New Canadian Cannabis Trust Regimes: Where is the Local Pot?

Abstract

In the 6 years since legalization of recreational cannabis, most Canadians have shifted their trust to the government regulated market, motivated primarily by product safety. In this case study of the province of Nova Scotia's cannabis market, we find that this disembedded trust regime of federal government oversight frustrates local producers’ efforts to make and market their products because regulation inhibits consumers from establishing local or embedded trust and allows the signifier of the local to be appropriated by large, national and transnational corporations. Our data is drawn from federal and provincial government laws and regulations, corporate financial press, provincial government stores, interviews with producers, and marketing and advertising materials. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings in the international context of increasing jurisdictions in Europe and North America establishing new licit cannabis markets.

Introduction

If you give a consumer the choice between buying something from a shady character in a stairwell of uncertain provenance—that's roughly the same price as buying it from a regulated place that's maybe the brand you like, is certified organic, or a particular strain—you can be confident of the quality, the provenance, and that you are not breaking the law.

—Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, Vice interview, 2017

In this interview, Prime Minister Trudeau justifies his government's plan to legalize recreational cannabis by invoking Canadian consumer desire. Trudeau claims that, dissatisfied with the lack of transparency in the illicit market, consumers want to know about the “provenance” or origin of their cannabis to be assured of safety and quality. Similarly, during a Standing Senate Committee (2018) meeting to discuss amending Bill C-45 (An Act respecting cannabis and to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the Criminal Code and other Acts), Bill Blair, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada and to the minister of health, proclaimed that legalization would give Canadians “a choice to go to a source where they know the potency, provenance, and purity of what they’re buying” (“Bill Blair, M.P.,” para. 115). Of course, the Canadian state's criminalization of cannabis for nearly 100 years created the very conditions for an underground, non-transparent market. And yet, a tension remains for the cannabis consumer in the context of federal legalization. While the “shady character in the stairwell” can be avoided, how is transparency of market choices to be achieved?

Opting for a legalized, rather than decriminalized market, Canada's Cannabis Act (2018) extended federal state oversight into all aspects of cannabis licensing, growing, processing, packaging, marketing, and vending. In doing so, as Potter and Weinstock (2019) note, the Canadian government was not so much “lifting criminal prohibitions on the existing, thriving, illegal marijuana economy” (p. 4) as it was “setting up a parallel legal marketplace for the drug, which, it hopes, will ultimately drive the illegal market out of existence” (p. 4). We also note, for the purposes of our discussion, that this federalist model of cannabis reform contrasts with the devolved governance of the United States: “Legalization of cannabis . . . does not illustrate a joint policy-making process in which the two orders of government are involved, but an imposed decision by the federal government onto its provincial counterparts” (Benoit & Lévesque, 2019, “Between ‘court,’” para. 5). In addition to producing much needed tax revenue for the state— “federal and provincial governments received $1.9 billion from the control and sale of recreational cannabis in 2022/2023, up by almost one-quarter (+24.2%) from a year earlier” (Statistics Canada, 2024, “Two of every,” para. 1)—legalization also gave rise to the legitimate recreational cannabis consumer, critical to the viability and political legitimacy of this new market. And, according to Statistics Canada (2024), Trudeau and the Liberals were on target in their assertion that consumers would shift toward the legal market, rooted presumably in trust of the federal regulatory system. Among those who used cannabis in the 12 months before the survey, just over seven out of 10 (71.7%) bought exclusively from legal sources. The main reasons reported for buying cannabis from a legal source echo Trudeau's assertions—product safety (38.0%), convenience (16.9%) and a desire to follow the law (12.9%).

This study explores the first 6 years of Canada's new legal cannabis market in terms of embedded and disembedded trust regimes offered to consumers. As Sassatelli and Scott (2001) note in their study of European food consumer confidence, consumers have traditionally faced two ideal-typical trust regimes that have each offered safety, ethics, and general trustworthiness of commodities: embedded and disembedded. Embedded trust regimes offer a local connection to the product, such as the face-to-face meeting of consumer and producer at a local farmer's market. One trusts the product because of the proximity to production. Disembedded trust regimes, in contrast, are those produced by corporate and government actors and their various systems of oversight. Despite great distance from the origins of production, consumers trust the product because policymakers and scientific experts regulate safety, or signpost ethical or production standards such as organic, or fair trade. Finally, “mobile trust regimes” (Smith Maquire et al., 2023) offer the best of both worlds, bringing the local into extra-local market circulation along with government or corporate oversight.

One might expect the Canadian government's emphasis on health and safety to translate to support for embedded trust regimes, or “localized authenticity” (Smith Maguire et al., 2023, p. 597), and yet we find local markets struggling in the national and international market context. We examine the local cannabis market in the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia and find that production and consumption of truly local cannabis products is almost impossible. A number of particularities unique to Nova Scotia's cannabis regime made it attractive for a case study: (1) the provincial government monopolizes sales through the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation (NSLC) offering a secondary level trust regime below the federal one; (2) the provincial government has an historic commitment to promoting its economy through the local; (3) Nova Scotia's relatively small producers operate in the broader context of national and international corporate positioning and government regulation; and (4) Nova Scotia has the highest rates of legal cannabis consumption in the country (Statistics Canada, 2023a). We found that Nova Scotia consumers held high levels of trust in both the provincial government vendor and federal government regulatory oversight of cannabis products. However, the mobile trust regime that would support local products through such government oversight is precarious because cannabis products and producers become experientially distant for the consumer. In spite of the best effort on the part of the provincial vendor, cannabis becomes sensually distant in the shopping experience (e.g., cannot be touched, smelt, or sampled), isolated from typical consumer practices (e.g., cannot accrue loyalty points), and physically abstracted (e.g., cannot be linked to concrete stories and signifiers of place). Moreover, the current cannabis market landscape is characterized by a small number of large, financialized, publicly traded licensed producers (LPs) with international ownership and transnational operations. The complex, layered reality of ownership, operation and control of the market, makes distinguishing local from faux-local producers difficult.

In terms of Canadian drug policy and governance we make two suggestions. First, given Canadian trust in government cannabis production oversight, such regulation is supportive of the new legal market in that quality and safety are vouchsafed, but sales and marketing regulation unproductively encroach on opportunities to support and promote local markets. Second, lack of market regulation pits small, local cannabis operations against the larger corporations such that mobile trust regimes offered by government oversight cannot function adequately to bring consumers to the local marketplace. In short, the federal government should revisit both its regulation of consumption and marketing of licensed, regulated, licit cannabis and the functioning of broader national/ transnational markets.

The following case study uses a mixed-methods approach to research design, data collection, and analysis. At the level of consumer experience, we provide a phenomenological account of shopping for local cannabis in the province of Nova Scotia, with a description of the commercial and marketing environments in which cannabis is sold. These environments include physical government-monopoly stores and online shopping venues as well as cannabis company commercial websites and social media content. By phenomenological account, we mean: how are signifiers of localness offered to the shopper and how well do these signifiers point back to actual producers and locales? From here we provide a thematic content analysis of local and extra-local cannabis marketing textual and audio-visual materials, asking how notions of the local are framed thematically. Initially, we had planned also to conduct interviews with licensed cannabis producers in Nova Scotia and we contacted all of them, resulting in one successful interview, and another set of written responses, which supplement our findings. Information on ownership, operations, branding, and the finances of national and Nova Scotian cannabis producers was gathered by a research assistant from corporate data and the business press to round out our investigation of the larger national and international market dynamics and conditions that impact local cannabis production and consumption. Theoretically, this case study is rooted primarily in consumer studies literatures, especially concerning trust regimes, and is supplemented by political-economic and historical studies of this region in the context of Canadian federalism and export economic traditions. In the following section we offer a literature review of the concept of local in consumer and neo-Marxian debates, highlighting the complexities and contradictions of this concept, including the possibility that local producers can be supported and cultivated by mobile, dis-embedded consumer trust regimes.

Locating and Producing the Local: A Literature Review

At first sight, the local is a simple and obvious notion that a product or production process is nearby in physical space. Upon closer inspection, the local speaks to deep consumer desires and politics, including feelings of home, place, identity, trust and transparency. As will be discussed in our review of consumer and neo-Marxist literatures, the local as signifier can be appropriated by large, extra-local corporations, regulated and supported by non-local government, and even guaranteed by such organizational oversight. For the consumer, locating the local can become conceptually and literally challenging.

Generally, contemporary consumer desire for the local is a product of extra-local markets and the experiential abstraction of the concrete world. In societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production, consumers encounter commodities abstracted from concrete labor and place (Marx, 1976). Building on Marx's general observation of the expanding experiential gulf between producer and consumer in capitalism, neo-Marxists describe modernity as “liquid” (Bauman, 2001), characterized by mobility, change, and global economies, while its promise of security and trust rooted in science and rationality dissolves into ontological insecurity (Giddens, 1991). In the most obvious sense, the local offers physical proximity of producer to consumer but can include proximity of supplier, commodity chain, and cultural product understood as local (Blake et al., 2010). And while provenance labels are defined and required by many jurisdictions (e.g., indication of country of origin of product), there are often no such government rules defining what is “local” (Blake et al., 2010, p. 410). In Canada, while some imported prepackaged products (e.g., wine, dairy, honey, fish, fruits and vegetables, eggs, meat) require country of origin labels (Canadian Food Inspection Agency, 2012), provincial or local labels on food are voluntary, although the government offers suggestions as to what constitutes “local” (Canadian Food Inspection Agency, 2022).

Motivations for consuming locally, however defined, are diverse, including environmentalism and resource conservation (Blake et al., 2010; Schrank & Running, 2018), individual health (Autio et al., 2013; Schrank & Running, 2018; Trobe, 2001), regional economic support (Schoolman, 2017), accountability (Kennedy et al., 2016), anti-corporatism (Sage, 2014), political resistance of globalization and mass production (Andree et al., 2014; Jackson, 2004), and the reassertion of the proximate as the site of identity and community (Bauman, 2001; Khan & Prior, 2010). As Kuehn (2017) notes, consumers may construct the local as a “civic duty to one's community” (p. 205), and Zepeda and Deal (2009) highlight that 100% of ‘heavy’ local food consumers cited support for the local economy as their motivation. The local is thus conceptually linked to the concrete or transparent in that products and production practices are traceable and accountable, a discursive strategy through which consumers try to “improve democratic accountability and mitigate risks posed by decades of neoliberal violence and wider political economic changes” (Kuehn, 2017, p. 207).

On the other hand, the local and its consumers are mobile. For tourists, who bring themselves into the local, it resonates with authenticity (Sims, 2009) and notions like pre-modern folk culture (McKay, 2009). Local products may feature a specialty or exclusivity of place that exports products as local to distance consumers (Morris & Buller, 2003). Ideals of particularity, exclusivity, and traceability may also be branded into products. Food consumption in Western countries, however, highlights local/extra-local tensions and contradictions. Up until the 1970s, 90% of food was consumed in the country it was produced in (Braithwaite & Drahos, 2000, p. 400). Since then, however, “food chains have become increasingly industrialized and consolidated” (Parker & Johnson, 2019, p. 207). Part of the reason has to do with the larger transformation of capitalism, from a world economy characterized by “national economies linked to one another through trade and finances in an integrated international market” (Robinson, 2004, p. 10) to a global economy in which national production systems have become increasingly “fragmented and integrated into new globalized circuits of accumulation” (Robinson, 2004: 10). As Parker and Johnson (2019) point out in respect to the global food system: “subcontracting, outsourcing, and . . . corresponding developments in financing and agricultural and food processing technologies” (p. 207) have transformed what used to be national food chains, scaling them up to produce standardized products able to be integrated into more extensive global circuits of accumulation. At the same time, these shifts have been accompanied by a “global circulation of artisanal food and drink products, genres, experience-scapes, and collective narratives, which manage to retain an aura of embeddedness and renderings of embedded authenticity within disembedded venues” (Smith Maguire et al., 2023, p. 602), suggesting that there might be another trust regime at work, enabling non-local products to secure consumer trust while also retaining their sense of localness.

For such products, Smith Maguire et al. (2023) argue that consumer trust is achieved through mobile trust regimes, which render the local trustworthy, despite being “a disembedded property or value” (p. 602), such as when large retailers like Whole Foods offer an ultra-transparency of products and producers as part of their brand identity. As part of a larger “politics of transparency” (Brans, 2023), in which consumers call for accountability for the whole supply chain of a branded product, mobile trust regimes typically utilize digital technologies to provide consumers with signifiers that reassure them of the nature of the product “in ways that comply with taste repertoires that prize the ‘local’ while also slipping the geographic bonds and interpersonal bonds of the local” (Smith Maguire et al., 2023, p. 602). Social media and company websites, in particular, are used to help small producers market themselves and their locales to distant consumers “enlivened by stories and storytellers” (Smith Maguire et al., 2023, p. 610). Just as the tourist can consume the local but not be a part of it (Bauman, 1999), under the conditions of global capitalism, the online consumer can now purchase the local without physically visiting it, with trust ultimately rooted in the non-local oversight of state agencies and the productive signifiers of digitally savvy market actors. Hence, the mobile trust regime offers the best of two worlds. Is such a consumer trust regime possible in the context of Canadian cannabis markets and regulatory governance?

A Phenomenology of Shopping for Local Cannabis

In this section we discuss the general social and economic meaning of the local and local production in the province of Nova Scotia. From this context, we explore both the consumer's typical experience of searching for local cannabis products and the efforts of local producers to market their products. We move from the experience of the typical consumer in the physical NSLC government, vendor-monopoly stores to NSLC online shopping, to cannabis company websites and social media content, and finally to challenges faced by local producers.

The Local in Nova Scotia Economic History

Historically, the province of Nova Scotia has had a long-standing economic and political investment in localness and governmental oversight of its production. Compared to other parts of Canada, Nova Scotia is one of the oldest settler-colonial territories with a relative “heaviness of place” (Corbett, 2013, p. 276). Organized around the production of staples products such as cod, timber, and coal meant for export to other parts of Canada and the world (Innis, 1978), by the twentieth century the various local corporations that emerged to produce and export these products began to decline as industrial production shifted to central Canada. As a result, many Nova Scotians became transitory laborers, leaving home for work in western Canada while trying to maintain local kinship and friendship circles from a distance of 5,000 km or more (Harling Stalker & Phyne, 2014). Based in such a history of unstable and unrooted experiences of work, supporting local industry is more than an individual consumer preference but speaks directly to a politics of place in a global economy as a “civic duty to one's community” (Kuehn, 2017, p. 205). More instrumentally, however, the commitment to and branding of localness is also intended to draw money into the province. As one of the poorer Canadian provinces in the post-industrial era, the Nova Scotia government has consciously and consistently marketed the province around local production and the touristic pursuit of folk culture. While McKay (2009) argues that Nova Scotia's claim to unique local production techniques and products is more construction than an expression of an authentic folk culture, it nevertheless continues to organize the province's inward and outward branding.

As will be discussed, the provincial government, or more precisely the NSLC as government vendor, does try to support and market local cannabis. And while the federal government regulates almost every aspect of the cannabis market, including licensed production, the vending of cannabis is devolved to provincial and territorial governments that must develop a private, public, or hybrid system of sales. Along with a few other jurisdictions in Canada, Nova Scotia adopted a fully public, or state-monopoly, model for distribution under the NSLC. The NSLC was formed as a provincial crown corporation in 1930 as the exclusive wholesaler and retailer of liquor after a decade of provincial prohibition. Over the last 50 years, the NSLC, like other provincial liquor retailers, has shifted its mandate increasingly to consumer demands for variety and convenience. NSLC reports high levels of customer satisfaction (Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation, 2023), and leverages this trust toward its cannabis vending monopoly, as it has the highest level of liquor/cannabis brand integration under the NSLC banner of all provincial or territorial state vendors (Wesley & Murray, 2021).

Since the addition of cannabis products in 2018, the NSLC has repeated its political mandate to drive out the illicit market under the guise of health and safety with the help of consumers and asserts its ongoing success. With 48 cannabis stores in a province with just over 1 million people, the NSLC (2022–2023) states: “These new locations reinforce our commitment to combatting illicit cannabis sales and providing Nova Scotians with expanded access to a safe and secure supply of cannabis” (p. 2). NSLC (2024a) reports second quarter sales for 2024 as $32.6 million, with an average price per gram one of the lowest in Canada and nearly 1/3 of product locally produced and sold. For the 2024 fiscal year-end, NSLC (2024b) cannabis sales were reported as $121 million. The NSLC (2022–2023) also makes an explicit commitment to promoting local products:

Local also remained a priority as we continued to look for new ways to showcase local products in our stores, increase shelf space and engage with local producers. Our customers demonstrated how local products continue to be important to them through increased sales across all local beverage alcohol and cannabis categories last year (p.1)

Beyond the NSLC mandate to support local products, we ask how shoppers find local products and how local producers market and promote their products within the federal regulatory system and broader market conditions.

Shopping for Local Cannabis

How exactly do customers locate the local products the NSLC is trying to support? In both the case of alcohol and cannabis, the NSLC makes use of its “Proudly Nova Scotian” in-house branding to draw attention to local products. Consumers may buy cannabis legally in a physical NSLC store or through its website. NSLC stores are usually glass fronted and filled with attractive displays of wines, beer and liquor that customers may physically touch. The alcohol sections of the NSLC offer free sampling of products, promotional contests, promotional merchandise, and loyalty points. None of this is allowed in the vending of cannabis. The Cannabis Act (2018, p. 21) highly restricts advertising and marketing, especially around the notion of “inducing” its use. “Inducements” include contests, samples, free accessories, gifts, deep discounts, loyalty programs, view into a store, and self-service—all features of NSLC liquor vending.

The Cannabis Act (2018) requires the NSLC to sell cannabis in a separate space that customers cannot see from the street. In all but one case, in which the NSLC has created a stand-alone cannabis store, this means that the cannabis section is behind an opaque wall at the back of the liquor section. Customers wend their way through the liquor section to the cannabis section. The interior often has no natural light, and consumers must deal with a salesperson behind a counter rather than browse. Purchased cannabis is put in a paper bag and the consumer must line up at a second cashier to purchase liquor. In the liquor section a consumer often finds a sampling table and staff who will offer a taste of the product and talk about its qualities, including its local particularities. In these cases, the local can be directly tied to the product, with, for example, the Nova Scotian tartan draped over the table. Staff in the cannabis section of the store is equally trained as knowledgeable connoisseurs of products, but they cannot engage directly with customers to “induce” them to consume or sample the product in the store. While the NSLC is supportive of local producers, it is limited in its power as a provincial vendor. At best, it can help producers navigate licensing, production, and marketing rules, offering NSLC branding of their products as local. But, beyond the “Proudly Nova Scotian” crest, regulation makes it almost impossible to provide a local narrative about production at the point of sale.

Marketing Local Cannabis

Unlike liquor, all cannabis products in Canada are packaged in childproof and opaque material, containing information about levels of CBD/THC and government warnings, but limited “brand elements.” The Cannabis Act (2018) prohibits advertising and labelling that “evokes a positive or negative emotion about or image of, a way of life such as one that includes glamour, recreation, excitement, vitality, risk or daring” (p. 22) or “that sets out a depiction of a person, character or animal, whether real or fictional” (p. 22). Health Canada (2018) offers suggestions to producers as to how to interpret and market themselves while conforming to the Cannabis Act. For example, brand elements like logos on “things that are not cannabis” are allowed, but not if they could “reasonably” attract youth. Health Canada offers guitars as such reasonable things, but not coffee mugs. Peppered with qualifiers like “reasonable,” companies are left to interpret their own legal risks. Where larger firms can gain brand awareness simply by their market movements in the business press, smaller firms are limited to advertising through websites and social media, as they cannot sponsor events as can local breweries. As one of our respondents noted: “Marketing is our biggest challenge. As a mom-and-pop shop we do not have the resources to compete on a larger scale for brand recognition. Marketing is limited due to regulation” (Interview, 2024).

Given federal regulations, local producers shy away from advertising their production sites and do not include people in advertisements or social media—typically signifiers of the local in Nova Scotia. Restricted from producing ads that give a positive response (e.g., people smiling enjoying cannabis), stand-ins associated with the local are used to elicit similar feelings about the product. A product placed on the arm of an empty Muskoka chair in front of a bonfire during winter, for example, is used to signify warm, good times. The local, in this sense, cannot be peopled or placed concretely, but can only exist as an abstraction. If Nova Scotia traditionally offers a “heaviness of place,” this notion of the local cannot be easily attached to cannabis given the current regulatory structure. As we will discuss, unanchored semiotically, the local becomes a floating signifier that can attached to large and small, extra-local and local production.

Corporate and Government Extra-Provincial Trust Regimes

Big Cannabis and the Green Rush

In December 2023, Canopy Growth Corp., one of Canada's largest cannabis producers, forced a reverse split on stocks at a rate of 1-for-10, meaning that shareholders got one share of the new stock for every 10 shares they already owned. Typically, a reverse split is conducted to prevent delisting from stock exchanges or to generate interest in stocks. Canopy took this desperate act in part because plans to expand into the US market have not come to fruition. As the Globe and Mail newspaper notes, the company's “failures have been symbolic of the cannabis industry's struggles overall” (Jagielski, 2023, para. 5). When legalization began 6 years ago, a share in Canopy traded for $68 and Aurora opened at $195; by mid-2023, however, their average stock prices were below $1 (Deschamps, 2023). Since legalization, all the largest cannabis producers, such as Canopy, Aurora, and Tilray, have diversified into non-cannabis products, shrunk the footprint of their cannabis operations, and laid off thousands of workers to reduce costs (Deschamps, 2023).

Part of the reason for this downsizing is due to the general size, ownership, and orientation of the industry's largest firms. With many firms getting their start as monopoly-authorized producers of medical cannabis under Health Canada during the medicalized cannabis period of the early 2000s (Childs & Hartner, 2022, p. 76), they were able to situate themselves as national producers with an orientation toward foreign markets (Garrod, in press). By 2017, when federal and provincial governments began to shift focus to the structure of the new legal regime, these large firms were already aggressively pursuing “expansion by finalizing partnerships with foreign companies and nations, exploiting the legal oversights of their new-found capital potential” (Bandosz & Wilczek, 2021, p. 256). Given overly high valuations in the wake of legalization, with questionable accounting tactics that enabled them “to publish market capitalization ‘data’ as fact” (Hathaway & Smith McCann, 2022, p. 317), the LPs that remain are compelled to grow by any means necessary to satisfy their investors. The contemporary Canadian Cannabis industry is dominated by a small number of large publicly-traded firms with high levels of American ownership and transnational operations. ¹ The federal government's approach to legalization “prioritized the monopolization of cannabis production by corporate individuals (in the legal sense) . . . effectively excluding non-corporate individuals from the ability to produce cannabis” (Bandosz & Wilczek, 2021, p. 254).

It is common to see giants of global finance like Blackrock, Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, among the lists of institutional stockholders of large Canadian cannabis firms alongside Canada's chartered banks, Canada's largest and most powerful corporate actors. Legalization also brought strategic partnerships with American beverage firms like Constellation Brands (the largest beer importer in the US), and Molson Coors (Bandosz and Wilczek, 2021, pp. 266–267). Canadian cannabis firms’ annual reports indicate boards of directors filled with members from private equity, global tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and retail. Depending on the firm, their level of transnational business varies, with some focusing more on the American market, and others taking a more global approach, inserted into both Canada and the US, as well as countries in Europe and South America. As Bandosz and Wilczek (2021) note, Canadian firms operating in these countries, like in Canada, “profit from the suppression and prohibition of small-scale production, effectively eliminating all potential competition that could arise in a liberalized market” (p. 260). To this point, Israel's Minister of Economy has recently launched an anti-dumping investigation of all the largest Canadian cannabis firms, as the import of Canadian cannabis has “pushed local growers and producers to desperation” (as cited in Brown, 2024). With a structural impetus to expand their business at home and abroad, the label ‘Canadian’ in this context works to obscure the industry's transnational ownership relations and operations.

Nova Scotian Market

Similar trends are found at the provincial level, despite differences in scale. In Nova Scotia, the NSLC (2022–2023, p. 21) reports that sales from Nova Scotian cannabis firms were 30.2% of all cannabis sales in 2022–2023, an increase of 6% from the previous year. But it is unclear what this means considering the transnational character of the industry. If consumers visit the websites of Nova Scotia cannabis producers, they find a thick layering of signifiers. Reef Organic, a brand owned by local company, Aqualitas (2024a), features a “female-led” and “diverse” “team,” that produces cannabis via “organic living soil made in Nova Scotia, and nutrient-rich water provided by our 800 + koi fish,” and “sustainable packaging.” Asserting that it “cares for the health of their people, the plant and the planet” (Reef Organic, 2021, p. 2), it also states that it is one of the few companies with a license to taste-test their product (as a stand-in for consumers who are legally restricted from doing so when purchasing cannabis).

The videos on Aqualitas’ website, however, use starkly different language, addressing both consumers as well as potential investors. CEO Myrna Gillis states that “Aqualitas is a value-added company,” and “a local company with a global vision” (Aqualitas, 2020). They “produce clean, consistent, and safe product without irradiation while utilizing organic and sustainable processes” (Aqualitas, 2020) and their website notes that “dedication to quality and sustainability is what sets us apart” (Aqualitas, 2024a). In this sense, branding works to make the abstractions of the market more concrete, acting as both “a legitimation device and as an element in capital accumulation” (Goldman & Papson, 2006, p. 330). It not only produces a “teleological direction to globalization and high technology” (p. 330), but also works to “bolster its valuation in stock markets” through the presentation of “a visible brand value to business partners and firms with whom they may enter into alliances as they negotiate the shifting dynamics of commodity chains and emergent market opportunities” (p. 330). Hence there is an inherent tension between the company's grounded, local claims and its extra-local ambitions of becoming “a global company and a global leader” (Aqualitas, 2020). As their websites notes in a section entitled “ALL MARKETS NOW OPEN,” Aqualitas is the only cannabis firm in the world with Organic, Good Agricultural Practice (GAP), Israeli Medical Cannabis Good Agricultural Practice (IMC-GAP), Drug Establishment License (DEL) and European Union Good Manufacturing Practices (EU-GMP) certifications, which the company suggests will help further the “distribution of medical products across Canada and exportation to the EU, Israel, Australia, and the USA” (Aqualitas, 2024a). These transnational links have been furthered by Aqualitas’ recent merger with Cannaray's medical cannabis divisions in the UK and Germany (Aqualitas, 2024b).

In this context, the local is particularly hard to isolate as local producers often look much like extra-local producers or are on their way to becoming one. The brand Ritual, for instance, is produced by Mernova Medicinal Inc., located in Windsor, Nova Scotia. Despite being advertised “Proudly Nova Scotian” on the NSLC website, Mernova is owned by Melodial Global health, an Australian medicinal cannabis company that also owns: Sierra Sage Herbs, a US-based developer of plant-based first aid and beauty products sold at Walgreens, Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods, among others; Health House International, which distributes medical cannabis products in Australia and the UK, and hopes to “capitalise on future European regulatory changes” (Melodial Global Health, 2024); Halucenex Life Sciences, a clinical stage psychedelic drug development company located in Canada; and Creso Switzerland, which markets hemp-based food, feed supplements, and topical products in Switzerland, the EU, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region.

Similarly, the company Highland Grow in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, has an Instagram feed that proffers consumers images representing the Nova Scotia coast and wilderness, with a catch phrase “From our coast to yours.” Yet, the company was previously owned by IM Cannabis, a larger Ontario-based firm that provides medical cannabis products to Israel and Germany via, in their words, “a transnational ecosystem powered by a unique data-driven approach and a globally sourced product supply” (IM Cannabis Corp, 2023). With IM Cannabis leaving the Canadian market, Highland Grow is now one brand among many distributed by Ontario firm Galaxie Brands. These market moves thus represent the ways in which an ongoing image of localness obscures the depth and extent of national and transnational ties in the Nova Scotia cannabis industry, as well as their impacts.

All this is not to suggest that local producers or the NSLC are intentionally trying to mislead the consumer. While the Cannabis Act (2018) oversees and controls the manufacturing and marketing capacities of small producers, it also makes it difficult for such producers to differentiate themselves from larger ones or even make a product that is entirely local. The high capital costs required for growing and processing infrastructure has since led to the rise of national business-to-business (b2b) markets in flower and various concentrated products, which are sold to other companies who brand them—typically by way of reference to local comforts and craft symbolism, despite being grown/processed elsewhere. Different provincial distribution models also run the gamut, from public distributors that use a single person to decide whether a product will sell (and thus, should be stocked), to ones geared toward the production schedules of big cannabis firms, which produce large, regular orders (Interview, 2024). Strict restrictions on packaging (especially on edible products) also add extra costs, which favor larger firms able to absorb them. Further constraints come in the form of taxation. All producers are taxed at the same rate, regardless of size; and while every producer pays a federal excise tax, provinces include a markup as well, which can be as high as up to 80% to 90%, making “slim margins even slimmer” (Interview, 2024). As one of our respondents noted, since all producers pay the same federal excise tax regardless of size, alongside the provincial distributor markups, “larger producers have the competitive advantage to sell their products at a lower price . . . whereas small producers have less financial wiggle room and are more likely to be priced out” (Interview, 2024).

Given these constraints, larger publicly traded corporate brands have begun to appropriate localness as part of their corporate branding strategies. Government regulation has forced marketing of products and corporations into the same virtual locations, offering a conflation of advertising brands and corporations not typically found in marketing. And, in contrast with models adopted by some American states that direct revenues toward small enterprises, neither the federal Cannabis Act nor the Nova Scotia Cannabis Control Act speaks to the issue of how revenues or excise and taxes are to be used. At the commercial level, the NSLC (2022–2023) reports only that “100% of net profits go back to the province to fund essential services and infrastructure” (p. 26).

In the current epoch of global capitalism, the regulations that structure the Canadian cannabis industry make it so that local producers are subject to forces far outside their control. For reasons of security, most production sites are not made public, so consumers cannot visit production locales as part of their consumption of the local. If they can, they cannot be assured that the product they see is the one they consume. One of our respondents, who makes a consumable cannabis product, grew cannabis at their facility to show visitors instead of the “clean, white room” (Interview, 2024) where the product was packaged. Just for show, the cannabis provided both meaning to visiting consumers and local credibility to the producer, when the concentrate used in the product was purchased from the significantly larger Valens Company, located across the country in Kelowna, British Columbia. With such purchases necessarily a matter of cost for small producers, by requiring separate cultivation and processing licenses, the government has created a wholesale cannabis market detached from any sense of terroir or craft, despite the constant branding of localness.

A survey conducted by the b2b Canadian Cannabis Exchange notes that 73% of their respondents engaged in wholesale sales, with 47% engaging in wholesale orders (Stratcann, 2023). In particular, “there are numerous cultivators, especially micros, who sell to third-party processors who often then take over sales into provincial markets for the cultivator, along with marketing” (Stratcann, 2023). Like brands that apply a ‘Made in America’ label if the final product is assembled there, so too are some brands labeled “Proudly Nova Scotian” by the NSLC because that is where processing into the final form takes place. There are now multiple b2b exchanges for cannabis, multiple wholesale producers, and SNDL, one of the largest Canadian cannabis firms, just bought the Valens Company (NCV Newswire, 2023). In a regulatory context in which producers are left with restricted website and social media content to construct their experience of the local, such signifiers are easily offered up by all companies, big and small, distant and local, to provide existential grounding for their products.

Conclusion

This case study has examined the promise of consumer choice and market transparency that was held out to Canadians with legalization of recreational cannabis six years ago. Looking specifically at the manufacture and marketing the local products in the province of Nova Scotia, as well as the consumer shopping experience, we find that embedded or local trust regimes are frustrated by both federal government regulation and corporate market advantages. This finding runs counter to Smith Maguire et al.'s (2023) argument that “mobile trust regimes” facilitated by social media technologies, narratives and design, along with disembedded government and corporate oversight, could support local production. In fact, we found not only the suppression of local markets, but the appropriation of local signifiers by firms of all sizes.

We know that Canadian cannabis consumers have turned to the legal, regulated market. Yet, the supposed “turn inwards” of local branding that was meant to “reorganize governance, improve democratic accountability and mitigate risks posed by decades of neoliberal violence” (Kuehn, 2017, p. 207) has instead facilitated government and corporate collaboration in favor of big cannabis. In an industry in which the economic linkages move in all directions, geographic descriptors like ‘Canada’ or even ‘Nova Scotia’ are not appropriate labels for these products as they circulate through transnational and national circuits of accumulation. Put simply, the transparency about the product that was proffered as a way of avoiding the “shady character in a stairwell” instead obscures the lack of transparency of the regulated market.

The implications of our findings are not confined by the borders of Canada. With countries like South Korea, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Singapore considering cannabis legalization, alongside the recent legalization of cannabis in Germany and possibly elsewhere in Europe (Oltermann, 2022; Radu, 2018; Stevens, 2024), consumer transparency becomes even more relevant. For instance, Kellner (2021) highlights how a patent case in Thailand suggests that Canadian-based TNCs will try to use global trade agreements to extend their domestic patents to other countries, thus making local cannabis production impossible. Similarly, in Germany, where the government's official reasoning for legalization was to “break up the illegal cannabis trade, thus gain control of the quality of cannabis on sale, prevent the circulation of contaminated substances and protect minors” (Oltermann, 2022, p. para. 7), the lingering shadow of cannabis as an illicit and dangerous drug continues to obscure the possibility of transparency. If Canadians cannot easily trace their cannabis, this will surely be the case in Germany, which still relies “on imports from Canada, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands for 85% of its annual use” (para. 17).

If a global “politics of transparency” (Brans, 2023) is to be truly realized, consumers must be provided with accurate information as to where their cannabis was grown, and how it came to end up in their hands. Despite suggestions from both researchers and Health Canada for more transparency of data related to the cannabis industry (Armstrong, 2021; Health Canada 2022, 2023, 2024), none of it is oriented toward transparency of the product itself. Utilizing government regulation to create the possibility of embedded trust regimes to emerge via farmgate sales, or other versions enabling a proximity to production would have numerous benefits. As Hathaway and McCann (2022) note: “creating access to markets for small, family-owned farms would create ancillary trade organizations and co-ops and supports a lengthy change of local insurance, commercial, retail, and financial services” (Hathaway & Smith McCann, 2022, p. 22). It could also “include incentives to transition to cleaner production techniques and technologies and to prevent the use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers” (p. 22). Even conservative commentators suggest that “Canadians in this industry want to see more diversity, but . . . ‘Diversity in the industry . . . means empowering small-town cannabis’” (Dan Sutton as cited in Gibbs, 2023, “Conservative opportunity,” para. 2). To do this, however, means dealing with the larger forces that have led the industry to be constructed in such a manner in the first place. Until then, consumers will have to do their best to see through the current haze of government and market regulation.