Chronicle of Canada’s maple-syrup industry a sweet treat

The story of Canadian maple syrup is full of unsavoury characters: malicious colonizers, conniving capitalists, brazen thieves.

In Maple Syrup: A Short History of Canada’s Sweetest Obsession, author Peter Kuitenbrouwer draws on this rich well of personalities to create an informative, entertaining account of one of the country’s most iconic natural resources.

It’s a story Kuitenbrouwer is uniquely positioned to tell.

A longtime journalist and former National Post columnist, Kuitenbrouwer grew up tending a sugar maple bush with his family in rural Quebec. Tapping trees and boiling sap was a stabilizing annual tradition following a chaotic early childhood. He’s now a registered forester with his own small-scale syrup operation outside of Toronto.

Kuitenbrouwer’s personal sugar shack experiences weave their way into reported vignettes about reconciliation, technology, religion, economics, regional politics and climate change.

The people-focused narrative keeps the momentum flowing through an occasionally dense forest of facts and figures. Delightful line drawings by Winnipeg illustrator Jonathan Dyck (Shelterbelts) bring the book and the sugar bush to life.

Maple Syrup covers a lot of ground but focuses on the syrup industries in Ontario, New Brunswick and Quebec — and the global dominance of the latter. It’s a slice of social and environmental history told through the sugar maple tree, the leaves and sap of which have become an engrained part of Canada’s flannel-coded national identity.

Kuitenbrouwer deftly addresses the sticky bits of that real and imagined identity.

An early chapter covers Indigenous maple syrup production — practiced in parts of North America since time immemorial — and the lasting impact of the government’s Indian Act, which forced communities onto reserves and systematically cut access to traditional resources, including large swaths of maple forest felled for settler agriculture.

Later on, he delves into the tension between Canada’s logging and syrup lobbies, and eco-friendliness of an industry that requires vast amounts of fuel to turn sap (which is 98 per cent water) into maple syrup.

Kuitenbrouwer also looks at the benefits and pitfalls of Quebec’s maple syrup federation (a.k.a “cartel”), which controls production in the province and, by extension, 72 per cent of the world’s syrup supply.

Readers might be familiar with the federation as the victim of Canada’s biggest criminal heist, during which thieves stole 3,000 tonnes of syrup from the organization’s stockpile. Kuitenbrouwer revisits the stereotypifying incident — dubbed the “Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist” by international media — in satisfying detail.

Despite being described as a “short history,” Maple Syrup takes a seemingly niche topic and makes it a national concern filled with intriguing stories. Fair warning: reading may also induce cravings for maple-flavoured treats.

Eva Wasney is a food, arts and life reporter with the Free Press.