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Maple syrup silly season
It must be maple syrup silly season. There has been a dispute about which province is the second largest maple syrup producer in the country.
According to a recent Canadian Press article, the Ontario Maple Syrup Producers’ Association has prepared a television commercial that touts Ontario as Canada’s second largest producer of maple syrup. It lags far behind Quebec, which accounts for about 90 per cent of Canadian production. (Quebec also leads the national rankings in total heists of bulk maple syrup; but that’s another story.)
The race to claim the biggest share of the remaining 10 per cent of the Canadian market might not seem the most compelling news item, but it is obviously important to the New Brunswick Maple Syrup Association, which took umbrage at Ontario’s claim. The New Brunswickers say that maintaining their second place status is important to them as a lot of their product is exported, and to convey confidence in security of volume helps. Maple syrup sales bring in some $40 million annually to the New Brunswick economy. Ontario, one the other hand, is a consumer of imported maple syrup; only about half of consumer demand is met with Ontario syrup.
Statistics Canada keeps track of maple syrup production. Its stats tell us that both Ontario and New Brunswick have a claim to the number two spot, depending upon what you take from the stats. Ontario was number two in 2018, the last year for which stats were available at the time the commercial was made, but New Brunswick has been number two for the remaining seven of the last 10 years. However, the 2019 stats are now out and they show Ontario still ahead of New Brunswick.
The Ontario Association has told the New Brunswickers that it is sorry for causing offence and that it doesn’t matter to Ontario producers where they rank as to volume. What they care about is ensuring product quality and being able to bring their syrup to market. It’s all Canadian syrup, right?
For the record, however, the Ontarians say the commercial, which will only run for a couple more weeks, is “not inaccurate.” They will use social media in the interim “set the record straight.” They are looking forward to a “banner year” and encourage every one to “get out and buy maple syrup.”
What could me more quintessentially Canadian than a fight about maple syrup—a natural resource consumed locally, nationally and internationally; an inter-provincial dustup; a plea to federalist sentiment as a way out of the mess; and a desire too kiss and make up. It’s just as well they didn’t have to try to construct inter-provincial maple syrup pipelines.
It’s also very Canadian to have a dogfight not over the right to be number one, but over the right to be number two.
Of course, what’s important is not the ranking per se, but what the ranking says. The Toronto General and Western Foundation just this past weekend ran a full page ad to celebrate that in a Newsweek survey of over a thousand hospitals around the world, the Toronto General Hospital ranked as the fourth best, behind only the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic and The Massachusetts General Hospital; and ahead of such heavyweights as Johns Hopkins Hospital. That definitely warrants some horn tooting. I don’t think the ranking of our country’s number two maple syrup producer rates comparably.
It’s time to end the maple syrup silly season and start the real sap season. I’m running low and want to replenish my stock. I put the stuff on my oatmeal every morning, and I eat at lot of pancakes. Bring on Maple in the County on the 28th and 29th of the month.
Finally, to make my contribution to the syrup season more memorable than my reporting of the current spat, I present my wife’s recipe for Maple Mousse. (“At last,” I hear you say. “Something useful on page eight of the Times.”)
The recipe:
- Take one tablespoon of gelatine and soften it in two tablespoons of water
- Bring one and one half cups of maple syrup to a boil.
- Stir in the gelatine, then chill the mixture till it is partially set.
- Beat mixture till foamy.
- Whip two cups of whipping cream and fold it into the beaten syrup mixture.
- Chill for 4 hours, then eat. Then eat again.
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