A sweet new day is dawning on Quebec’s maple forests. Producers disgruntled using the province’s existing maple syrup supply-management regime may take heart. The federal government – having helped to create a system which has seen Quebec syrup producers lose substantial global share of the market, exports to the dominant U.S. market stagnate, as well as their revenue per pound drop below producers elsewhere – is preparing 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 depends on bailiffs, guards and also the courts, is crippling the province’s most celebrated export, and the province needs to abandon its maple syrup quotas, says a new report.
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This good news has arrived by means of a report on increasing the system, by Florent Gagn, former chief from the S?ret du Qubec. It had been released publicly days ago, but delivered in December to the minister of agriculture, who commissioned it after reading Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s report on Quebec’s awakening “Maple Syrup Rebellion” in the Financial Post last spring. The article recounted stories of producers, accused of selling their syrup without clearance in 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 as the federation assured Kuitenbrouwer, this is because 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 the best thing, but you want to protect our producers. It’s our distinct society.”
And indeed, the final results of protecting producers with supply management take time and effort to measure economically. In other words, they can be measured economically, but it is not advised. In the last Ten years, Quebec syrup has lost 10 per cent of world market share, despite booming global demand; there are fewer sugar bushes within the province; and while technologies have helped boost Quebec’s production 30 per cent inside a decade, worldwide production grew 50 per cent. Within the U.S., production exploded by 45 per cent in just five years. Meanwhile, American producers collect 20 percent more for his or her syrup than Quebecers do.
Gagn senses these costs have gotten out of hand. But as a person with experience of protection rackets might know, the more one protects, the more protective services are needed. The federation, which began as a farmers’ union for bulk sales in 1956, would go on to insinuate itself into non-bulk sales, too (only network marketing at the sugar shack remain unsupervised). It created a syrup reserve to ensure “supported inventories” and price. Then the single-buyer monopsony. In 2003, it introduced a quota system to ration supply.
And still the federation doesn’t rest in pursuing new tactics to safeguard producers. Where producers were once required to submit only sales invoices to take into account small-scale domestic sales directly to stores, the federation now demands invasive details: “the name of every customer – the purpose of sale, whether it is a new customer, the nature from the product sold, the quantities and quantity of each sale and also the number of sales per year to 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 a typical industry) the federation responds by demanding more. Records of “production volumes and schedules, detailed accounts of sales with supporting documents, invoices for purchases of small containers, electricity or oil bills, the amount of taps in operation, the sugar bush’s cadastral designation, any lease or management permit issued for public land, bank statements and a copy of their financial reports for quite some time.” The federation drives the place to find producer precisely how fundamental to his protection is this unsparing inquisition by informing him that if he doesn’t help himself with greater haste, he or she is the subject of a provincial investigation or banned from eligibility for agricultural support programs. This really is, as Gagn notes, generally beyond the federation’s role, other than to determine “its power and need for absolute control.”
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It’s a wonder that such measures are necessary 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 may find “no clear policy” how quotas are awarded, or “the order of priority” to whom they’re distributed. Although he did find 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 more 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 might be permitted to “withdraw” in the federation’s collective if they “pay fees comparable to those set for participating producers” and accept adhere to “conditions regarding product inspection and classification.” Obviously the federation can now be trusted to utilize these nonconformists as fairly because it has dealt with free spirits before. Besides, why get rid of the infant using the bathwater? It’s, Gagn writes, “often more realistic and definitely easier to work to improve existing things instead of dreaming about a radical change.”
Before the federation, “producers alternately experienced the vagaries of nature – or even the omnipotence of clients who dictated the guidelines,” he argues, while the federation has “transformed Qubec maple syrup right into a product which can be found 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 goods both available and profitable – selling their produce, free of coercion, surveillance and intimidation, as if residing in some radical dream.
