Major Canadian employers are considering covering the drug, says an industry insider.

The winds of change are blowing through employee benefit plans across Canada, and they smell like weed.

Benefits industry insider Mike Sullivan caught a whiff at a recent meeting with some of his clients, who represent private companies with benefit plans that cover about three million Canadian workers across a range of industries.

"This group that was in attendance, the No. 1 topic of discussion was medical cannabis," said Sullivan, who is president of Cubic Health, which provides analytics to employers who sponsor health benefit plans.

Vancouver-headquartered Tantalus Labs has become B.C.’s 10th Health Canada-licensed medical marijuana producer, aiming to start sales sometime in the summer of 2018 under the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes regulations.

In an interview Monday, CEO Dan Sutton said Tantalus received word Friday that it was approved, which allows it to start acquiring materials and planting seed crops, including clone plants, at its high-tech greenhouse facility in Maple Ridge, which has the capacity to grow up to 10,000 kilograms of cannabis per year.

Canada plans to legalize recreational cannabis before July 1, 2018, and the industry continues to steal headlines as this has created great opportunity for both companies and investors.

Although the opportunity is significant, the process of becoming a licensed medical cannabis producer is very lengthy and expensive. These factors have resulted in the country having a supply and demand issue for the medical cannabis market.

Even attendees at Canada’s biggest cannabis trade show, Lift, on this weekend at Metro Convention Centre, had mixed feelings about legalization, with some worried government control and corporatization would crush the little guy.

Longtime head shop owner Luke Reynolds sees recreational marijuana in Canada eventually rolling out “like Tim Hortons and Starbucks” on every corner.

“It will be government run and I think they’re going to crush all the little guys like us who started this movement in the first place,” said Reynolds, owner of PipeDreamz in Ajax, while selling his vaporizers and pipes for pot smokers at Lift, Canada’s biggest cannabis convention, Saturday in Toronto.

One would think the province known for its joie de vivre and laissez-faire attitudes would have the most lenient stance toward the legalization of pot. But a recent survey shows the opposite is true.

Quebecers are far less optimistic about the legalization of marijuana than their counterparts in the rest of Canada, a CROP poll conducted on behalf of CBC's French-language network, Radio-Canada, shows.

For nearly every promised benefit of legalization, from the reduction of the black market to less stress on the justice system, people in Quebec were more skeptical than their counterparts elsewhere in the country.

The results even surprised CROP president Alain Giguère, a veteran pollster.

Aurora Cannabis Inc. (TSXV: ACB) announced just before Friday’s closing bell that it plans to acquire Germany’s Pedanios GmbH, a wholesale importer, exporter, and distributor of medical cannabis in the European Union (EU). Aurora Cannabis’ stock had been halted for more than 24 hours pending this news.

Cannabis Wheaton (TSX: CBW.V) (OTC: KWFLF) is a newly traded Canadian cannabis company that has received significant coverage since it started trading due its management team and differentiated strategy.

Although the company is focused on cannabis production, it does not actually produce cannabis. Cannabis Wheaton invests and partners with licensed Canadian medical cannabis companies that are in various stages of the licensing process.

Now that marijuana has been legalized is so many states, and is about to become legal across Canada, new concerns have been raised over people driving or being on the job while impaired by recent marijuana use. Well, those concerns are being addressed.

Like the familiar breathalyzer used to test whether a driver is behind the wheel while impaired by alcohol, a similar hand-held device that tests for recent marijuana use is already being tested in Canada and the United States, including a small device being tested in California that uses a small sample of saliva to test for six drugs within minutes.

Investor fatigue has taken hold in Canada’s hot marijuana sector amid an influx of look-alike producers getting licensed and going public, analysts said at an industry conference Friday.

“There’s massive investor fatigue, like enormous, and people can’t tell the difference between licensed producers anymore,” Aaron Salz, CEO at Stoic Advisory, said on a panel Friday at the Lift Cannabis Expo in Toronto.

“Fundamentally, to some degree, these businesses, as prescribed by Health Canada and being in a highly-regulated industry are almost forced to be identical in many ways.”

Marijuana Stocks Are Under the Government’s Thumb

Canada is going to be the first western nation to totally legalize recreational and medical marijuana on a national scale. As such, many investors are rightfully treating Canada as a guinea pig of sorts to see how arduous the process of legalization is and what the ultimate effects on the marijuana stock market will be as a result.

Obviously, as you would expect, legalization is good for business. Unless you know a way to invest and trade in roving illegal gangs, sellers, and importers (probably not a good idea, even if possible), then investors have for a long time been shut out from getting in on the recreational marijuana market.