Good morning. My name is Marcel Vandebeek. My role during the 19 years with the BC Compassion Club Society has included front-line dispensing of medicinal cannabis for five years, administrative duties for 15 years, and purchasing for 17 years. I have been working with suppliers of the BC Compassion Club to ensure a consistent supply of high-quality medicinal cannabis to our membership.
As my colleague Hilary said, we are a registered not-for-profit society focused on providing holistic health care for those who most need it. We work with small-scale growers, who cultivate specifically for our members at below-market pricing. They have cultivated specialty strains and have amassed a tremendous amount of expertise including that on organic cultivation methods. None are related to organized crime and all have taken on great personal risk to help us meet the needs of our members. We ensure the ideological values of the suppliers we work with and we reject the producers who are solely profit motivated. We have a strict cap on pricing which weeds out those who are not aligned with our mission, vision, and values, and we ask them for small things and donations.
For example, we have a cultivator named Joe, who lived with a serious disability, and grew organic cannabis for us. He used to donate thousands of dollars' worth of cannabis every Christmas to help us gift it to our members in order to help alleviate their financial hardship during the holiday season. He used the small profits to fund a summer camp for disabled children. Sadly, he was raided by the RCMP. He was never charged, but as a result, he was forced to end his summer camp. These are the good, honest, hard-working, law-abiding Canadians this government is looking at as the criminals who must have the industry taken out of their hands. In fact, they're people you should be bringing out of the shadows and into the light.
The current process for applying to be a licensed producer is inaccessible financially to small-scale producers and to small-business people, who are part of what is needed to fill the supply shortages in licit production. The pioneers of the medical cannabis movement and industry will not be included in the legal market unless you dissolve the onerous barriers to becoming licensed.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to your committee today. We look forward to your questions.