In January or February of 1998 I travelled to Ottawa, along with a lot of other people from the hemp industry, to go over the draft Industrial Hemp Regulations before they were finalised. Twenty-eight years later Health Canada is rewriting those same regulations, so it seems worth setting down what was actually asked for in that room, and what happened next.
One thing I should be straight about at the outset. I have a letter from Allan Rock, then Minister of Health, dated 30 April 1998, telling me the Industrial Hemp Regulations had been made. Ministers do not write to members of the public at random, so I take it as evidence I was on the department's list of interested parties. It is not evidence that I attended the consultation, and I am not going to present it as though it were. That part is my own account, and there are other people who were in that room and are still in the industry.
Why I was there in the first place
I did not go to Ottawa hoping to enter the hemp business. I was already in it.
My first company was incorporated in 1996, two years before the regulations existed, and it made food from hemp seed. That sounds like a contradiction and it is worth explaining, because it tells you something about the era. Growing hemp in Canada was not permitted before 1998. Making food from hemp seed was a different question, and the answer depended on where the seed came from and what had been done to it. So the earliest Canadian hemp food businesses were built on seed sourced from outside the country, under a legal framework that had not been written with any of this in mind.
What that looked like in practice was a protein bar and a folding table. We made the Zima Crisp, a hemp-seed bar, and sold it and other hemp food the grassroots way — at markets, face to face, explaining what hemp seed was to people who had mostly never eaten it and half of whom wanted to know whether it would get them high. There was no category to sell into. You built demand one conversation at a time, at a stall, on a Saturday.
That is the position I came to the consultation from: someone already making and selling hemp seed food, arguing about the rules that would govern the crop it came from. It is also why the two things I pushed for were about seed and about processing rather than about acreage or licensing. I was not speculating about what a hemp food business might need. I was running one.
What I went there to argue for
Two things, and I lost on both.
The first was unsterilised whole seed. The second was permission to make food from hemp sprouts.
The sprouts argument is the one I still think about, because the reasoning behind it has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with competing on a shelf. Soy's great commercial advantage as a protein crop is that it swells when you soak it. A dry bean becomes several times its volume, and that transformation is the basis of an enormous range of products — tofu, tempeh, soy milk, textured protein. Hemp does not do this. A hemp seed soaked in water is a hemp seed that is slightly wet.
Sprouting is the one process that gives hemp the same kind of transformation. A sprouted seed changes in volume, in texture, and in what you can build from it. Take sprouting off the table and you have removed hemp's only route to the category of foods soy dominates. That was the practical case I made: not that sprouts were harmless, though I believed they were, but that without them hemp food would be permanently confined to seed, oil and flour.
What the regulations actually did
The Industrial Hemp Regulations were registered on 12 March 1998 as SOR/98-156, under Order in Council P.C. 1998-352. They excluded sprouts explicitly. The regulations prohibited whole industrial hemp plants "including sprouts," along with the leaves, flowers and bracts, and that exclusion carried through into the derivative provisions as well: a hemp food product was permitted only if it had not been made from whole plants or sprouts.
That exclusion is still in force today. When the rules were amended on 12 March 2025 to let derivatives of non-viable hemp grain move without a licence, sprouts were not brought back in. The position I argued against in a room in early 1998 has now outlived the regulations it was written into.
I incorporated Chi Hemp Industries in Victoria on 27 May 1998, about ten weeks after the regulations were registered, and spent the next sixteen years building a hemp food business inside the rules I had just finished arguing with. I want to be precise about my role: I was one of many people at that consultation, and I have no idea how much weight anything I said carried. What I can say is what was asked for, and what the published regulation did.
What they got right
They got the industry off the ground. That is not a small thing and it is easy to forget how uncertain it looked at the time. Canada put a workable licensing framework in place two decades before the United States managed it with the 2018 Farm Bill, and Canadian growers and processors had a functioning legal market while their American counterparts were still arguing about whether the crop existed. Every hemp food company operating in Canada today stands on that decision.
The framework was also, for its era, reasonably practical. It distinguished between grain intended for processing and seed intended for planting. It set a THC threshold and a testing regime. Those were sensible choices by people who had to write rules for a crop most of the country had never seen.
What actually went wrong — and it wasn't the regulations
This is the part I would most want the current consultation to hear.
The damage to Canadian hemp food did not come from the 1998 rules. It came from what was allowed to happen in the market afterwards. Twenty years ago there were roughly ten times the number of hemp food products on Canadian shelves that there are now. Not ten percent more. Ten times.
What replaced that variety was consolidation. Hemp food production in Canada concentrated, company by company, until what had been a field of independent producers became something much closer to a monopoly. The regulations did not require that. Nothing in SOR/98-156 said the industry had to end up in a small number of hands. But nothing in the surrounding policy did anything to prevent it either, and no meaningful support existed for the small producer trying to stay independent.
I watched this happen to people I sat with in that room. Ruth Shamai, who I met at my table in Ottawa and have kept in touch with since, had been working with hemp since 1993 and went on to found Ruth's Hemp Foods in 2000 — hemp tortilla chips, burgers, bars, protein powders, dressings, sold across North America. She sold the company in 2013. My own company passed through intermediaries and ended up inside a public company. That was the pattern, repeated: the pioneers built the category and then, one by one, the category stopped being theirs.
The consequence for the consumer is the narrowed shelf. The consequence for the crop is that hemp food never became what its nutritional profile justified. Hemp seed carries a genuinely unusual balance of essential fatty acids and a complete protein, and it has spent twenty-five years being sold mostly as three commodity products. That is not a regulatory failure. It is a market-structure failure that regulation could have noticed and did not.
What I would say to the current consultation
Health Canada reopened the Industrial Hemp Regulations for consultation in 2026, and most of the submissions concern THC limits and licensing thresholds. Those matter. But the question nobody asked in 1998, and as far as I can tell nobody is asking now, is what kind of industry the rules are meant to produce.
A framework that is easy for a large processor to satisfy and expensive for a small one to satisfy will produce a concentrated industry, whatever its authors intend. That is what happened here. If the rewrite is going to be worth the effort, the test should not only be whether the rules are safe and workable, but whether a person with a good idea and a small operation can still get into the category and stay in it.
I would also, twenty-eight years later, still like to be able to make food from sprouts.
Eric Hughes has worked in hemp since 1996, when he incorporated his first company and began making food from hemp seed — two years before hemp cultivation became legal in Canada. He founded Chi Hemp Industries in Victoria in 1998 and ran it until 2014, created the Zima Crisp hemp-seed bar, served as president of the BC Industrial Hemp Growers' Association, was a member of the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance, and built the CHTA's first website in 2003. Details of the 1998 consultation are his own recollection; the regulatory dates and provisions cited above are drawn from the published text of SOR/98-156.