Two St. Albert entrepreneurs are hoping Sturgeon County will support their bid to build what’s likely the county’s first commercial distribution facility for medicinal cannabis.
Reid Smith and Brandon McBride spoke to county council Tuesday about their plans to build a 10,000 square-foot medicinal cannabis processing and distribution centre just south of Morinville. The two St. Albert residents are the co-founders of Pure Selections Inc.
Smith, who has previously managed a roofing company, said in an interview that he and McBride learned of medicinal cannabis about four years ago and considered it made for a good business opportunity.
“I have epilepsy, and I know medicinal cannabis can definitely help patients,” said Smith, who personally uses medicinal cannabis.
Pure Selections is one of about 428 companies seeking license to grow and/or distribute medicinal cannabis in Canada, Smith said. It’s taken them about four years to reach this point, and they hope to have their facility built and licensed by the end of the year.
Smith said the proposed facility would be built on land owned by McBride’s family about three kilometres southwest of Morinville and take up about 10 per cent of the site. If approved and built, it would likely be the first commercial medicinal cannabis distribution centre in Sturgeon County.
“This is a non-retail location,” Smith told council, one where up to six workers would convert cannabis into dried marijuana and cannabis oil for shipment to patients via courier.
Smith said the site would have minimal water and power requirements as cannabis would not be sold or grown on site; all material would be shipped in from licensed growers. The company would set up a separate facility elsewhere if it got into cultivation.
Traffic-wise, McBride said that they expected to have about two delivery trucks a day visit the site.
Smith said the site would have to meet strict safety and security requirements in order to get its Health Canada license. The site will have fencing, security cameras, motion detectors, 24/7 monitoring, keypad locks and a concrete vault to store the cannabis. It would also be subject to random federal inspections.
When asked if the site’s shipments would become a target for criminals, Smith told council Health Canada’s rules for shipping cannabis would address those issues, and that couriers were already active in this region.
Smith said the company hoped to attract about 100 patients a month for its first year and to have up to $1 million in cannabis on site at any one time. They planned to stick to medicinal cannabis for now, as the rules for recreational cannabis (expected to become legal this year) were still unclear.
Gord Putnam, a lawyer with Putnam & Lawson representing Pure Selections (and a former Morinville town councillor), said that the company had applied to rezone the site’s land from agricultural to direct control, which would let the county implement any restrictions it wanted.
Mayor Alanna Hnatiw said she was concerned about how a fire at the site could affect neighbours.
Smith said the company planned to meet with police and emergency services on how to manage the site.
“We know this is new, and we want to make sure we’re working collaboratively.”
Cannabis is an emerging agricultural commodity, and it was only a matter of time before the county got an application such as this one, Hnatiw said in an interview.
“I’m always happy when someone chooses to do something innovative in Sturgeon County,” she said, adding that this gave the county a chance to work on medicinal cannabis.
Health Canada reports that there were about 236,000 registered users of medicinal cannabis in Canada as of last September.
