Bruce Linton and the factory that changed the town

The chocolate mattered because of the milk. When Bruce Linton and his partners were looking for somewhere to build a cannabis company, the former Hershey factory in Smiths Falls had an obscure advantage: local bylaws already allowed agricultural activity inside. Raw milk had gone in; chocolate had come out. A different crop could fit the paperwork. Before the billions, the celebrity partnerships and the stock exchange appearances, there was a building whose previous life made its next one possible.

There was also a town that wanted work. Hershey’s departure had left Smiths Falls with an empty industrial landmark. Linton later recalled that the owner had twice asked permission to demolish it. He needed space and municipal support. The town needed someone with a use for an inconveniently large building. Neither side had much reason to be sentimental about an empty factory.

By December 27, 2013, the deal had closed. Linton would later tell a business audience that he did not know whether the company had enough cash to reach the new year. It is a useful corrective to the photographs of a founder celebrating a stock exchange listing. An industrial adventure can begin with a calendar, a bank balance and four rather awkward days.

Six years to finish, plenty of time to begin

Linton’s route to that factory ran through Carleton University, where he accumulated responsibilities with considerably more enthusiasm than he accumulated progress toward graduation. He served as students’ association president, sat on the board of governors and held numerous campus jobs. A four-year degree took six years. The Bachelor of Public Administration finally arrived in 1992. The extracurricular activities had already started paying a different sort of dividend.

University governance put him in contact with Terry Matthews, the technology entrepreneur behind Newbridge Networks. Matthews became an early employer and a lasting business connection. Linton began his career at Newbridge, then worked across businesses including CrossKeys Systems, webHancer and Computerland.ca. At CrossKeys he was part of the leadership team involved in its Nasdaq and Toronto initial public offering. His apprenticeship included the machinery of taking a company public.

That background helps explain the apparent career swerve. Cannabis offered unfamiliar products, but Linton already knew something about building teams, raising money and selling investors a future that had yet to arrive. His university qualification concerned public administration. His eventual business depended heavily on what public administration would permit. The degree had found an unusually literal application.

The building was ready. The budget wasn’t.

Tweed, co-founded by Linton and Chuck Rifici in 2013, required more money than its early arithmetic suggested. Linton’s account of the original estimate was wonderfully economical: “it had a two in it.” They had imagined roughly C$2 million. The figure he later described as appropriate was C$28 million. Security requirements and the scale of the property had made a small plan rather larger.

The financing problem had a particular cruelty. Investors had to pay for a facility before inspectors could approve it. A licence depended on a building being ready; getting the building ready depended on money raised without that licence. The bureaucratic sequence was clear enough. Finding people willing to fund it was another matter.

By 2018, the factory had become a place international visitors came to understand an emerging industry. There was a visitor centre, and a particularly neat continuity in the workforce: Carol Lawrence, who had guided visitors at Hershey, was guiding them at Tweed. Her husband had lost his Hershey job after more than three decades. The same entrance now led to a different employer.

Linton’s travel itinerary had acquired its own unlikely geography. London, Paris, Smiths Falls and New York could belong to the same working week. The small Ontario town had become a stop between financial capitals. This was the tangible part of the growth story: people returning through factory doors, outside visitors arriving, a place acquiring a new answer to the question of what it did.

From a town address to the exchange floor

At a Senate committee appearance in 2018, Linton stressed the importance of being headquartered in Smiths Falls. This was a company directed from the town, with decisions made there. He described roughly 500 local employees and about 1,000 across Canada at that point. For a community of around 9,000 people, the relationship was difficult to miss.

Meanwhile, Tweed had become Canopy Growth. The corporate milestones came in quick succession: the Toronto Stock Exchange in July 2016, inclusion in the S&P/TSX Composite Index in March 2017, and the New York Stock Exchange in May 2018. Each step brought the business further into the established infrastructure of public markets. A company built around a newly regulated trade was acquiring thoroughly conventional financial credentials.

There were recognisable names in the commercial picture, too. Canopy worked with Snoop Dogg and later with Seth Rogen’s Houseplant. Those associations made sense within Linton’s consumer-brand approach: the product would need names, identities and reasons for customers to choose it. The company was trying to make an unfamiliar legal market legible to shoppers as well as investors.

But the consequential name was Constellation Brands. In August 2018, the drinks company announced an additional investment of approximately C$5 billion, described at announcement as US$4 billion. The transaction closed that November. The proposed ownership position was about 38 percent, assuming exercise of existing warrants. This was money on a scale far removed from the anxious calculations of late 2013.

The partnership was intended to fund international expansion and preparation for new consumer markets, including beverages. It gave Canopy both capital and a major corporate partner. It also sharpened a question that follows many founders into success: once a business can attract this much money, whose expectations will govern the next decision?

The money came with another set of keys

On July 3, 2019, Linton’s departure became public. He left the co-chief executive role and the board. Mark Zekulin continued as chief executive while the company searched for a successor. Linton’s own explanation dispensed with the comfortable ambiguity that often accompanies executive exits. He said he had been fired.

The disagreement concerned how the company should proceed after its rapid expansion. Constellation had expressed dissatisfaction with Canopy’s performance, and the founder who had made the business an investment opportunity was no longer the person chosen to lead it. Capital had solved the problem of financing ambition. Agreement about how to use it proved less straightforward.

By October, Linton was discussing the dismissal before a business audience in Kanata. He defended the risks he had taken and recalled the company’s close calls. He could also make a room laugh about being out of a job. That combination matters to understanding him: he contested the decision without treating unemployment as a reason to stop appearing in public.

“There is nothing elegant about getting here.”

Bruce Linton, on persistence, 2018

His record already included an unusually crowded working arrangement. For nearly five years, until late 2017, he had led communications software company Martello alongside Canopy. Cannabis had brought attention to a career that extended well beyond it. The idea of returning to several businesses after leaving one was hardly an invention forced upon him by dismissal.

A factory can have more than two lives

The chocolate factory story eventually turned again. In August 2023, Canopy announced an agreement to sell the Hershey Drive property back to Hershey Canada for about C$53 million. Canopy was restructuring, closing facilities and reducing expenses. The building that had helped express its expansion would now help it pay down debt.

That reversal deserves a place beside the stock exchange milestones. A factory full of work in 2018 was real. So was the later retrenchment. The company’s subsequent difficulties belong to the history of the enterprise Linton helped create, even though he had left years earlier. A founder’s departure does not freeze a business at its most flattering valuation.

Linton kept moving. He chaired and led Collective Growth, a special purpose acquisition company that went public in May 2020 and completed its combination with automotive sensor company Innoviz in April 2021. His old technology interests had found another route to the public markets. In February 2023 he stepped down from Martello’s board as it reduced its number of directors.

By December 2025, another appointment placed him at the head of Greenlane Holdings’ board. Greenlane combined a cannabis accessories business with a Berachain-focused digital asset treasury strategy. In August 2026 its board designated him audit committee chair, effective August 31. These are specific responsibilities in a public company, with all the oversight that implies. The next act includes committee work.

The parrot gets a vote

At home, the scale is rather different. Linton grew up on a hobby farm in southern Ontario and later settled on the outskirts of Ottawa. In a 2020 interview, he explained the practical merit of distance from neighbours: his wife’s Senegal parrot could make its early-morning opinions known without provoking complaints. Property selection had accommodated another forceful personality.

His 2023 account of Ottawa life included the same home of more than twenty years, a former barn cat, a small dog and that parrot. He liked working outside, clearing dead trees and dealing with the debris. He enjoyed local radio, GreekFest and the Redblacks. The home address remained steady while the business cards changed.

There had been room for that sort of humour at Tweed, too. When the company announced its 2017 Front Yard Shindig, with Mother Mother and Classified on the bill, Linton promised his family he would spare the audience his singing. The factory had acquired a music festival on its lawn. Apparently, even a chief executive could be subjected to sensible limits.

His career is easiest to grasp at that human scale: a student staying busy, an entrepreneur finding a use for a building, an employer trying to make a town part of the proposition. Money enlarged the possibilities and brought new constraints. Through it all, Linton has kept finding something else to start. At home, his family had already negotiated one firm limit: no singing on stage.