The Newsroom

The Most Expensive Small Town in Canada

For 45 years a chocolate factory anchored Smiths Falls, Ontario. Then it became the headquarters of a $24-billion cannabis company. Then it was sold back to the chocolate company — and the town is still waiting for the future it was promised.

In 1963, Hershey opened in Smiths Falls: 750 jobs in a town of nine thousand. In 2008 it closed — 650 jobs gone. In 2013 the money came back: a cannabis startup called Tweed bought the shuttered plant for about $4 million, and by 2018 it was Canopy Growth’s global headquarters — a $24-billion market cap and 3,000 workers at the peak, in the first G7 country to legalize. Then came the layoffs, the write-downs, and in 2023 the punchline history wrote itself: the factory was sold back to Hershey — for $53 million.

We went to Smiths Falls on June 28th and met the people who lived it. The full investigation premieres on our channel — the trailer is on the homepage — and the history that explains how a century keeps repeating itself is in Wha Happen??, our complete cannabis history.

The Open Files

Some questions are too big for one story. They get a number, stay open across everything we make, and close only when they are actually answered. Open File №1: should the legal age be twenty-five? — follow the file, or bring us the next one →

The Lobby Just Quit

The national body that speaks for Canada’s licensed producers suspended operations — and pointed at the illegal market on the way out. When the industry’s own lobby can’t afford to keep the lights on, that’s the canary, not the footnote.

The Cannabis Council of Canada — the country’s national association of licensed producers and processors — announced it is suspending operations, citing financial pressure, the weight of regulation, and a “highly active” illegal market that, in its telling, has drained the resources needed to sustain a national voice. The line that should stop you: the businesses it represents “generate billions of dollars in revenue, but the majority of them remain unprofitable.”

Read it next to the consolidation story below and the shape of the thing appears. A legal market generating billions, but not healthy enough to keep its own trade association solvent. Its president’s parting position was that the job of eradicating the unregulated market belonged to government — “accountability rests with the federal government.” We’ll test that claim against the record, in both directions.

Consolidation Comes to Main Street

While the supply chain wobbles and the lobby folds, the roll-up keeps rolling. A single Ontario operator now flies more than ten banners over 200-plus stores — and one of them used to be the independent down the road.

The quiet half of this story is consolidation. Banners that started as separate, often local businesses — Pop’s Cannabis, Fire & Flower, Friendly Stranger, Ganjika House and more — now sit under one corporate umbrella, FIKA Company, spanning 200-plus locations across multiple provinces. Fire & Flower alone, once a publicly traded chain, was bought out of insolvency for $36 million. The roll-up doesn’t pause for a down market. It feeds on one.

This is the backdrop against which the small operator has to survive: a wholesale chokepoint above, a roll-up beside, and a grey market underneath waiting for any of it to slip. Which is exactly the story we’re building toward next — the independent’s side of it, told by someone living it.

The Big Three

High Tide, SNDL, and Tilray: executive pay climbing while the losses mount and the workers go. One shared pattern, three different buildings.

Three of Canada’s largest cannabis companies have a combined revenue north of C$2.7 billion — and combined accumulated deficits running into the billions. The public filings tell a consistent story: enrichment at the top, contraction at the floor. This is the gap between what the boardroom announced and what the employee experienced, told through the documents.

The central question

Public money — a wage subsidy designed to keep people employed — flowed into an industry that in many cases saw sales rise during lockdown, and much of it landed at companies that cut staff regardless. There was no clawback. So the question we keep asking, company by company: the taxpayer paid in. Are the jobs the taxpayer paid for still there, or did consolidation strip them while the executive line went up?

The Producer Tour

We’re knocking on doors. Who opens theirs gets the feature. The silence of those who don’t becomes part of the story too.

Everything the Collective has covered so far is the retail side — the store, the budtender, the consumer. The producer side is the other half of the supply chain, and it’s where the M&A pressure is decided before a jar ever reaches your shelf. So we’re doing it the honest way: a professional visitor request to each producer within reach of Ottawa. Not asking for sponsorship. Asking for their story, and a tour.

First requests out

• Tilray (ex-HEXO) — Masson-Angers, QC. 1.3M sq ft greenhouse built by HEXO, ~30 minutes from Ottawa.
• Canopy Growth — Smiths Falls, ON (99 Lorne St). The town that bet on weed when Canopy bought the old Hershey factory.
• Ferme El Camino — Pontiac, QC. The family-farm counterpoint, across the river from the corporate giant.
• Cultures du Kalumet & Kingston Cannabis — the regional growers on the route.

What Are We Allowed to Show You?

Our first product tests are written and coming. Before the camera rolls, we’re asking the regulators a simple question with a complicated answer.

The WeedWiki Standard means buying real product off the shelf and testing it on camera — flower, concentrate, edible, hardware. But the Cannabis Act’s promotion and display rules were written to restrain marketers, not to guide journalists and educators. So before we publish, we’re going to the source: Health Canada and the provincial regulators, to understand exactly what an independent cannabis journalist may legally show on screen — what we can hold up, name, and display, and where the line sits between education and promotion.

The story inside the story

The answer matters beyond us. If a framework built to restrict advertising also restricts independent product journalism and consumer education, that is a public-interest question in its own right. We’ll publish what the regulators tell us — and, just as importantly, the questions they can’t or won’t answer. The reach for clarity is itself the reporting.

Stories We’re Working On

The desk is open and the notebooks are full. Here’s what’s in progress.

• OutreachThe Independent’s PlaybookAn eastern-Ontario retailer on how a small shop plans to outlast the roll-up, the wholesale bottleneck, and the grey market — the human face of the launch sequence, told when they’re ready to tell it.
• WritingFirst Product TestsOff-the-shelf flower, concentrate, edible, and hardware — bought like you buy them, scored on the Standard. Going live once the on-camera rules are clear.
• ReportingThe CEWS-to-Layoff Pipeline$141M of pandemic wage subsidy went to companies that cut staff anyway. No clawback. Following the money.
• ReportingThe $273M Excise Black HoleRoughly 70% of licensees owe the CRA unpaid excise. The government is an unsecured creditor in its own industry.
• OutreachSmiths Falls: The Town That Bet on WeedCanopy bought the old Hershey factory, promised transformation, downsized, and sold the building back. A community case study.
• WritingThe Boring Model WorksA family-run Quebec grower posting steady profit with no roll-up and no drama — what good corporate cannabis can look like.
• WritingSeed SovereigntyOne company that lost nearly all its market value still controls the overwhelming majority of cannabis plant-breeder rights. Follow the genetics.

The Leaf, Applied to the Boardroom

The same healthy-leaf scale we use on stores and products, we apply to the companies behind the shelf — not on taste, but on whether they’re delivering on the jobs and the public dollars that built them. A vibrant leaf is a company keeping its end of the bargain. Full Leaf Death is reserved for one thing only: total collapse. We don’t hand it out. Bankruptcy earns it.