Quick answer: Cannabis growers in Canada are excluded from the 80% carbon tax relief every other Canadian greenhouse crop receives, and face significant energy costs heating and lighting facilities through harsh Canadian winters. That structural cost pressure makes it harder to justify putting big buds in every pre-roll.

In 2018 the smart money didn't trust the sun.

Billions of dollars poured into glass and steel. Massive greenhouse facilities across Ontario and BC. Investors wanted scale, Wall Street wanted institutional-looking facilities, and the industry decided greenhouse meant quality and security. Nobody bet on the sun.

Since 2018, the Canadian cannabis industry sank $42 billion into capital expenditures, the vast majority into that greenhouse infrastructure.¹ That bet has cost the industry. And your customer is the one feeling it.

Glass Boxes In A Canadian Winter — Think About That For A Second

Cannabis is a tropical plant. It evolved under equatorial sun, in warm, humid air, with zero concept of frost.

So naturally, the smart money decided the best place to grow it was inside a glass box, in a country where it regularly hits minus 20, minus 30, sometimes colder.

Think about how backwards that is. Glass is one of the worst insulating materials you can build a structure out of. It loses heat fast — roughly 25 times faster than an insulated wall. A greenhouse in a Canadian winter is constantly bleeding warmth into the outside air, and the only way to keep a tropical plant alive inside it is to run heaters and lights around the clock, fighting against the exact climate the building is sitting in.

It's not a minor inefficiency. It's structurally absurd. You're trying to recreate the tropics, in a glass box, in the middle of a Canadian winter — and then wondering why the energy bill is enormous.

A greenhouse in the Fraser Valley or Ontario gets real, usable sunlight maybe four or five months a year — May through September if the weather cooperates. The other seven or eight months — fall, winter, early spring — it's not really a greenhouse anymore. It's a heated glass box running on artificial light, trying to fake summer in the snow. The cannabis industry built billions of dollars worth of these facilities across the coldest agricultural country in the G7. That was always going to be expensive. The surprising part is that anyone thought it would work out cheap.

The Tax Break Everyone Else Gets

On top of all that, commercial greenhouse growers in BC get an 80% point-of-sale carbon tax exemption on the natural gas and propane they burn to heat their facilities.² Vegetable growers get it. Flower growers get it. Nursery operators get it.

Cannabis growers don't.

BC's own government has stated it plainly — cannabis is not an eligible crop at any phase of production.³ Same story federally. Greenhouse relief on carbon pricing was built for vegetables, fruit, bedding plants, cut flowers and nursery stock.⁴ Cannabis was never on the list.

With the federal industrial carbon tax sitting around $95-110 a tonne in 2026,⁵ that exclusion adds real, compounding overhead to every gram produced in a Canadian cannabis greenhouse. There's no workaround, no efficiency play, no operational improvement that makes it go away. It's a policy decision, and cannabis is on the wrong side of it.

The Environmental Cost

Research from Colorado State University confirms that indoor cannabis cultivation generates between 2,283 and 5,184 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of dried flower — compared to just 22.7 kilograms for sun-grown outdoor cultivation.⁶

That gap is enormous. And it's a gap your customer pays for, one way or another — either in higher prices, or in lower quality product as producers cut corners to protect margins.

What That Means For The Pre-Roll

A greenhouse carrying that kind of cost, for most of the year, with no tax relief to offset it, has a harder time justifying big buds in every pre-roll. The math gets tighter. Big buds command more in the bag flower market. The pre-roll is where the cost pressure shows up first.

It's not an accusation against any one company. It's just what trying to grow a tropical plant in a Canadian winter, inside glass, without the tax relief every other crop gets, does to the math. The product that ends up in the paper is shaped by the economics of production. When the economics are this constrained, the pre-roll pays the price.

For a deeper look at how this connects to what's actually in your pre-roll, read:

→ The THC Trap — Why The Number On The Label Can't Be Trusted

We Don't Carry That Cost

We grow under BC's open sky. No glass box fighting a Canadian winter. No supplemental lighting running through the dark months. No carbon tax bill on fuel we never burn. The sun does that work for nothing, the way it always has.

We only sell pre-rolls — no bag flower. Every big bud we grow goes straight into the paper. BC Sungrown, double screened, milled right, packed consistent, sealed fresh. That's Smart Value — not a discount, just the natural result of never carrying the winter heating bill, or the carbon tax on it, in the first place.

To understand why the strains we grow were born outside and why that matters for quality, read:

→ Open Sky Classic — Real Identity Only Found Under The Sun

Related Reading

→ The THC Trap — Why The Number On The Label Can't Be Trusted

→ Open Sky Classic — Real Identity Only Found Under The Sun

Sources:

¹ Variability of total THC in greenhouse cultivated dried Cannabis. Scientific Reports, 15, 25285 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-06962-2

² Danziger, N., & Bernstein, N. (2022). Too dense or not too dense. Frontiers in Plant Science, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2022.713481

³ Ben-Shabat, S., et al. (1998). An entourage effect. European Journal of Pharmacology, 353(1), 23–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0014-2999(98)00392-6

⁴ Spindle, T.R., et al. (2024). Vaporized D-limonene selectively mitigates the acute anxiogenic effects of Δ9-THC. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 257, 111267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2024.111267

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