B.C. government has begun to buy bud

Thestar.com
August 29, 2018
Perrin Grauer

An Ontario-based cannabis company announced Wednesday morning that it has received its first order from the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch (BCLDB).

Grant McLeod, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs and general counsel for Beleave Kannabis Co., said while the purchasing order it received on Friday is only the first of what will eventually become business as usual, it nevertheless feels like a milestone.

An Ontario-based cannabis company announced Wednesday it has received its first purchasing order from the B.C. government.

“People assume if you can grow some weed you have a market automatically, but there’s a lot of labour that goes into this,” he said in an interview. “We’re thankful for (this) opportunity, and we’re very focused on being a trusted entity for the government and for Canadian consumers.”

In July, the BCLDB announced the names of 31 companies with which it had established a memorandum of understanding to supply its cannabis come legalization, on Oct. 17. The Crown corporation will control wholesale of recreational weed to all brick and mortar retail stores in the province, and will control provincial online recreational sales entirely.

The BCLDB will, in turn, purchase its cannabis from licensed producers like Beleave.

Beleave will be providing cannabis to the BCLDB through its Seven Oaks brand of bud. Seven Oaks is a reference to a famous Métis and First Nations battleground near Lake Winnipeg. The name, said McLeod, reflects the Métis heritage of both he and his co-founder, Myles Fontaine.

McLeod, a lawyer who has consumed cannabis his entire adult life, said symbolically, filling the first purchase order from the provincial government represents a landmark moment in the fight to have cannabis and cannabis users normalized by institutional authorities.

“Stigma is something that we, like others in the industry, are trying to knock down,” he said. “I think what the government is saying is, ‘In reality, our approach to reducing usage is not working and we can do more with education (than prohibition).’”