Kevin Libin: Might Quebec’s maple syrup rebels dream of tasting sweet freedom?

A sweet new day is dawning on Quebec’s maple forests. Producers disgruntled with the province’s existing maple syrup supply-management regime can take heart. The federal government – having helped to create a system that has seen Quebec syrup producers lose substantial global share of the market, exports to the dominant U.S. market stagnate, and their revenue per pound drop below producers elsewhere – is getting ready to develop that success.

Quebec’s ‘autocratic’ treatments for maple syrup producers looking for major overhaul: provincial report

Quebec’s “autocratic” charge of maple syrup makers, a reign of terror which relies on bailiffs, security guards and the courts, is crippling the province’s most celebrated export, and also the province must abandon its maple syrup quotas, says a new report.

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This good news is here in the form of a report on increasing the system, by Florent Gagn, former chief of the S?ret du Qubec. It had been released publicly days ago, but delivered in December towards the minister of agriculture, who commissioned it after reading Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s set of Quebec’s awakening “Maple Syrup Rebellion” within the Financial Post last spring. The content recounted stories of producers, accused of selling their syrup without clearance from the proper authorities, facing crippling fines and oppressive surveillance by La Fdration des producteurs acricoles du Qubec, the syrup union established by provincial law – their personal affairs pried into, their assets seized, guards in their door.

Such measures likely seemed drastic to us non-Quebecers. But because the federation assured Kuitenbrouwer, this is as much about preserving culture because it is about crushing freedom. “Don’t be way too hard on us,” Paul Rouillard, the federation’s deputy director, said. “We all know that economically it’s not a good thing, but you want to protect our producers. It’s our distinct society.”

And indeed, the outcomes of protecting producers with supply management are difficult to determine economically. That is to say, they can be measured economically, but it is not advised. Within the last Ten years, Quebec syrup has lost 10 per cent of world market share, despite booming global demand; you will find fewer sugar bushes within the province; even though technologies have helped boost Quebec’s production 30 per cent inside a decade, worldwide production grew Half. Within the U.S., production exploded by 45 percent in just 5 years. Meanwhile, American producers collect 20 per cent more for their syrup than Quebecers do.

Gagn senses that these costs have gotten beyond control. But because anyone with experience of protection rackets might know, the greater one protects, the greater protective services are required. The federation, which began as a farmers’ union for bulk sales in 1956, would will continue to insinuate itself into non-bulk sales, too (only direct sales at the sugar shack remain unsupervised). It created a syrup reserve to make sure “supported inventories” and value. Then the single-buyer monopsony. In 2003, it introduced a quota system to ration supply.

And still the federation does not rest in pursuing new tactics to protect producers. Where producers were once required to submit only sales invoices to account for small-scale domestic sales directly to stores, the federation now demands invasive details: “the name of each customer – the purpose of sale, whether it is a brand new customer, the nature from the product sold, the quantities and amount of each sale and the quantity of sales each year for this customer.”

Despite their value and scarcity, Gagn could find ‘no clear policy’ how quotas are awarded

When producers try protesting that client lists are “trade secrets” (as if this were an average industry) the federation responds by demanding more. Records of “production volumes and schedules, detailed accounts of all sales with supporting documents, invoices for purchases of small containers, electricity or oil bills, the number of taps functioning, the sugar bush’s cadastral designation, any lease or management permit issued for public land, bank statements along with a copy of the financial reports for several years.” The federation drives the place to find producer just how vital to his protection is this unsparing inquisition by informing him that if he doesn’t help himself with greater haste, he could be the topic of a provincial investigation or banned from eligibility for agricultural support programs. This is, as Gagn notes, generally beyond the federation’s role, apart from to establish “its power and need for absolute control.”

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It’s amazing that such measures are essential when the federation’s charge over production quotas is powerful enough. Not that Gagn found proof it abuses that authority. It is simply that, despite their obvious value and scarcity, Gagn could find “no clear policy” on how quotas are awarded, or “the order of priority” with whom they’re distributed. Although he saw a “troubling” number of producers suspecting quotas were doled out as favours, in “questionable arrangements,” or as “rewards to informers” – suspicions that may only seem, to the federation, both ungracious and scurrilous given that the province so takes pride in the incorruptibility of their public officials.



Gagn finds “profound unrest” among producers towards this “authoritarian” system. With “other players with increased vitality, boldness, innovative spirit, and freedom” threatening to take yet more market share from Quebecers, he recommends to the minister numerous changes. Sanely, the abolition entirely from the quota system is one of them.

But somehow Gagn sees the federation – distinguished by its “activism and zeal”; which “does not hesitate to prosecute its members in addition to harass them” – remaining, even when he suggests it dials back its bullying intrusiveness. Gagn proposes that unhappy producers could be permitted to “withdraw” from the federation’s collective if they “pay fees comparable to those looking for participating producers” and agree to comply with “conditions regarding product inspection and classification.” Obviously the federation can now be trusted to utilize these nonconformists as fairly as it has dealt with free spirits before. Besides, why throw out the baby with the bathwater? It is, Gagn writes, “often more realistic and definitely simpler to try to improve existing things rather than dreaming of a radical change.”

Before the federation, “producers alternately suffered from the vagaries of nature – or even the omnipotence of clients who dictated the rules,” he argues, while the federation has “transformed Qubec maple syrup into a product that’s available to buyers and profitable for producers.” Left unspoken may be the bewildering proven fact that there remain farmers within this country who not just must endure self-reliance, the seasons and customers, but somehow still find methods to make their items both available and profitable – selling their produce, free from coercion, surveillance and intimidation, as if living in some radical dream.