Talk:Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

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Discussion for: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada is about Canada's federal agriculture department: its origin and the act that governs it, the cannabis garden grown at its Central Experimental Farm in 1971, its herbarium and national gene bank and its place in the regulation of hemp, which Health Canada licenses.

Sourcing

The department's history, research centres and collections come from its own pages, its country report of 2022 and its crop profile of industrial hemp. The law comes from the texts on Justice Laws and from Health Canada's pages on hemp licensing. The 1971 garden comes from the Le Dain Commission's report and from the voucher specimens of the garden. Discuss attribution, independent sourcing and any claim that has lost its attribution here.

Discussion

Who licenses hemp

The Minister of Health issues licences under section 62 of the Cannabis Act. The Industrial Hemp Regulations of 2018 were made on the Minister of Health's recommendation. Health Canada publishes the List of Approved Cultivars. The department's part named on Health Canada's pages is a seat on the Interdepartmental Working Group on Industrial Hemp Cultivars, which makes recommendations. The department's own crop profile of 2020 says that all aspects of industrial hemp production are regulated by Health Canada.

The law of 1938

The department's crop profile of 2020 says hemp was banned in 1938 under the "Opium and Narcotics Control Act". The Le Dain Commission's report of 1972 describes the change of 1938 as an amendment to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act, which prohibited growing cannabis without special authorisation.

Cannabis in the department's collections

Genesys lists no accessions from Plant Gene Resources of Canada. On 13 November 2026 the herbarium DAO had 1,632 digitised specimens on GBIF out of about 1.5 million, none of them Cannabis. The vouchers of the 1971 garden are at the New York Botanical Garden and the University of South Florida. Whether the gene bank or the herbarium keeps Cannabis is not shown by these catalogues. Writing in 2017, Small found no conventional public gene bank in North America that offered or accepted cannabis.

Size of the national gene bank

Canada's country report of 2022 gives 111,158 accessions at the three national gene bank sites in 2019. A Seed World article of 17 September 2020, on the gene bank's fiftieth year, gives about 115,000 accessions. The two figures are from different years.