Don’t get high on your own supply. That’s lesson number one at drug dealer school. Do drug dealers go to school? I dunno, but for the sake of this intro let’s assume they do.
I’ve never been to drug dealer school, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that lesson number two is to know when to fold ‘em.
Which is what a huge number of cannabis growers did in the years following the great 2018 legalization gold rush. Right after legalization, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a cannabis company that was over-hyped, overvalued, and over-employed. Back then, splashy ribbon cuttings were a weekly occurrence in Niagara, where cannabis companies were setting up left and right.
Fast forward a few years and most of them have quietly gone up in smoke. That’s the last cannabis pun, I swear. And while most of them have quietly disappeared, some went down very much not quietly, as in the case of CannTrust or Phoena or whatever you want to call it, which went down amid a blaze of bad press in Pelham and beyond.
For a few years there, cannabis production was the hottest story in town. Whether it was a positive story about the plethora of jobs that cannabis production was going to create, or a negative story about how the odour from a cannabis farm was driving some neighbours nuts, it seemed like weed was the topic du jour. Until suddenly it wasn’t.
Even the once explosively controversial CannTrust plant is on the road to reopening without anyone much noticing, according to a story this week which laid out how T’iitsk’in Spirit Ventures Ltd. has purchased the facility and is stealthily heading toward restarting production.
No one seems to care about cannabis anymore because we’ve all apparently moved on to the next gold rush: the electric vehicle supply chain. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard that Port Colborne is going to soon be home to some kinda massive EV battery factory thing. Which is… fine.
At the height of the California Gold Rush, supply shortages meant that a pair of boots cost $2,500
I don’t want to be too much of a Debbie Downer about this. It's a big billion-dollar factory, and it’s jobs, and it’s investment, and yadda yadda. Good stuff.
But I can’t shake the feeling that this is just the latest gold rush that will fizzle out in a few years.
Remember in the mid-2000s when “green jobs” were going to be the big thing in Niagara, and everyone was going to work in a wind turbine factory. And then DMI Industries in Fort Erie shuttered permanently, then the GE “Brilliant Factory” in Welland turned into something else, and all those wind-turbine-slash-solar-panel jobs just quietly disintegrated. Then a few years later the cannabis boom hit, followed almost immediately by the aforementioned cannabis bust.
And now here we are, at the precipice of the EV supply chain explosion. But how far away are we from the bust?
In a perfect world, sure, we’d all switch to EVs. I’d love to buy a Tesla or a Fisker Karma. But the price is prohibitive to mass market adoption. Your average dude is not going out and dropping $60,000 on a Tesla Model 3 (the cheapest EV available in Canada) especially when a pack of strawberries costs $9 and a bag of milk is $6.
I want to be wrong about the EV factory boom. I want this to be a generational industry that employs thousands of people for many years to come. Unfortunately, I just don’t see it. It feels like another bubble waiting to burst. It feels like we’re getting high on our own EV battery supply chain.
And that’s not good for anybody. At the height of the California Gold Rush, supply shortages meant that a pair of boots cost $2,500 and a single egg cost around $25. We’ve already got $9 strawberries and the EV bubble hasn’t even begun to reach its zenith.
And at the rate that my toddler currently consumes strawberries, that means I’m currently on track to be financially insolvent by… the middle of next week.
James Culic is currently accepting strawberry donations. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or tell us why James needs to spark up a spliff and chill in a letter to the editor.
