Recent amendments made by Health Canada to cannabis regulations aim to reduce regulatory burden, support diversity and competition within the industry; while maintaining public health and public safety objectives.
On March 12, new rules amending certain regulations concerning cannabis came into force for license holders, in the biggest shake-up to guidelines since legalisation. Generally speaking, regulations have been relaxed in a number of areas. For example:
- Research licences no longer needed to possess up to 30 g of dried cannabis (or equivalent) for non-human and non-animal cannabis research.
- Higher limits for micro-cultivation, nursery and micro-processing licences.
- The requirement to have a security-cleared person on-site when conducting activities with cannabis has been dropped.
- Pre-rolled dried cannabis no longer has a limit of 1 gram.
- Ethyl alcohol can now be used in limited cases in cannabis extracts intended for inhalation – up to 10 mg per activation.
- Denatured alcohol can be used in cannabis topicals.
- Various packaging and labelling changes.
- The requirement to submit a notice of new product for dried and fresh cannabis products is no longer needed.
- Changes to record-keeping requirements for the destruction of cannabis.
- Annual report of promotional (advertising) expenses no longer required.
- Processing licence holders are permitted to have more than 2 alternate quality assurance persons (QAPs)
This just scratches the surface of all the changes, summaries of which can be found here. Official regulatory amendments can be viewed in the Canada Gazette, Part II,
Canada has had a medical cannabis program in place since 2001 and non-medical use was legalized in October 2018. Total legal medical and non-medical sales (packaged units), reached 21,448,153 units during April 2024 to June 2024, which was up 7% from the same period in 2023. For the 2024 period, the total licensed area for cultivation:
- Indoor growing area: 1,331,102 m2
- Processing area: 341,682 m2
- Outdoor growing area: 601 hectares (6,010,700 m2)
The legalization of recreational marijuana has had a significant impact on the country’s medical program. There were 345,520 registered patients when legalization came into effect, and that figure had plummeted to 180,878 by March last year.
In other recent cannabis related news from Health Canada, the organisation is investigating setting up a regulatory pathway to authorize the use of cannabidiol (CBD) in Natural Health Products (NHPs) – and is asking for feedback that can be submitted until June 5 this year.
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