It’s late May, and Emily O’Brien is packing up her belongings for the second time in six months.Her first move took her from a Kitchener prison, where she spent 10 months for smuggling drugs, to a residential halfway house in Dundas.Now, she’s heading back into the community.Since leaving Grand Valley Institution for Women in December, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind for the 30-year-old Hamilton woman, who was recently granted full parole after being sentenced to four years in prison in 2015.In the last six months, she has pitched to a panel of judges on CBC’s business reality television show Dragons’ Den, given more than 40 talks at schools, women’s groups and corporations and continued to grow her specialty popcorn business Cons & Kernels.Now, the 30-year-old is building sets for her new podcast Criminally Acclaimed, which is being produced with Digital Canaries Entertainment, and preparing to launch a “mini-flagship” location for her business at Dundas’ The HOP Urban Market — formerly the Horn of Plenty — after making her gourmet popcorn in shared kitchen space at The Kitchen Collective for the past few months.Needless to say, O’Brien has been busy.Read more: A Hamilton woman’s journey from St. Lucia to prison “This is what I know I’m capable of,” said O’Brien, who recently moved back to her mom’s house before she gets her own place later this summer. “With the energy I was born with, now I’m channelling that into way better things.”In July 2015, O’Brien was arrested at Pearson airport for importing drugs on her way back from a trip to St. Lucia. While coming back into the country with her co-accused, she was stopped by a border services officer to whom she confessed having close to five pounds of cocaine sewn into her underwear. She later pleaded guilty to the offence and was sentenced to four years in prison, which is ...
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