Growing Cannabis In Canada

Cannabis Reform in Canada: Why Consumers Must Speak Up Again

When Canada legalized recreational cannabis in October 2018, it settled the one question most Canadians cared about: nobody should be criminalized for using a plant. For the average consumer, the fight was over. Walk into a store, buy legally, go home.

But for the industry that grew up after legalization, the fight is far from finished. Producers and retailers are still pushing Ottawa on excise taxes, packaging and marketing restrictions, THC caps, and dozens of smaller rules. What they've lost is the public standing behind them.

That raises a real question for the Canadian cannabis sector — and for anyone who grows, buys, or consumes cannabis in Quebec: should the industry stop lobbying only governments and start talking to its own customers?

Why the public stopped paying attention

Jennawae Cavion, executive director of NORML Canada, a long-running consumer advocacy group, describes the problem plainly: to most Canadians, legalization feels like a solved problem. Before 2018, criminalization gave ordinary people an obvious reason to care. Today, the regulations that frustrate businesses are mostly invisible at the checkout.

Cavion supports pulling consumers back into reform, but she warns that not every industry complaint is a consumer complaint. Excise tax is the classic example. It clearly hurts the legal market's viability, but as she puts it, nobody is going to write their MP because a cannabis company pays too much tax.

Her advice: find the rules where industry and consumer interests overlap. If a regulation makes legal cannabis more expensive, more wasteful, harder to understand, or narrows choice, there's a story consumers can relate to — as long as it's told from their point of view, not as a favour to the industry.

What a consumer issue actually looks like

Cavion points to access, affordability and product availability as natural starting points. If people can't find what they want, pay unexplained price premiums, or drift back to the illicit market because it's simply more convenient, that is something they experience firsthand.

She also frames this as the next chapter of reform rather than a fight over profit margins: with a legal market in place, it's time to separate the rules that protect public health and youth from the ones that are just leftovers from prohibition.

For Quebec residents, the most obvious leftover is the province's ban on growing cannabis at home. Federally, adults can [grow up to four plants](INTERNAL LINK: your home-growing guide), and seeds are a legal product. Quebec is the outlier, and it's exactly the kind of gap between the law on paper and the consumer's real options that Cavion is describing.

Lessons from Canada's beer lobby

Cannabis isn't the first regulated adult product to face this challenge. Beer Canada, which represents Canadian brewers, has spent years fighting the federal excise "escalator" — an automatic annual tax increase introduced in the 2017 budget that rises with inflation without a vote in Parliament.

Rather than treating it as a boardroom-to-Ottawa conversation, Beer Canada built a public campaign around it. President Richard Alexander's logic is simple: a tax on beer is paid by the public one way or another, and people who like beer don't want it to become unaffordable.

Three lessons from their playbook apply directly to cannabis:

1. Build a coalition. Beer Canada rarely shows up alone. It brings union reps, barley farmers and hospitality workers to demonstrate that the issue reaches far beyond one industry.
2. Test your message. The organization uses public opinion polling to learn which segment of the public will act and which framing moves them.
3. Find the fairness hook. The message that resonates most isn't "taxes are high." It's that the tax rises automatically with no debate — something Alexander says the vast majority of Canadians view as wrong.

Retailers have the receipts

If consumers are going to get involved, retailers are the ones who talk to them every day.

Matthew Greenwood, owner of Vancouver's Up in Smoke Cannabis, says his store published a full price breakdown after fielding questions about cost almost daily. The core of it is the federal excise duty on dried flower: the greater of $1 per gram or 10% of the sale price. When that formula was designed, wholesale flower sold for roughly $10 a gram. With wholesale prices now closer to $2–3, the flat $1 minimum has become a far heavier burden — a problem craft growers have been flagging since 2021.

Greenwood's math: on a 28-gram ounce, that's $28 in tax collected before the product leaves the farm, then marked up by the provincial wholesaler and again at retail like any other cost. Consumers, in other words, pay a markup on a fixed tax.

His argument is that explaining this does more than deflect blame from the store. Once customers understand why the legal price looks the way it does, they stop blaming the retailer and start asking who to write to. The trick is plain language: nobody responds to "regulatory modernization," but everyone understands paying $12 a gram for something that should cost $9, or watching a favourite craft grower vanish from the shelf.

He'd like to see retailers nationwide rally behind a single reform and make participation effortless — a site where a customer signs a petition and emails their MLA/MNA and MP in one click.

The hard part: agreeing on the issue

Different corners of the industry want different things. Greenwood's own priorities as an independent retailer include scrapping the 30-gram possession limit, letting minors enter stores with a parent (as BC liquor stores allow), and removing barriers to interprovincial trade so stores can stock products from anywhere in Canada.

For a Quebec audience, the list looks different but the logic is the same: home cultivation rights, product selection, and whether the legal price reflects the product or the tax stack.

From customers to constituents

None of this replaces traditional lobbying. Bodies like the Cannabis Council of Canada will keep working the halls of Parliament. The opportunity is to add the voice that has been missing since 2018: the people who actually buy the product.

It also takes patience. Beer Canada has been lobbying against the escalator since 2018 and running consumer campaigns since 2020, and the tax still rises every April. Alexander's biggest lesson from three decades of advocacy is that persistence counts — government is now well aware of the issue, and sometimes that's what it takes.

For Canadian cannabis, the next phase of reform may depend less on making a better argument to Ottawa and more on making sure Ottawa hears it from more than cannabis businesses.

What you can do

• Learn where your money goes. Ask your retailer for a price breakdown, or read [our guide to cannabis pricing in Quebec](INTERNAL LINK).
• Support consumer advocacy. NORML Canada is the main consumer-side voice in Ottawa.
• Write your representatives. A short, personal email to your MP and MNA about home-growing rights or excise reform carries more weight than you'd think.
• Grow your knowledge. Browse [our cannabis seed collection](INTERNAL LINK) and [beginner growing guides](INTERNAL LINK) so you're ready if and when Quebec's rules change.

FAQ

Is cannabis reform still happening in Canada?
Yes. Legalization in 2018 was the beginning, not the end. Excise tax, packaging rules, THC limits, possession limits and interprovincial trade are all active debates.

How much of the price of legal cannabis is tax?
Federal excise duty on dried flower is the greater of $1 per gram or 10% of the sale price, plus provincial markup and sales tax. At today's wholesale prices, the flat $1 minimum can represent 30–50% of the wholesale value.

Can I grow cannabis at home in Quebec?
Federal law allows up to four plants per household, but Quebec prohibits home cultivation for recreational use. Cannabis seeds themselves remain legal to purchase and possess.

How can consumers influence cannabis policy?
Contact your MP and MNA directly, support groups like NORML Canada, and share your experience with the legal market publicly. Beer Canada's excise campaign shows that sustained consumer pressure gets noticed, even if it takes years.