Green light given
North Sydney company can begin making cannabis products
NORTH SYDNEY — A Northside company has been given the green light from the federal government to begin making cannabis products.
On Friday, Bluenose Labs Corp. became the first in Cape Breton to receive standard processing and medical sales licensing from Health Canada for operations at a former Northside pharmaceutical plant its parent company, Highlanders Cannabis Corp., purchased in 2018.
Tiffany Walsh, who is president of both Highlanders and Bluenose, said the regulatory approval was a “huge hurdle.” While Health Canada will still have to certify a test batch of their products, she’s confident the facility could be up and running within months.
“My confidence level is pretty high,” Walsh told the Cape Breton Post. “It’s just that with cannabis these things move slowly — it’s not like just opening up a retail store and beginning operations, just because of the magnitude of the project — but I have all the faith in the world it’s going to happen. We just have to be patient and go through what needs to be done, make all of our checks and before we know it, we’ll be in business.”
Once the business receives final federal approval, Walsh said they will explore financing options to purchase the costly equipment needed to get the 48,000-square-foot facility up and running. Bluenose won't grow marijuana at the site. Walsh said they will take cannabis from licensed producers and manufacturing and packaging it into a range of products, beginning with oils then expanding into vape cartridges, gummies and topicals.
Walsh said they will start slowly with a handful of employees but many more jobs would be created once the facility is at full production.
“What I can say is that it's a 50,000-square-foot facility and if it was operating at maximum capacity we would have people in every room. We would have more quality assurance people walking around. We would be able to take on a great deal of cannabis, and therefore, we're hoping a great deal of employees and technicians to fill those positions.”
A 35-year-old lawyer from Sydney Mines who owns a firm in Vancouver, B.C., that specializes in cannabis corporate law, Walsh is now winding down her legal practice so she can return home permanently.
“As a lawyer in Vancouver, I hardly got to see my family,” she said.
“The fact that we got that approval, it's going to make everything plausible now. We can now really run an excellent, world-class facility."