Article by Kate Robertson, Growth Op
When management at CannTrust announced on May 29 that a suspended licence had been reinstated for its Niagara cultivation facility, not everyone was happy for the embattled cannabis producer and its employees.
“Throughout this thing, I’ve been absolutely offended by the way CannTrust gets treated differently than ordinary Canadians who would be doing the same thing,” says Paul Lewin of Lewin & Sagara LLP.
While he notes that the company isn’t the only regulated cannabis organization to have had serious infractions since the Cannabis Act came into force in 2018, the claims from a whistleblower’s email to Health Canada in June 2019 seemed particularly reprehensible. Former employee Nick Lalonde said that the producer had been growing cannabis in unlicensed rooms and that he had been asked to hang fake walls to hide the unlicensed grow.