McGill University will teach students how to grow the perfect pot plant starting next year.

McGill’s Diploma in Commercial Cannabis program launches in June and it’s meant to train biologists to cultivate cannabis, design strains, protect them against contaminants and understand the legal framework of Canada’s burgeoning weed industry.

While Guelph University has a cannabis cultivation course and there are college-level programs geared toward the industry, McGill is the first among U15 Canadian Research Universities to go all-in on weed.

When Alycia Walker worked as a publicist at an agency in downtown Toronto, she yearned to trade the towers and traffic for trees and tranquillity without giving up her marketing career.

“My husband and I were looking to get out of the city,” she says. “He owns his own landscaping company and we’ve been long-time cottagers in Muskoka, so we were always looking for an opportunity. I just honestly never thought it would come.”

Walker rejoiced when one of the agency’s clients, Muskoka Grown, needed a marketing manager a few hours north of the city, in cottage country. She and her husband have lived in the region for about a year now, and the self-proclaimed cottager says they’re part of a burgeoning community of former urbanites — thanks in part to the cannabis industry.

After opting in to retail cannabis stores this year, Collingwood, Ont., will have its first legal pot shop by Christmas.

Louis Laskovski, who won the licence during the previous government lottery, teamed up with Sessions Cannabis to open the store.

“After an intensive government approval process, we strive to become a reliable and trusted source of information about cannabis along with being a leading retailer of the product,” Laskovski said in a press release.

“We know there is demand in Collingwood and the surrounding area. In our experience, customers are becoming more sophisticated and want an alternative to the black market.”

It’s going to be a busy season for the RIDE program.

Police in Ontario are ramping up Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere checks as the holiday season approaches and drivers get a little too joyful behind the wheel of their cars. Officers in search of drivers under the influence of alcohol or cannabis said the infractions came fast and furious after they set up near Peterborough on Tuesday.

“Three drivers were charged with having cannabis readily available within 45 minutes of that RIDE check starting,” Const. Joe Ayotte with the Peterborough County OPP, told Global News.

A Sudbury-based cannabis company that announced plans to set up shop in Espanola last summer has hit a funding snag that's delaying the project's development.

Jeff Scharf, president and CEO of GaiaCann Inc., said plans for the construction of a first-phase cannabis cultivation and extraction facility in northeastern Ontario have been deferred.

Locals from the northeastern Ontario paper mill town about 40 minutes west of Sudbury recently took to Facebook to express confusion. 

The Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS) is offerings same-day and next-day shipping in some areas of Toronto.

According to the OCS website, if a customer lives within the postal code areas chosen for the pilot, the new delivery options will appear at checkout.

To have an order delivered on the same day, the order must be placed before 1 p.m. For those wanting next-day shipping, the order must be placed before midnight the day before.

In both cases, the delivery will be made between 6:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.

Customers will need to show identification at the door to prove they are 19 years old or older.

Ontario’s finance minister is dismissing criticism from cannabis industry executives who attribute their weak sales to the province’s limited number of retail stores.

“The [criticisms are] not fair; but it doesn’t surprise me. Sometimes businesspeople look for all kinds of reasons why things don’t work out,” Rod Phillips told BNN Bloomberg’s Paige Ellis Thursday.

"We’re focused on what is going to be a system that is sustainable, that makes sense for our communities and tackles the black market. We’re confident that we’ll put that forward.”

Phillips said he’s comfortable with the progress the province had made on its rollout of cannabis, given the sensitive nature of it.

Michigan’s move to issue its first licences to businesses planning to grow and sell recreational cannabis could be the death knell for a small, southern Ontario town’s chance at becoming a pot tourist destination.

Windsor, Ont., is a border town connected to Michigan., the state south of the border that will let the sale of recreational marijuana proceed on Dec. 1.

Windsor Ward 3 Coun. Rino Bortolin told the Windsor Star that Ontario’s slow and “ridiculous” plan to establish brick-and-mortar cannabis shops around the province is to blame.

Relief may finally be coming for cannabis producers that have been stymied by the lack of legal retail stores in the country’s most populous province. 

The Ontario government is considering a plan that would abandon the maligned lottery process that has left it with only two-dozen legal pot shops, and instead pivot as early as January to a system that could lay the groundwork for up to a thousand stores in the province, according to a person directly familiar with the matter.