Talks have started up again between JWC and the health agency

James, E. Wagner Cultivation has resumed talks with Health Canada to obtain a cultivation licence for their expanded facility in Kitchener.

Previously they only had their licence for their pilot plant, which only covered medical marijuana for patients. When they showcased phase one of their retrofitting of the former Lear plant last year, JWC still hadn't heard back from them.

But now, according to Nathan Woodworth, President and CEO of JWC, they are in ongoing communications with Health Canada.

"In terms of what's left in our conversations with the provincial distributorships, I think it's mostly paperwork in front of us. Just making sure that we're all signed up and dealt with in the proper fashion and that's just really a matter of time," he said.

Woodworth believes the delays in communication were the result of a fast-growing industry and a federal department having to play catchup.

"They have struggled valiantly to try and deal with the flood of applications that they are receiving now and I think they're finally managing to catch up to some of the cases that they are working on," he said.

He says cannabis was "going to play an important part in the Canadian jobs landscape in the next decade," and that they expect to hire 450 people in the coming months. Currently JWC employs 85 workers for their phase one operations. According to Woodworth, they were nearing the end of phase two of their plant expansion.

"So given are current numbers and the numbers we expect, you can see that we will be looking to hire about 20 to 30 people a month over the next year, year and a half,"

Health Canada has not given JWC a timeline of when they will receive their licence, but Woodworth was confident it will be very soon.

"In the meantime, we are in discussions with a number of provincial retail distributors in order to prepare to be able to distribute our product from our new cultivation facility."