By Peter Kuitenbrouwer
On an April morning, Angèle Grenier tramps on
snowshoes through her sugar maple forest. Her vest pockets bulge with plastic
spouts, tube connectors, clamps, wire ties, a tool for twisting the ties,
surveyor’s tape, tube-cutters, and a snack: a molasses cookie in a Ziploc bag.
At each maple Grenier stops and taps a spout with her mallet, securing it in
a hole. Maple sap flows from these spouts through pipes, down the hill to a
reservoir in her sugar shack. The tap of her mallet and a crow’s call are all
that disturb the stillness of the sugar bush.
This diminutive, twinkle-eyed grandmother hardly looks the part of a
guerilla. Yet in recent years Grenier and other maple syrup producers in Quebec have sent the
Fédération des producteurs acéricoles du Québec — the provincial syrup
producers’ union — into paroxysms of rage. There is a maple syrup insurgency
afoot, and the union is doing everything it can to thwart the subversive
activity of Grenier and her fellow insurrectionist syrup producers.
Backed by the Quebec
justice system and the provincial police, sheriffs have raided sugar shacks
down country roads and seized barrels of maple syrup, using trucks and
front-end loaders. The federation’s goal: enforcing a supply management system
that controls the sale and proceeds of maple syrup in Quebec.
Quebec is the Saudi Arabia of maple syrup. This
food fight has shattered the bucolic image of sugaring-off season here.
Producers whisk away their sweet liquid by night, trade in “black market syrup”
and rage against what they call the “mafia” of the producers’ union.
In a bizarre twist that made headlines across Quebec, the federation this
month stationed security guards in several sugar shacks, to stand over the
farmers and watch that they don’t sell a drop of maple syrup outside the iron
confines of its cartel.
When one producer gave a visiting reporter a small tub of maple butter as a
souvenir, it came with a warning: hide it in his pocket, to avoid the prying
eyes of a guard stationed just outside the sugar shack.
“It’s worse than drugs,” says Grenier. “There’s not a single pusher who
would get pursued like this or pay fines like us.”
No comments:
Post a Comment