At Deep Blue Distilleries in Richmond, every drop of spirit in every bottle we ship is made on site. The water is local. The grain is British Columbia. The still, a Hagyo column with porcelain tubes, sits about thirty feet from where this is being written. The company that owns the brand has its head office in Richmond, British Columbia, and pays its taxes in Richmond, British Columbia. None of that is unusual for a craft distillery. What is unusual, in the current Canadian retail environment, is that you can actually tell.
Sobeys and the Maple Washing Investigation
This week CBC reported that Sobeys is quietly pulling its red maple leaf shelf tags out of stores across the country while the Canadian Food Inspection Agency investigates the chain for what is being called maple washing, the practice of marketing imported products with Canadian imagery. The CFIA has identified at least twelve cases so far. A Sobeys-owned Safeway near Edmonton was selling Compliments avocado oil under a maple leaf and a Made in Canada sign, when the oil itself was imported. A Sobeys in Nova Scotia put a maple leaf shelf tag above walnuts grown in California. A Toronto store ran more than a dozen imported Compliments products under Canadian branding. No fines have been issued.
Shifting the Burden Onto Shoppers
Empire, the parent company of Sobeys, told the Canadian Press in late March that it was starting to remove some of the Canadian signage because shoppers are capable of figuring out where their food comes from. That sentence is worth reading twice. The entire reason maple washing exists as a category of problem is that shoppers cannot easily figure it out. A red leaf at eye level above a quietly imported product is, by design, a confusion. Calling that confusion the shopper’s responsibility to untangle is a polished way of saying the chain would prefer not to be specific.
Canada Washing Is Not Just a Grocery Problem
This problem is not confined to grocery. Canada washing is happening across categories, and spirits is one of the more striking ones. A bottle can be filled in Canada, labelled with a Canadian brand name, decorated with mountains and rivers and Canadian-sounding font choices, and contain neutral grain spirit imported in bulk from another country, owned by a multinational headquartered somewhere else, with the profits leaving the country before the cap is screwed on. Nothing on the front of the bottle has to tell you any of that. Some of the most prominent vodka brands sold in Canadian liquor stores fit this description. The legal labelling requirements let them.
The Dealer Name Loophole
Federal law does require what is called a “dealer’s name and principal place of business” on prepackaged products. The catch is that the dealer can be the importer, the distributor, or simply the company the product was packaged for. A label that reads “Packaged for Sobeys Inc., Stellarton, Nova Scotia” is fully compliant even when the contents are American, the manufacturer is American, and the corporate parent of the actual supplier is sending truckloads north for rebadging. A spirits label that names a Canadian bottler is fully compliant even when the actual liquid was made on the other side of an ocean. The labels are technically accurate. They are also, in any practical sense, useless to a consumer who wants to know what they are actually buying.
What Customers Are Asking in Liquor Stores
A sales trip through liquor stores across the BC Interior last week made one thing clear. Customers walk in and ask, point blank, who is behind the product. Who owns it. Where the company actually is. Whether the spirit was distilled in Canada or only bottled here. Independent store owners get this question every day and often do not know the answer themselves, because the label does not tell them. People are not being patriotic in the abstract. They are trying to make a deliberate decision with the information that is in front of them, and the information that is in front of them is engineered to be opaque.
A Two-Part Labelling Fix
The fix does not require a treaty fight or a trade war. It requires a labelling rule with two elements. First, every prepackaged consumer product would have to disclose the location of the head office of the company taking responsibility for the product, meaning the actual address of the actual parent, not a mail drop and not a contract packager. Second, for products imported or sourced from outside Canada, the label would have to name the supplier of the primary contents and the country of origin of those contents, in type at least as prominent as any country-association marketing imagery on the same package. For products made in Canada, the same disclosure would apply, naming the producer and the location of its principal place of business. Spirits should sit squarely inside the same rule. Where was the liquid actually distilled. Who actually owns the brand. Where does that company actually live.
This Is Not a Trade War
Nothing in this would violate the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement or our other trade obligations. Origin labelling is expressly contemplated under CUSMA, and a rule that applies equally to domestic and foreign products and discloses neutral commercial facts is the kind of measure trade panels have repeatedly upheld. The United States itself maintains country-of-origin labelling for many products. This is not a tariff. It is a sentence on a label.
Provinces Can Move First
This is almost certainly a provincial fight before it is a federal one. Ottawa has had years to tighten the dealer-name rule and has not. Doug Ford in Ontario has been the loudest premier on protecting Canadian jobs and Canadian consumer choice, and Ontario has both the market size and the regulatory authority to move first. British Columbia could follow. Liquor distribution is already a provincial jurisdiction in every province, which makes spirits an unusually easy place to start. Once two large provinces require the disclosure, national packaging falls in line, because no manufacturer prints separate runs for separate provinces if they can avoid it.
Why Ownership Matters
The American midterm elections are coming. American corporations donate heavily to the Republican Party. The Republican Party in its current form is openly hostile to Canada’s economic interests. Every dollar that flows to a Canada-washed product whose actual contents and actual ownership trace back across the border is a dollar that, somewhere along the chain, helps fund a political project that treats this country as a target. People are entitled to know that before they reach for the can, or the bottle.
The Difference a Clear Label Makes
Deep Blue would happily print all of this on every label tomorrow. The grain is from British Columbia. The water is from British Columbia. The distillery is in Richmond. The company is owned in Richmond. Nothing about us needs a red leaf sticker to be true. That is the difference between a Canadian product and a product dressed up to look like one, and a clear labelling rule is what would let shoppers tell them apart.