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Photo by Mark Yuen/Postmedia

“In the case of BC, our regulator provided a licence to grow, but the licence to process did not show up when we wanted to start the harvest. We can’t put it all on Health Canada, as we had our own delays and challenges getting these incredibly massive facilities up and running, but it sure didn’t help. As a result, we have sadly had to kill tens of thousands of plants that we could not harvest,” the email continued.

In a phone interview with the Post, Jordan Sinclair, Canopy’s vice-president of communications, addressed the video publicly for the first time.

When asked if it depicted a greenhouse in the Aldergrove facility, Sinclair said, “That is an excellent question.”

“Clearly people have seen the video, we have gone through video records to try and verify where that footage came from,” Sinclair said. “I would say I think it lines up with timelines, but even internally, I would not say that I can confirm that is our site.”

When asked specifically if Canopy ever faced crop loss in Aldergrove, Sinclair was adamant that they had not.

“We have not experienced crop failure at Aldergrove. The problem at Aldergrove is that we didn’t have the licenses in hand to be able to harvest the crop.”

Linton, too, reiterated to the Post via text that there had been no crop failure at the site.

Photo by Mark Yuen/Postmedia

Cultivating cannabis in massive greenhouses, at such scale, has never been done before and is bound to come with its fair share of challenges.

This may be why Canopy, like many other cannabis companies, does not publicly specify the quantity of cannabis produced at each of its operations across the country. The way the company tends to measure its operational scale is by square footage — although the company owns 4.4 million square feet of licensed production space, it is not clear how much cannabis flower and oil that actually yields.

According to Greenblatt, each 400,000-square-foot greenhouse in Aldergrove can produce 5,000 kilograms of cannabis in one harvest cycle — the growers anticipate that in a given year, there will be three-and-a-half cycles, meaning that at full capacity, the facility could produce up to 52,000 kg of cannabis.

But Greenblatt also confirmed that the most recent harvest out of Aldergrove in February (from a single greenhouse) yielded just 1,200 kg of cannabis. When asked about the shortfall, he said that much of that specific greenhouse was used as a nursery to house mother plants and test out different kinds of genetics.