'Business as usual' for Canopy Growth in St. John's after termination of CEO
Company expects grow-op construction to be completed by the fall
Once construction is complete, the Canopy Growth production facility in the White Hills area of St. John's will be the company's largest site in Atlantic Canada.
And according to Jordan Sinclair, the company's vice president of communications, the termination of CEO Bruce Linton last week won't have an impact on the company's plans to produce thousands of kilograms of cannabis each year at the site.
"It's business as usual," Sinclair told CBC Radio's St. John's Morning Show.
"In terms of St. John's, you know, we're still building, we're still plowing forward. His departure, while it is sad, it won't have any impact on the project."
Linton co-founded the Ontario-based company in 2013 and it's grown to be one of the country's biggest cannabis players. The Newfoundland and Labrador Liberals struck a controversial deal with the company, offering $40 million in tax remittances in exchange for Canopy establishing a production facility in the province and a guaranteed supply to the local market.
That facility's steel structure is now fully enclosed and interior work is being done to transform the space from an empty shell into an operational grow room, Sinclair said.
The company is still on track to have the work finished by November 2019, he said.
Black markets and green thumbs
The facility will employ 146 people with different skill sets, and Sinclair said the hiring will be done in waves as the project develops, with jobs posted in the careers section of the company website.
They'll need people with engineering and management backgrounds to run the plant and maintain the complicated systems controlling things like temperature and humidity levels, but the majority of the jobs will involve day-to-day care of the plants, he said.
The company isn't too concerned about how potential employees have developed their green thumbs.
"That might mean people that have experience growing in the black market," said Sinclair.
"I mean, sometimes at job fairs we get the official resume and then the unofficial resumé is kind of the pictures that are on someone's phone."
Over $100 million in expected production
Health Canada will have to assess the White Hills site before before Canopy Growth gets a licence to operate, which Sinclair expects may take another couple of months after construction is finished.
He said Canopy Growth produced a total of 24,000 kilograms of cannabis in the past fiscal year with total sales of $226 million.
The St. John's facility is projected to produce 12,000 kilograms once it's up and running.
With files from the St. John's Morning Show