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Photo by Ted S. Warren/AP photo

Bruce Linton: This sector has had a nearly continuous case of hiccups for five or six years because there’s a lot of friction involved in doing something that changes perception, public policy, creates an entirely new supply chain, doesn’t have generally good access to banking, all of a sudden becomes international.

Vic Neufeld: It’s not an easy thing to build a greenhouse and know you can produce, you know, 20,000 kilos a month. It takes a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge. And Mother Nature is not co-operative at all times.

Bruce Linton: People said, ‘You can’t grow in a greenhouse, that won’t work, greenhouses are too easy to break into because they are glass,’ all these complaints. So I didn’t know how big the company or the sector would be, but I knew our objective — it wasn’t to be small, it was to be No. 1.

Greg Engel, CEO of OrganiGram: You have to be very creative and work with the right companies to help build and find solutions. And a lot of those solutions, you’ve had to create custom, such as pre-roll equipment that’s going to produce millions of pre-rolls (pre-rolled joints) per year. I mean, no one out of the U.S. had that expertise, and we’ve had to go to engineering/design/manufacturing companies to create that equipment.

Brian Harriman, CEO, New Brunswick Liquor Corp.: We knew supply was going to be critical. We knew from our experience that we could build buildings and hire people and train them and do all those good things, but doing all that and having empty shelves wasn’t going to work. At that point, we didn’t have the mandate to run the stores. But we thought, ‘No matter who’s running retail stores in New Brunswick, they’ll need supply.’ So we began signing supply MOUs in July 2017. One of the challenges was we, as the New Brunswick Liquor Corporation, couldn’t sign supply contracts with a cannabis producer given that it was still illegal. So there was some stickhandling there to think about who did have the authority to sign. At the end of the day, the province was the entity that had to sign the documents and to support the process.