Michael Armstrong, Associate Professor of Operations Research in Brock’s Goodman School of Business, had a piece published in The Conversation Wednesday, Feb. 26 about government statistics not providing any reliable insight on why weed prices, including cannabis oil, varying widely across Canada following legalization.

Armstrong writes:

“To evaluate cannabis legalization’s progress and success, Canadians need good information about legal product sales. Unfortunately, most provincial cannabis agencies keep results overly secret. And some publicly available estimates lack precision.

One example of cannabis agency secrecy made the news last week. An investigation found cannabis oil prices vary wildly between provinces. Inter-provincial price differences exceeded 50 per cent for half the products surveyed. The report couldn’t explain the ‘fishy’ differences.

But it’s no secret that legal pot costs more in, say, Ontario than Québec. Ontario’s cannabis agency marks-up prices by triple what Québec’s more profitable agency does. We can see this by analyzing their 2018-19 financial statements.”

Continue reading the full article here.