N.W.T.-grown cannabis weeks away from hitting shelves

Jordan Harker has been dreaming about growing cannabis for more than 30 years. 

He recently found an old notebook from when he was 15 or 16 years old, with sketches of a secret underground grow-op. 

A lot has changed since then; for one, no more need to do it underground. 

Instead, Harker and his two business partners — his brother Brooke, and Damien Healy — now have 616 plants growing in a specially-constructed building off Deh Cho Blvd. in Yellowknife. 

Their company, Boreal Cultivation, is the first licensed commercial cannabis grower in the N.W.T., and second in the North. 

N.W.T. residents may have already seen the Boreal name at their local cannabis vendor. The company has been selling since June, but it's all been cannabis from the South it has imported, processed and re-packaged. 

Now the budding company is weeks away from selling its own, well, bud. 

Harker, master grower Rob Dawe and a third staff member went through 28 strains, with thousands of plants grown in Harker's home and lots of... testing. 

"It was sitting literally around a coffee table, smoking different jars," he said. 

"Everyone always sort of had their favourite, but generally the ones that we decided on, all of us thought these are the winners." 

Ultimately, they settled on a single new and unique strain they're calling GasBanana. 

Funding support

"Labour and heat is what we look at every month, worrying," said co-owner Damien Healy. 

Boreal currently employs five full-time staff and its building stays warm via oil-fed in-floor heating. 

While the other northern cannabis grower, Yukon's ArcticPharm, grows its cannabis outside, Boreal has opted to keep everything indoors. 

"Electricity is not as bad as everybody thinks," said Healy.  

Harker says the company is continuously trying to find efficiencies to reduce costs. One of those is using multi-level racks to maximize floor space. 

But the real solution, he says, is much simpler: try and sell more weed. 

So far, Boreal is selling across all three territories, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Harker says it's in the final stages of getting its product in Ontario, which is "a game changer for us."

Despite all this, he admits the company couldn't operate without government funding. 

Healy says the company has received funding through the N.W.T. Business Development and Investment Corporation; Industry, Tourism and Investment's SEED program, and the federal government's Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership. 

He adds they'd like to see the N.W.T. government update its Cannabis Products Act to allow Boreal to sell from its facility, create indoor consumption sites and allow for consumption at special outdoor events. 

'Better than friends'

Both Harker and Dawe say their interest in cannabis goes beyond money. 

"This plant's been good to me, man. Better than most of my friends," said Dawe. 

"If you showed up to work and you didn't love the plants, they wouldn't even look great." 

For Harker, smoking weed has gone from a fun thing to do with friends to pain relief — he was diagnosed with a serious liver disease five years ago. 

"We view this plant as magic, and I don't use that word lightly," he said. 

"I don't believe in magic, but I believe in this plant, what it does, and it's pretty cool for us to grow." 

Harker says the current setup is the first phase for Boreal. The plan is to grow 3,000 to 4,000 plants and a handful of different strains.