There is no shortage of Canadian insurance brokers and companies trying to sell medical cannabis businesses insurance products. While your business and property always need some insurance keep in mind that insurance is merely one treatment for managing your business risks.
Think about car insurance for a moment. Sure you need insurance to cover any damage to your vehicle but there are other risk management treatments that can be employed. For example, you don’t drive 150 on icy roads just because you have insurance, right? One alternative is to reduce the likelihood of a collision by driving more carefully.
I read about a company that was offering insurance related to people getting hit in the head by coconuts. Do we really need insurance for that? How about just wearing a helmet or staying away from the hazardous coconut forest?
To a medical cannabis grower, even if you can purchase a policy to cover you from theft, you can better protect yourself with extremely robust controls to protect you from theft. (Didn’t Health Canada make you build a safe?) Equally, while you can purchase a policy to protect you from crop-spoilage I am certain there are hundreds of preventative controls that you have documented and maintain in order to safely mitigate this (many of which you perform for ACMPR compliance).
An experienced risk management professional like me can help you identify, assess and manage all your enterprise risks (and not just the ACMPR-related ones) and help you develop a risk management program that suits your needs and organizational culture. Once all your risks are identified and assessed I can introduce your business to alternative treatments to choose from before you buy insurance such as:
- Avoid the risk
- Remove the source
- Change the likelihood
- Change the consequences
- Share the risk (with insurance)
- Accept the risk (and do nothing)
Here’s a video that explains risk treatments