Every business has its fair share of paperwork, and in all sectors, complaints about the burden of regulation and reporting are common. Within Canada’s cannabis industry, however, the paperwork requirements are intense, with a significant burden on smaller cultivators and processors.
“Larger companies producing a more standardized product are able to streamline their data entry requirements,” says Kirk Tousaw, CEO of Great Gardener Farms. “They may have more paperwork in the aggregate, but they’ll also have more employee resources available. At small companies like ours – three total employees, including the two owners – it’s very hard to find extra time or person-power to do the work.”
The nature of the paperwork itself can be frustrating. In many instances, the requirements aren’t only time-consuming – they also seem illogical.
“Particularly onerous is the requirement that all inputs into the cultivation process be tracked,” says Tousaw. “This means that every time we add nutrients to our reservoirs, we’re required to create dozens of data points. This information is absolutely unnecessary to track, which makes spending time on it frustrating.”
Perhaps due to the fact that Canada’s legal cannabis industry is a relatively young sector, the government’s cautious approach has resulted in many redundancies. The bureaucracy associated with these requirements can, at times, seem absurd.
“The fact that Health Canada and the CRA require almost the same information in slightly different formats is ridiculous,” says Sarah Campbell from the Craft Cannabis Association of BC. “You’d think they could coordinate in some way to be more efficient for all involved.”
There are also differing paperwork challenges that are dependent on the number of strains grown, and the type of cultivator, with indoor and outdoor grows having unique burdens.
POUR LIRE LA SUITE: StratCann