Canada’s “Maple Mafia”
This the full 3545-word text of one of my postgraduate essays, "Canada’s “Maple Mafia”: Regulatory Capture, Path Dependency, and Canadien Values in Québec’s Maple Syrup Industry", written in 2018. Enjoy! Canada’s “Maple Mafia”: Regulatory Capture, Path Dependency, and Canadien Values in Québec’s Maple Syrup Industry The Fédération des producteurs acéricoles du Québec (FPAQ) controls all bulk sales of maple syrup in Québec. Since the early 2000s, they have used a quota system and strategic reserve to maximize the price of maple syrup. Media have called them "the Saudi Arabia of maple syrup" and maple syrup producers have called them a "mafia" (Kuitenbrouwer 2018; Cohen 2016). Perhaps most surprisingly, the Federation’s power is granted by Québec’s provincial government. How can we account for the government of Québec's support for a maple syrup cartel? A government-backed cartel is highly unusual in a liberal democracy. There is no clear explanation