Cannabis producer Canopy Growth shuts down 2 B.C. facilities, leaving hundreds out of work

Canopy Growth has closed large greenhouses in Delta and Aldergrove, staff who worked at the cannabis company tell Global News.

Workers say the company told them Wednesday that all employees at the two facilities, which each employed about 150 people, are being closed.

Steve McLean, who has worked for Canopy Growth since September of last year, says employees were notified on Tuesday of a big meeting scheduled for the following day. At that meeting, employees were “basically told that everyone’s terminated,” McLean said.

“It’s a pretty tough day for everyone to deal with. We all were friends. We were all family. It was a tough thing to walk away from,” he said as he walked out of the company’s Delta facility on Wednesday.

McLean believes the closures have a lot to do with the government “not opening the doors as they should.”

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“No dispensaries really in B.C., hardly any in Ontario and where there are dispensaries, there is not a lot of people buying from them.

“The black market is flourishing and the legal market is having troubles.”

Last year, global alcohol giant Constellation Brands Inc. announced a deal in August of last year to invest $5 billion in Canopy Growth to secure a 38 per cent ownership of the company.

The company, which employs about 3,000 people worldwide, hasn’t confirmed the scale of the closure and job cuts. Global News has reached out to Canopy Growth for comment.

In August 2018 Canopy Growth was the biggest pot company in the world by market value, at more than $18 billion.

— With files from The Canadian Press