Breaking Bad, with maple syrup

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Peter Kuitenbrouwer is a journalist, a Registered Professional Forester and the author of a forthcoming book about maple syrup.

In a brazen heist a dozen years ago, a makeshift gang of thieves stole more than $18-million worth of maple syrup. Over many months, the crooks hauled thousands of barrels of syrup from a warehouse along Highway 20, east of Montreal. Discovered in the summer of 2012, it was the biggest theft in the history of Canada; it made headlines worldwide and became a golden opportunity for jokes on late-night TV. What could be more Canadian?

The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, the victims of the crime, probably wish everyone would forget about this theft – it exposed their incompetence. Even though a barrel of maple syrup is worth about 20 times a barrel of oil, they stored what Quebeckers like to call “liquid gold” in the grandly-named Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, a former furniture factory that had no security cameras – and one of the owners of the warehouse was in on the job.

In the end, “every dollar of stolen syrup was reimbursed to the producers,” Joël Vaudeville, a spokesperson for Quebec syrup producers, told me. “Our insurance took care of us, the thieves went to prison, and we are very satisfied with the end of all this. This is all ancient history to us.”

Not any more. The theft is about to come roaring out of history, thanks to a six-part television “dramedy” that premieres on Amazon Prime on Dec. 6. The Sticky is a kind of Breaking Bad for the world of maple syrup.

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The story is only very loosely based on real events; white type on a black screen notes, “This is absolutely not the true story of the great Canadian maple syrup heist.”

Maple-syrup connoisseurs classify the condiment in four grades: golden, amber, dark and very dark. Golden syrup commands the best price. The Sticky is in the “very dark” category: there is arson and blood and murder. The series really comes to life in the fifth episode when Jamie Lee Curtis, an Academy-Award winner who also serves as an executive producer, shows up. Ms. Curtis plays a tough Boston crook sent north to mop up the mess of an underling nicknamed “Lollipop.” She expresses approval at the wardrobes of his Québécois co-conspirators: “Love the look by the way,” she says, gesturing at the thieves with a silencer-equipped handgun. “Tough farmers. Sort of flips my switch.”

For all its laughs, though, The Sticky represents a missed opportunity; though the plot revolves around a big theft, the show makes the world of syrup feel small. The truth of Quebec’s syrup cartel is a golden chance for satire. In real life, the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers are a powerful group who rule with an iron grip.

Indeed, the attempt of one woman to buck this system and seek syrup freedom – a story I reported a few years ago in the National Post – may be an inspiration for the character Ruth Landry, played by Margo Martindale, one of the syrup thieves depicted in The Sticky. Both are middle-aged sugar bush owners with curly red hair. The difference is that in real life, the syrup rebel was not among the thieves.

The true story of the maple-syrup rebels and thieves dates back to at least 2000, when, after decades of debate, Quebec’s maple-syrup producers voted to pool their syrup through a federation, to control the production and the price. The decision was not unanimous: Three sugar shacks belonging to leaders in the syrup federation burned down that spring. The police called the fires “suspicious”; the syrup federation president said, “I don’t know if they think they can stop the federation by threatening me.”

A maple-syrup cartel is possible because, unlike grapes or cacao or wheat, whose growers compete with other farmers worldwide, over a century Quebec developed a stranglehold on the maple-syrup market. Ontario and New England cut down many of their sugar bushes, while Quebec let the sugar maple trees grow. Quebec has cold weather, a requirement for maple sap to flow, and has a long history of co-operation among farmers in the Union Catholique des Cultivateurs, which celebrates its 100th birthday this year, now with the secular name Union des Producteurs Agricoles. The syrup federation is a branch of this union. Thanks to all these factors, Quebec today makes about three-quarters of the world’s maple syrup, which is quite a feat, considering the weather-dependence of the crop.

The cartel is an influential force. Its name is Producteurs et Productrices Acéricoles du Québec, which contains a conjugation of the Quebec-born word acériculture, a fusion of “agriculture” and “acer,” the Latin word for maple. Acériculture translates to sugaring.

This group decides who in Quebec may produce maple syrup, and how much; for anyone who tries to sell syrup outside its supply-management system, punishment can be severe.

Some “rebel” syrup producers have used what Quebeckers call “barrel rollers” – stealthy operators who buy syrup for cash outside the confines of the federation – to spirit their syrup out of Quebec, often to New Brunswick, where Quebec rules don’t apply. The most famous of these barrel rollers was Richard Vallières. Fined by the producers’ federation in 2006 for trading maple syrup on the black market, Mr. Vallières five years later became a ringleader of the syrup thieves, and earned the stiffest prison sentence, plus a $10-million fine.

The syrup rebels were not thieves. Angèle Grenier, one of the real-life maple-syrup rebels, was already a grandmother for a decade when she took on the power of Big Maple. The snowshoe-clad firebrand, who with her husband owned a sugar bush in St. Clotilde de Beauce, in the Appalacian Mountains between Quebec City and the U.S. border at Maine, did not want to steal anything. She just wanted to do what Quebec settlers had done since the First Nations taught them long ago how to boil maple sap into a sweetener: Make as much syrup as she wanted, and sell to whomever she pleased.

The cartel said no.

For ease of storytelling, in The Sticky the rebel becomes a thief. In one of the first scenes an agent for the syrup producers’ group, known in the show as “Association Érable Québec,” walks through Ruth Landry’s snowy sugar bush. The agent pulls spiles (the name for the taps out of which maple sap flows through tubes into collection vessels) from maple trees. “Your farm has been shut down and we’re also confiscating all your syrup,” the agent tells her. “You have been deemed an unlicensed operator.”

In real life, Ms. Grenier, the syrup rebel, took the syrup federation to court, demanding the freedom to sell her maple syrup in New Brunswick. She lost. By the time the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear her appeal, she owed the syrup federation hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. In the end Ms. Grenier sold her sugar bush and got out of the business.

In The Sticky, Ruth Landry, described in press material as “the tigress-like figurehead that a growing farmers’ revolt might just need” – decides to get back at the syrup association by stealing maple syrup. Here lies another missed opportunity, a detail perhaps too strange even for the producers of an outlandish comedy. In The Sticky the thieves conspire in a strip club. In real life, the syrup thieves hatched their plot at a truck stop called Le Madrid, near the syrup warehouse. Le Madrid featured a restaurant and hotel housed in a kind of castle with a red-tiled roof, an attempt at Spanish architecture improbably surrounded by dozens of life-sized fibreglass dinosaurs, along with a number of monster trucks, those ungainly vehicles with oversized tires.

New owners have since torn down the castle; today Le Madrid 2.0 has a McDonald’s, a St. Hubert roast-chicken restaurant, and dinosaurs but no monster trucks. Perhaps a recreation of the place was outside Amazon’s budget.

There is a quétaine – a Quebec word that loosely translates to cheesy – appeal to much of The Sticky. The show features remakes of vintage pop songs with French lyrics sung by Québécois artists. The producers deserve credit for their efforts to bring the province’s unique charms to a wider audience. There are good laughs, through which the relative mildness of Canadians – even our crooks – shines through. A warehouse security guard named Rémy Bouchard, played by Quebec actor Guillaume Cyr, gestures in anguish to Mike Byrne, a hot-tempered American thief played with élan by Chris Diamantopoulos, and cries, “He knows like eight people in Canada and he tried to kill half of them.”

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There’s another great scene at a classic small-town Quebec diner called Rotiserrie Diamond (“brochettes,” “mets chinois et italiens”) where Léonard Gauthier (played by Guy Nadon), the head of the syrup association, orders pancakes. He asks for syrup; the servers says, “We’re all out.” Mr. Gauthier protests, “I’ve got a warehouse full that says otherwise.” He tries to grab maple syrup from other tables but the farmer patrons, who all loathe him, refuse to relinquish their bottles.

That said, the show lets the syrup federation off the hook. In The Sticky, visits to sugar bushes by menacing agents and six-figure fines for disobeying the rules are directed by federation head Mr. Gauthier, a corrupt syrup-association leader trying to drive producers under so he can buy their farms cheap. In real life, such farm visits and fines are the official policy of a cartel sanctioned by the government of Quebec.

The real heist itself did something else for maple syrup: It wiped away the image, popular on syrup packaging, of the sweetener as a pure essence that flows from the forest, made by snowshoe-clad farmers who use horse-drawn sleighs to collect buckets of sap hung on trees, and stoke a wood fire to boil the liquid.

Maple syrup today, as The Sticky reminds us, is a big business: sap extracted via tubes hooked to vacuum pumps, boiled often using stove oil, hauled in transport trucks and stored in steel barrels in vast warehouses.

Pure maple syrup still tastes pretty good though. So maybe The Sticky, in a funny way, lands as a big sloppy promotional kiss to Canada’s iconic elixir, reminding us that everyone – including thieves – wants to get their hands on the liquid gold.

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