On June 22, the Cannabis Council of Canada, the closest thing this country’s legal cannabis industry had to a national association, suspended its operations. Membership had collapsed from 48 companies and 38 affiliates in 2024 down to 18 and 4 by the time the doors closed, in an industry with more than 800 federally licensed producers. The reason given: the same financial and regulatory pressure squeezing every licensed operator in this country finally caught up to the group that was supposed to speak for them.
Give that a fair read first. Getting hundreds of competing cannabis companies, licensed producers and independent retailers with wildly different sizes and priorities, to agree on one national ask was never going to be easy and after four years of asking for reform with nothing to show for it will most definitely wear any organization down to nothing.
But here’s what actually matters for you, the customer, standing in a Toronto neighbourhood shop deciding what to buy and where to buy it: that national voice is gone, and it’s not coming back this year. For the first time since legalization, there is officially nobody in Ottawa whose job it is to speak for this industry as a whole.
The association was never actually doing the work that keeps this industry legitimate in the first place. For me, I believe that work happens at the counter. It happens when staff learn a product well enough to explain it properly instead of just ringing it through. It happens when a shop checks ID. It happened when we fought the city over RapidTO in 2025 to keep this block walkable and this business alive. None of that ever needed a national association’s permission to exist but it did need someone showing up, week after week, whether anyone was watching or not.
That matters even more right now, because the fight was never really in Ottawa, it’s on the shelf next to your favourite shop. Illicit cannabis still accounts for somewhere around 35% to 45% of everything consumed in this country, 7+ years after legalization was supposed to end that. No association was ever going to close that gap through a policy memo. The only thing that moves that number is a customer choosing, purchase by purchase, to buy from a shop that cards properly, tests its product, and actually pays into the system, instead of a Shopify page or a guy with a duffel bag and no age gate.
Every point that shifts from illegal to legal is real money that stays in its local neighbourhood instead of funding nobody’s payroll or tax base. That was true back when the Cannabis Council of Canada existed on paper and it’s just more obviously the only lever left now that it doesn’t.
I won’t pretend legal costs the same as illegal, it doesn’t, we know that, and it probably won’t for a while still. Compliance, testing, excise, it all adds up on a receipt the black market never has to print. What that receipt buys you is a business that has to answer for what it sells you.
Nobody’s coming to save this industry from a boardroom in Ottawa, it gets built the way it always got built anyway: one shop, one staff member, one customer at a time, choosing to do it right.