An elderly man in Ontario, who was twice charged with running an illegal cannabis farm, failed to convince the federal court to force the Canada Revenue Agency to pay $10 million in compensation because his private mortgage broker sold the property when he stopped paying for it. Instead, Albert James Oddi ended up in trouble for $10,000 in legal costs borne by the government for consuming "years of court time and resources" in addition to forcing federal lawyers to spend "significant amounts of time and resources" in a lawsuit.

The judge also wrote in his ruling: "Given his financial decisions, his failure to declare his business income from marijuana growing operations on his income tax returns, and his failure to resort to the courts at the appropriate times and in the appropriate manner, Mr. Oddi will be the one who suffers." Oddi's criminal efforts began in 2001 when he bought a piece of land in Smithville, Ontario, for $235,000. Starting in 2002, he ran the "first illegal marijuana growing operation" until he was arrested in 2005 and then convicted of running an illegal cannabis farm in 2007, according to the ruling.

During that time, Oddi surprisingly reported "no income or $1 income" and "no business income" to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) regarding his illegal cannabis farm. One year after his conviction, the CRA began probing his financial resources. By November 2008, the tax agency estimated he had $605,815 of unreported income plus more than $41,000 in unpaid goods and services tax (GST) between 2004 and 2007. Eventually, the CRA and Oddi settled on a total income tax debt of $58,470 for unreported amounts between 2002 and 2006. After the CRA mistakenly sent information about his tax debts to the wrong address, that was also eventually dropped to $14,493.64 by 2013. In the same regard, the judge wrote that Oddi "made no voluntary payments towards any of the outstanding debts," and in 2012, the CRA placed a lien on his property hoping to recover the amounts owed someday.

Despite his conviction in 2007, Oddi quickly returned to it again, and in 2012 his property was raided and he was again charged by Hamilton police with growing and possessing marijuana for trafficking purposes. In a statement carried by local media at the time, police said they found more than 1,200 marijuana plants and 70 grams of hashish worth approximately $1.25 million on Oddi's property, where he was 64 years old at the time.

According to the ruling, just before the police raid, Oddi obtained a $500,000 mortgage on the property from private lender Paul Michael Siskind. But shortly after registering the mortgage, the ruling says Oddi stopped paying it "because he was incarcerated at the time." After seven months, Siskind began foreclosure proceedings to sell the property and recover his money. By the end of 2014, he sold it for $600,000.

Later, Oddi filed his lawsuit against the CRA in 2016 claiming he was a victim of "fraud" and "negligence" and that the agency violated his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He also sought more than $10 million in damages from the CRA due to the sale of his farm. But after years of litigation, the federal court issued an urgent ruling fully siding with the CRA. It also ruled that Oddi would be liable for $10,000 in legal costs to the government. The only error the judge noted in the CRA's dealings with Oddi was that it mistakenly sent a reassessment of GST debts for cannabis growers to the wrong address.