Marijuana Business Magazine - Issue 09, Oct 2017

Capital raises in Canada rose about 1,700% in the first half of 2017. Is that sustainable? As the business evolves and grows and as certain companies emerge as leaders, they might need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to continue to grow – whether that’s here in Canada or even internationally. I think the concern and the question is the number of companies that have been able to raise substantial dollars, meaning CA$10 million, CA$20 million, CA$30 million. Is that sustainable? I think that’s the big question. My personal opinion is that’s not sustainable. Can you offer advice for young companies? We’re building a business, and we’re helping to build an industry at the same time. That’s really hard to do suc- cessfully. You need to find good people. Without that, any company will fail. Specifically in this space, there are a lot of complexi- ties – dealing with regulators, dealing with growing live plants, dealing with production process issues. You really need to trust and rely on your people. Otherwise you get tripped up. So anyone starting out should make sure they have the right complements of skills and staff. The provinces are working on regulatory structures for the rec industry. Do you have a preference in terms of taxes and distribution? We would like to see a federal excise tax on the prod- uct rather than a sales tax, because that will help allevi- ate a lot of the challenges, especially in Canada, that we see with the sale of contraband tobacco. From a retail standpoint, we have a number of thoughts on that both from MedReleaf and the industry overall. We’d really like to see that producers will not be prevented from operating in the retail space on our own directly with the patient. Having that direct relationship with our patients has been invaluable. At a physical retail level, we’d like to be able to be participants in that. Our preference is not for a govern- ment, province-by-province monopoly on retail. That seems to be the way some of the provinces will go. We just don’t think government should be in the business of retailing products. ◆

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Nzk0OTI=