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It’s earnings day at Aphria Inc. and Irwin Simon has a smile on his face.

The interim chief executive of Canada’s third-largest licensed cannabis producer has just walked into a boardroom at the company’s Leamington, Ont. headquarters — the same boardroom in which he and his executive team have been holed up for a week, finalizing the details of their latest quarterly earnings report.

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Dressed casually in jeans and a dark blue sweater, Simon knows there is good news on the way: Aphria is about to post a surprise profit, its first since the legalization of recreational cannabis last year.

On this day, with the positive earnings and the company’s automated flagship cultivation facility, Aphria One, humming away at full capacity a few hundred yards away, it might be easy to forget that at the beginning of the year, some were questioning whether Aphria would even survive.

In December, a series of short-seller reports about inflated foreign assets and self-dealing involving the CEO and founders of the company had sent Aphria’s stock plummeting by as much as 60 per cent.