Legalizing recreational marijuana could ignite a $22.6 billion industry in Canada, Deloitte says.

It's Sunday afternoon and Toronto's Centre for Social Innovation is packed full of marijuana enthusiasts perusing tables of goods.

Everything from marijuana-infused barbecue sauce to medicated body rubs is available at Green Market, where artisans peddle their various craft cannabis products.

Such events, which sell to patients and casual users alike, operate within a foggy regulatory environment. Selling marijuana is illegal unless you are a large-scale producer licensed under Health Canada's medical marijuana regime.

His supply chain strategy and brand equity are near-unbelievable. Four strategies you should copy from the world's jolliest entrepreneur.

Deriving business lessons from Santa Claus is difficult. Despite the ubiquity of the Santa Claus brand, little is known about the actual workings of the operation. Santa’s business is privately held; he prepares no publicly available annual reports and publishes no audited financial statements. (I did address a list of questions to “Santa Claus, The North Pole, Postal Code H0H 0H0.” An unsigned response simply asked me to continue believing in “magic.”)

In spite of this I’ve conducted a close analysis of Santa’s operations and have defined four sets of resolutions you can make that will benefit your business next year.

The Trudeau government has pledged to legalize marijuana in the spring, but anyone who’s been convicted of a pot-related crime won’t be off the hook right away.

A federal task force on legalization recommended this week to allow storefront and mail-order sales of marijuana to people 18 years old and up, and to not sell it alongside cigarettes or alcohol.

But just like the federal Liberals, it said little about how the government should go about pardoning those who’ve been convicted of possession, trafficking, or production or marijuana, and more, once marijuana is made legal.

Years before U.S. arrest, cannabis stores, Marc Emery was a bookshop owner on a mission.

Marc Emery and his stores, Cannabis Culture, came out of nowhere last week with the announcement that they were breaking federal marijuana laws at eight secret locations in the city. 

A few days later, the stores were raided, closed and Emery was thrown in jail. He was charged with drug trafficking, possession for the purpose of trafficking and conspiracy. 

He has been released on bail and is due back in court Feb. 15.    

Here's a look at Emery's background and what he might hope to accomplish in Montreal.

Tania Cyalume and Brandy Zurborg are the brains behind Bloorcourt’s Queens of Cannabis, a dispensary that sells to approved medical marijuana patients. But it’s so much more than that – it’s also a healing centre.

A knowledgable, articulate couple who live and work together, Cyalume and Zurborg were patients with medical cannabis prescriptions before deciding to open a dispensary. Originally hoping to start a female-oriented head shop, they were inspired to go the dispensary route after a trip to Vancouver, where they experienced that city’s dispensary culture while shopping for woman-made wholesale pipes.

Deck the halls with blunts and bong hits.

This morning I was sent a press release from Cannabis Culture to announce that despite the arrests and the 8 police busts that took place over the weekend, their stores are still in fact open for business.

So pretty much the only thing the police crackdown accomplished was wasting taxpayer money.

Now that that’s out of the way, Cannabis Culture wants the people of Montreal to show their support for legalization.

To encourage you to join the fight, they are giving out some special “Christmas Gifts” to anyone who signs their petition. You just need to send your name and email address to Cannabisculture514@protonmail.com

The Cannabis industry soared in 2016 in the US and Canada. Here's an outlook for what's in store for the market in 2017.

It goes without saying that the cannabis industry reached a new high point in 2016. The US voting in favor of legalization (in four states) on November 8, and the Canadian government releasing its task force  for recreational use of marijuana on December 13 were certainly two of the year’s biggest moments.

Task Force on Cannabis Got it Mostly Right.

Last week’s release of the report by the Canadian government’s Task Force on Cannabis Legalization and Regulation largely took a public health approach, which is appropriate given both the initial terms of reference and the evidence they gathered throughout the process. It was heartening to see the government get this right, for the most part, and to see the focus on access to medicine for medical users and fair access to safe and reliable cannabis for recreational users. They crafted a strategy governed by an overarching harm reduction objective, as opposed to the nanny state, control-oriented philosophy that governs so much of what happens in my native province of Ontario.

A Canadian cannabis-tech company is readying a January ASX listing, capitalising on Australia’s recent move to legalise the manufacturing of medical cannabis.

RotoGro CEO Adam Clode said his system is a cheap, quick and effective way of achieving massive medical cannabis yields, and he calls it the future of indoor growing equipment.

The equipment can be loaded with up to 420 cannabis plants in a single system.

Mr Clode told The Australian cannabis stocks in Australia have been going gangbusters since it became legal to cultivate and manufacture medical cannabis from November 1.

Even as more states move to legalize marijuana use, the plant’s genetic makeup remains a relative mystery.

“It’s still quite an undeveloped species from the perspective of genetics,” Canadian botanist Jonathan Page told Vocativ. 

Page published the first paper with a draft sequence of a single cannabis strain, but federal laws against pot have long made academic research on the plant a challenge.