From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decands. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. You can find corruption and conspiracy in the oddest places. Longtime listeners, you're well aware of this. Uh. And today we are traveling up to the land of our lovely northern neighbors. We're traveling to Canada through the power the mind, right, the theater of imagination. And in this episode we're exploring a bizarre international well, you could call it a conspiracy, you could call it an industry. Some people, rightly or wrongly, are convinced it is a scam or even racketeering. UH. And this is his story that may well travel all the way up to your own breakfast table. No kidding. Before we do the big reveal and get into this, I have one very important question for you. Knowl and for you, Matt, and for everyone listening along at home, waffles or pancakes if you had to choose one. Oh, you know, I like a waffle because of the little divits just hold the syrups so nicely. They're like little syrup cups. You know. I would have said waffle. But the other day I had pecan pancakes or pecan pancakes if you're nasty, and they were incredible. And I used this very bottle allegedly maple syrup, and it was delicious. You wish on the side, Matt, I didn't you see the front. I didn't want to show you the actual company. Yeah, okay, well it checks out. You can see you can see the name here the Yeah, I myself am a waffle person because of the surface area conundrum that you mentioned earlier, or it's a feature not a bug, also because of the ingredients. But the crux of today's story, fellow conspiracy realist, is maple syrup. Yes, you are listening to a show about critical thinking applied to conspiracy theories, and yes, this episode is about maple syrup. Trust us worth it problems. So here are the facts. If you're like most people, You've heard of maple syrup, right, you've heard of it. It's not it's not new to your human experience. It's made from this substance called xylem sap and it comes primarily from three types of trees that are all maples. Uh. The big the big dog in the game is sugar maple. But you will also see people uh ultimately creating maple syrup from red and black maple trees. It's not a new idea. Like a lot of things on this continent. Indigenous people had learned the trick of of this thousands and thousands of years ago. They already knew how to take this slightly sweet sap and turn it into syrup. And the process that these earlier people discovered or created continues today. It's a really neat marriage of art and science, and it's something that I think a lot of people don't think about. Like when if you live in many parts of the US, uh, you may not even find real maple syrup. Often you may go for the much more affordable table syrup, which is not not the legit maple syrup. But if you're you're in certain regions of this continent, particularly the eastern northeastern seaboard right Canada, UH and New England. Then it would be tremendously insulting to serve table syrup to your loved ones, your friends. They would think, oh, okay, Mr cheap stuff over here has decided that we are acquaintances and not yeah, and and like it can seriously be seen as an insult. And that's because they are very different things. The I think to set this up, we need to talk a little bit about the process of creating this stuff, because so much work goes into it. And when you understand how much work goes into it, you can understand a little bit of why maple syrup is such a big deal to some people. Okay, so let's talk about sap. That's what we're gonna talk about, uh, because you need a lot of it to make maple syrup. The sap is almost like water in terms of the makeup of the product. It is an incredibly thin um substance that contains about two sucross, so it makes it sweet, and about thirty gallons of sap is what it takes to make it just a single gallon of maple syrup um. And while of course the sap is the key ingredient in the process. UM. It also requires another key ingredient, which is time. UM. You have to have. You know, you can't grow a tree overnight. A tree needs to be healthy and it needs to be at least around ten inches in diameter before it can be tapped UM, which is exactly what it sounds like. You you know, stick a device into the tree that then sucks out the sap or at least allows you to drain the tree of that soup. UM. And it typically takes a tree around forty years to reach that kind of size. Yeah, and it's pretty amazing. The process really is amazing. If you watch some videos online about it and seeing especially if it's a larger operation with a lot of maple trees that have been tapped, and just watch looking at the lines of of sap that just you know, slowly drained from the tree into a collection area. It's it's pretty cool. It's fascinating because you could tap a younger or smaller tree, but it would have it would have tough effects on the health of the tree, which is super important. That's why we say it takes about forty years because you're waiting for it to reach that size, and for a large tree, if it's large enough, you could have multiple taps on the tree. There's a lot of really cool terminology here that I've just sort of unapologetically peppered through because it's it's a lot to take it all at once, but think of it this way. So the people who tap the trees, they are called sugar makers, which I think is tremendously sweet on several levels. And they they're part of where the art and the science really meet. To do this successfully, they need to have a very deep understanding of each tree, like they tend to know its history. They know if they had any like problems with bugs or some kind of you know, um rot got to it, and they take immense, immense pains not to do any lasting harm because if everything goes well, these trees can be tapped again and again multiple times over a long period of time, like a century or more. And and Matt, I'd love to hear a little more about that sap collection process because it changed over time, right oh yeah, before the invention of I guess modern plastic and uh, you know, just some innovation. The way you would tap an old maple back in the day is you would have you would do the thing you have to get a hole into the tree itself. But before it was just this kind of wooden like a wooden tube let's say that would come out like a spout almost or uh that just kind of goes down and his angle down, and then you'd hang a bucket onto that wooden piece, or at least you'd get a bucket very close to where that wooden pieces it's actually tapping the tree. That bucket would fill up, and then you take the bucket over dump it into wherever you collect and then sometimes like a big pan, yeah, exactly, you would boil. You you boil the sap down and you're reducing it to something something thicker, but plastic change this operation made much more efficient. It's funny. It almost reminds me of those old uh I believe Tropicana orange juice ads where it was just like a straw shoved into the orange. The implication being that it's like it comes you know, it's the freshness you can get without sucking it straight from the orange. But it's about that low tech even in the modern day. I mean, you're literally shoving a thing into the tree that is then pulling the draining the sap out into some receptacle. But yeah, and Ben made a really really great point just before we got into the tubing and everything, just that if you mess up and you tapped the tree, you're wrong or in the wrong place or too many times and you lose that. Imagine you're losing forty years minimum of effort to get that tree to where it needs to be to even be tappable. Uh So that's why, like, that's why it is such there's so much of an art to it, um and a and and a science to making it work. That Sweetie song is actually about tapping in I was gonna ask Ben, is it because it replenishes itself over time, like you have to give like leave a period, you know of kind of rest in between tapping so that the tap can be replenished or is it a finite amount I would imagine it's the former. Yeah, yeah, you're correct, it's the it's the former. There's a finite amount of set. But to be clear, no sugar maker is parasitic or vampiric here. They're not draining these trees dry. It's almost like, for very crude analogy, it's almost like they're giving blood. Like the process of donating blood is meant to leave the donor healthy, so like a really responsible vampire, like a very like an ethical like the kind of vampire that shops at the vampire equivalent of a co opera whole foods. Uh co op whole Foods is no longer the best example. But but part of the way they do this and keep these healthy is also by limiting the the amount of time per year when this when this tapping occurs, it only takes place for about four to six weeks, so think roughly a month and change during something that is called adorably the sugar season, which I think is also a good name for maybe not a band, but an album. And this is still like we'll see, there's a lot of limitation here, and the limitations placed on this process. People argue for the good of the tree, but they're also at the limb of the weather. It's there, there's a ideal time to uh tap this tree, tap into this tree, and most of these tapholes only give you about ten gallons of sap throughout that period. So four So thinking back to um, you know the attrition that you have described, No, that means that we're talking four tapholes over a period of rob four to six weeks, making forty gallons of sap, making one gallon of maple syrup. A ton of bo goes into this. Yeah, a ton of work and not that much yield, right, And and they're in lies this entire episode. Yeah, it's a fascinating process. And we could spend some time, you know, especially um for those of you all familiar with our old school origins how stuff works. We would totally spend an hour talking just exploring how cool this process is. But for our purposes today, fellow conspiracy realists, it's just important to know how much work goes into each one of those little bottles. The industry today is surprisingly big. There's a lot of there's a lot of money in maple. It turns out by three this is gonna be worth the maple syrup industry alone. It's gonna be worth one point seven billion dollars. This story may be familiar to some of us listening today because there was a Netflix documentary that came out not too long ago, a great series called Dirty Money, and one episode in season one of Dirty Money, they discuss maple syrup in a way that's related to this, it turns out officially because of all the time dedicated to creating this, Uh, there is a premium in price, but it's also only part of the reason there's a premium of price anyway. Right now, when the statistics you'll hear thrown around is accurate, but it changes a little bit a year over year, a single barrel of maple syrup would be worth around one hundred dollars eight hundred dollars, which makes it currently more than twenty times the price of a barrel of oil, which is right now as we record about seventy three to seventy four bucks. And that'll that'll change, but there maple syrup has been more expensive than oil for a long long time. Yeah, And it's a really great comparison because Ben isn't joking or talking around it when he's saying a barrel of this substance, the a barrel of oil is the same as they're like the same barrels basically, Um that that you can find maple in and and oil in, and that also is very important to this story. Yeah, Yeah, forty two gallons, that's how much a forty two US gallons, that's that's the size of both of these kinds of barrels. So this industry also gets further specialized because it's very localized. Maples don't grow everywhere, maple syrups not made everywhere. In fact, it's it's pretty much exclusively created in North America. The biggest US manufacturer is Vermont. That stereotype is true. Vermont is is is a very big maple syrup industry, at least in the US, but that US behemoth is absolutely dwarfed by Canada. That's where the real maple action go is down. The province of Quebec specifically makes in excess of seventy percent of the world's entire supply of maple syrup. And this is why outfits like the Economists were investigative reporters like Carol and Jarvis, who appears in Dirty Money, have called Canada the Saudi Arabia of maple syrup. It's not just the clever title, it's pretty accurate. It's all intermesh with the oil industry. I love it. Yeah, And most people outside of these very specific regions um that specialized in producing this stuff UM or outside specific industries that are associated don't really think about maple syrup. Um until back in that is, when there was a story that hit the press um where it had been discovered that someone had pulled a heist. Been you refer to it as an ocean's eleven level heist with your bag man and your in sideman and all your other men. Doesn't have to be a man, but you know, in the parlance of heists, and this crew, um, if you will, were involved in stealing thousands of tons um of the stuff and making off with around eighteen points seven million dollars Canadian which is around fifteen million US d um worth of maple syrup. And if you were talking about this around the water cooler, uh, it might have at the time, like it did for most people. I imagine strike you as a little bit funny. Um immediately when you hear somebody stole maple syrup, that's right, because what do you do with all of it? That's what you like. Back in two thousand twelve, that was the immediate question. It's like one of those highs where you know, uh, I try not to say it's too often an air, but I have a weird thing with dirigibles, and I always joked about stealing a blim for an airship, and the big the reason that's so humorous is because the hell do you do with it? Yeah? Where you're gonna put all that maple syrup? How do you how do you explain that? How do you add you launder maple syrup? How do you offense maple syrup? That's a good question, benum. But at the end of the day, how is it any different than any other valuable commodity? You know? Because valuable it absolutely is. As you mentioned earlier. Uh, it costs upwards of a little under two grand a barrel, whereas oil, I think is only around seventy five seventy six bucks. So I mean absolutely sticky brown gold is what the stuff is. But um, you know chuckles aside, when the story came through, there really is absolutely a dark, uh presumably somewhat sticky underbelly to the world of maple syrup. Because the story didn't just end up exposing these criminals who did get caught and convicted, ultimately exposed something ounce, something much deeper and arguably more sinister. Um, a multi generational cartel like operation that spanned decades. Yeah, you see, the economist and Jarvis didn't just say that Canada was the Saudi Arabia maple syrup. They went a little further and they said, this situation also has an opeque. Yeah, there's a conspiracy of foot in the land of pancakes, of waffles, folks, just like the stories of diamonds or the early days of light bulbs. Turns out maple syrup is run by a cartel. What are we talking about. We'll tell you afterward from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. So let's let's talk just a second about opeq. Uh Yeah, alright. OPEC is the organization of the petroleum exporting countries you have. If you've, depending on the kind of news you've read over the years or decades, you've probably heard OPEC being brought up various times in the West. And that's because OPEC can It makes for a very convenient boogeyman, especially when when you get to oil wars and fossil fuel prices. Because OPEC is what is known as a cartel. Usually when we hear the word cartel, we associate it with drugs, cocaina, you know what I mean, Like this is uh, this is because we often hear the terms together we don't hear things like banking cartel. Right, and and even though the diamond cartel is very much real, you like nine times out of ten when you hear the word cartel described in the news, it's going to be referring to drugs. But what it acts lead defines is just this. Let's say that Matt Noel, Mission Control and I all make I don't know, what's something fun that we make some specific it's specific for kids. Okay, we make so we make like that kind kind of let's say it's like a branded kind of it's a very specific kind of slime, like with gack. There we go, So we make ghack. We make ghack. And what we are the four largest manufacturers of ghack? And were your company is called Ghakuta. Uh, it's not called Matt Ghack. Well anyway, I we got we got lots of room to play with this. So we are the four largest manufacturers of ghack. And we say, hey, why are we Why are we fighting with each other? You know what I mean? Why? Why why are we all like living living like dogs and popers? For a measly of a small piece of pie, we could get together. We could make the pie bigger and we could all profit off of it. And what we would do then is well be a group of suppliers or manufacturers and we would conspire with each other. Literally would say, Okay, the price of ghack no matter what, is always going to be um arrested development reference is always going to be like what what could it cost ten dollars? You know that's what That's what we'll do. We'll do it the way they did bananas. And then we would say, in addition to that, the four of us are also going to cooperate, whether through transparent legal means or through unethical illegal means, to keep all those other dirty competitors out of the game. You know, there's there's a there are a bunch of independent producers of ghack, and we are going to destroy them. So free market a cartel is not Yodo would say, you know, a really great example of this isn't a show that I've I've been rewatching recently, The wire Um where there is a group of rival drug dealers who are constantly at each other's throats and whoring and dropping bodies in the streets, and then um, they they eventually get together, pull their resources, use their influence to get the best product and then share real estate. Um. And then they also use that to vanquish any other competition or if there is competition that's worth bringing into this collusion or cartel type situation, they do that and just absorb them. But it ultimately is about limiting competition and about kind of the rising tide carrying all vessels, but also not having any outsiders. Yeah, and in price fixing. And I think just one minor thing we're missing with the gack version that we're talking about here is that with most cartels there's either natural resource or a resource that is limited, there's limited access to Right. Our gag is all organic exactly from the GA you're making. But yeah, in the in the gag example, you would just it would be more about the things needed to create the gag. Right. So in this in Maples, the reason why it's important or like almost like I would say, almost needed to have a cartel like this, And I know that's a little controversial, we'll get into it, but it's because there is a limited amount of the stuff in circulation at any given time, um, and controlling that the supply becomes vital to the industry, Right, right, it becomes monopolistic, you know, and the world of done about. Frank Herbert has an excellent example of this with the spice. This is not based on some sort of made up thing. The cartel in question is called the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers. But you know, the real name is in French because it's kepaqua, it's usually referred to by the acronym f p a q uh. The story of the organization is interesting and dates all the way back to the nineteen fifties. These guys have been active for a while. So over in southern Quebec a group of remember the name sugar makers. We're having a hard time because this is this is hard work, just like farming. Uh. These folks are often at the whims of the weather. They don't know what may or may not affect the trees, and and sometimes it's like active god level disasters. So they said, look, we can no longer be at the whims of a market. We have to be able to guarantee our survival, the survival of our kids and our businesses. So we're gonna get together and we're gonna vultron up will collectively market our mapel syrup. This starts the nineteen fIF the eight the idea catches on. It leads to the formation of a larger group ultimately across the entirety of Quebec. And since all they're they're typically called producers. All the sugar makers in this fp a Q have worked together as a cartel. They've set prices and they've also done something else, they've set production quotas. That's the big problem that the US historically had with OPEC. They would get mad at OPEQ and UM. I had an old professor years ago who said, that's a very nice person, but they said, uh, opaque exists to stop the flow of oil and make it expensive. And that was a little hot take because it didn't seem like a good idea as a business model. But it turns out it's a great idea as a business model in some cases, especially if you want to enrich um a all number of families that own all the oil in the Middle East anyway, Yeah, or or or dack tycoons like us. Hey, so so this is this is again it's it's similar to OPEC. It's similar to two Beers, which is the infamous diamond cartel, or it's similar to the Phoebus cartel, which is the group that back in the day purposefully made lightbulbs crappier. Yeah, and also just hey, don't sleep on the diamond, the Beers diamond thing that we I think we just put out the classic episode on diamonds. Don't sleep on that. Check Lauren and question, I didn't know the answer, but just hypothetically speaking, a cartel isn't inherently illegal. I mean, there certainly are illegal cartels the traffic and illegal goods. But to me, the whole purpose of a cartel is to limit competition and essentially create a monopoly. So is it just kind of like a loophole that allows for a legal monopoly of some sort? And why aren't these challenged more often by you know, regulators? One A great question. Yes, the answer, as we'll find, verges on the philosophical points, but without sounding two cynical, what I would say, and I welcome disagreements with this, what I would say is that the issue of legality ultimately becomes just an issue of who controls the mechanisms of the state. That's why different countries have different laws. So like, if you so so like, somebody may consider the activities of a cartel domestically or internationally illegal, but if that cartel is powerful enough, if they have enough access enough what you would call juice in the wire or suction in the wire, suction industry makes a lot of money, right, or if their industry has already been purchased through perhaps unethical means by the rulers of a country, then they get to decide what they think is legal or illegal. So that's why we have these legal cartels. And then you know, there's a greater good argument that comes out, and sometimes it's a good faith argument, but the the idea here is the idea of what these guys are doing. This group is legal. The government of Canada has sanctioned this, but not everybody agrees because there's very much of who watches the watchman kind of situation anytime you talk about a cartel, because you could ask people throughout mining operations run by de beers what they think of the cartel's activities, and um, yes, sometimes being ethical and being legal are not always the same thing, you know. Unfortunately. Yeah, And again, like we were making these comparisons because it is the best, These are the best ways to actually make these connections and talk about these things. But you know, the mining operations and some of the horrors, they are very different from you know, sugar makers tapping trees. Right, But and and there's also I mean they're there. That's the thing. We we love the complexity of a topic like this because it's it's not apples to apples or maples to maples in every one of these um and I I'm only saying this to point out that a lot of sugar makers, and from what I've seen in the stats and some of the stuff that was shown in that Dirty Money episode, the producers and the sugar makers, the vast majority of them are down with this cartel because it helps them, individually, uh, make sure that they're able to sell their product at a good enough price, to to get loans right, and to be able to make enough enough profit off of something that could be not profitable. Yeah, it's not like these it's not like these folks who are in this, in this industry, whether they are opposed to the cartel or whether they support it, it's not like they're billionaires, you know what I mean. They're they're like anybody else with a job, trying to get by and in, you know, in the opaque example. It's interesting is if you were a member of OPEC, you would see clear advantages, especially when you were cognizant of the way that colonial powers absolutely exploited any place with oil for as long as they could, you know what I mean. So it is seen as um a protective, defensive move, which is why it is called protection is m So this like like to that point right now, this organization is legal. It's a fantastic question. We'll get into the philosophy of the of the problem later. But from the perspective of the folks, the many members and supporters of what is sometimes just called the Federation for shorthand uh, this group is taking necessary actions to ensure that all important price stability, because otherwise, if you're just out there independently, what if what if the weather doesn't work out? What if something terrible happens to the trees in your sugar brush, which is what the collection and copes of trees being tapped is called see because they're all like words with sugar in them, so we can't just list them all. I don't know, well and ben and also what if what if you produced too much. Right, What if you've got too much stuff and you don't have a buyer for all of this syrup you've produced, right, Yeah, syrup sir plus could be as bad as a syrup shortage. This this leads to that that quota system, because the Federation doesn't just dictate the price at which syrup has to be sold in Quebec. They also dictate how much you, as a sugar maker can make each sugaring season. So like if we did that with our Gack cartel, then we would be telling, you know, like, let's say we all agreed that we were gonna sell we were all only gonna sell ten million tons of gag units. There we go, that's a little better. Yeah, ten million units each of ghack. And then let's say Mission control has a bumper year, his gag trees are doing awesome, and he's like, I've made twenty million units at ghack and then we say, well, sorry, bro, that's over your quote to uh so you cannot sell it. As a matter of fact, you have to give it to us. That's what happens in the maple syrup situation. If you have a great year, no matter who you are, if you have a great year and you harvest more than the allowed quota, you cannot sell that excess syrup the way you would want to, because it might end up driving down that price and creating a surplus. Instead, you have to ship it to you not something called the global strategic reserve of maple syrup. Yet again, the oil comparison holds. You know what I mean, the US has a global reserve of oil or strategic reserve. Yeah. Now, forgive me if I'm incorrect here. My understanding is that it's not them just handing it over like for free. They would they would get payment for not it's not donating but essentially giving their syrup to the preserve. Yes, yeah, And the key issue there is the timing. So let's look at the other case. So if there's a low production year, the Federation taps get it uh that reserve and they release a controlled amount of syrup into like out into the world. And the circulation, yes, they circulate the syrup. And some people love this setup because again, like like Matt was saying earlier, this makes it much much easier to predict how future years will play out, which is huge, hugely important. But other people had a problem with this other maple syrup producers. Uh not, just like outside observers with some economic policy acts to grind. There are people who saying, I've been making maple syrup my whole life. This maple syrup operation has been our family for generations. We want to take a cue from Sleetwood Mac and go our own way. The Federation wasn't really cool with this in two thousand. In the early two thousandsol here it called two thousand or two thousand four. But in the early two thousands they did this thing where they created an exclusive selling agency, meaning that no matter who you were, if you were in Quebec and you're you're in the syrup game, you you can't sell like directly to a supermarket, you know what I mean. You can't make a deal with like a restaurant chain to just carry your your syrup. You have to sell it to the Federation at that agreed upon price and then they will basically run the rest of the sales from there. So if you didn't like this and you wanted to sell things yourself, you ended up putting syrup on an actual black market. Wow. So this is to say that any syrup in the syrup pile at your local you know, grocery store chain, whether it's the like twelve nine bottle seemingly small batch family operation on a situation, or whether it's your you know, whatever they like. I don't even know what the most mainstream syrup d jur is today. They're all going through this system. Otherwise, No, seven seventy right now, if you if you're walking in a grocery store where any store selling maple syrup almost anywhere in the world, in excess of seventy of it is coming not just from Canada but from this place, which means unless you're in like uh syrup black market or unless there's like a black market supermarket, some syrup comes from the United States, obviously, I mean like that's so that's that's the issue here. Well, And a lot of syrup you will find for sale wherever you live is going to be corn syrup that's got some color in it and may have some maple flavoring and or maple syrup involved, but it's mostly corn. But it can't say pure no, no, I can't say here, and there is a premium on organic maple syrup, but largely like these this organization has the heft to swing around and to get its way. This is where stuff started clamping down. And for people who are big free market proponents, this is where it becomes a little bit of a horror story because all producers in the area, all sugar makers in the area, are required to sell their product directly to this organization, whether or not they want to. So it's not it's not quite the same thing as like a union. You can't opt in, right, there is there is one exception, which is you can sell small amounts of your syrup directly from your farm, which are called I love this sugar checks que two B fifty twos. Uh. You can, so you can all your own stuff two people who like happened by right, And you can also if you want, you can sell the supermarkets as long as you give the federation they're cut, which is twelve off the top. It's not as big of a cut as say Google takes off YouTube, but still twelve cent makes a big difference in people's lives. As a matter of fact, you know, let's let's talk a little bit more about the money in this relationship, because that's where that's where the problems with cartel's usually come into play, and that's usually where you see like the if not conspiracy inruption, that's where you're going to see the conflict. Es estimates right now, our best estimate is that the Federation, the cartel takes the equivalent of eleven cents US off of every pound of produced. So let's just do the math here. One gallon of syrup contains eleven pounds, so a dollar twenty one US per gallon of syrup. Basically, uh. And interestingly, and I guess kind of rationally, that money that the Federation takes off, according to them, goes to the promotion of maple maple syrup as a thing. It is like, right, we're promoting the industry itself by having this this group over like deployed on top of it. And also in research, how can we tap these trees better? And how can we store this maple for longer? And what scientifically proven advantages does maple syrup have over say something something others, some other sweet substance that people might buy in a store like honey. So this makes sense, and if you are a sugar maker, you also pay an administrative fee to this organization. But again, the people who are running this organization, staffing at working for it. There they're going to say, look, we're making ends meet, but please stop calling us, stop calling us like tycoons and stuff, because we're just we're trying to do what's best for everybody. The thing is again for their involvement, whether consensual or non consensual. These producers are paid in installments. So like going back to our surplus, your example, you send in, you've exceeded your quota. How dare you be good at what you do? Right? How dare you be uh, you know, extraordinary what you're doing? Then you will be paid for the syrup that has to be shipped off to the strategic reserve. But you're paid on kind of a layaway plan. And this has led some unhappy syrup makers to say that they've they've said they're waiting like months or in some cases years for these payments to come in. And if you are paying other bill or costs associated with keeping the lights on, etcetera, etcetera, then you can't really go to your utility company and say I'm waiting on the syrup money. I'll get to you next year. Fingers crossed knock on maplewood so yeah, and you can totally see why the black market feels like it may be a viable option for that individual, like you said, who needs to make payments to other people while they're waiting on the other one. But there certainly are you know, critics of this system from the on the producer side, And one particularly vocal producer who was fighting against f pack f p a q UM is Angel grenier Um, who was kind of tired of the whole set up. She was sick of the cartel pushing her around and decided to take on a direct sales model where she sold her syrup right to a distributor bypassing the f p Q entirely. And the he's got involved. All of her stock that she had warehouse was seized and she was slapped with a crippling five hundred thousand dollar fine. Um very much seems like they were trying to make an example of her. So this is where we start to really see problems brewing. And Ben I believe this is one of the primary interviewees on that Dirty Money episode. Yeah, this this person who's very outspoken and kind of leading a fight against the cartel. It's it's a fascinating story. Recommend you check out that episode if you can, just to to get the background on it. But we're gonna we're gonna continue on here because that was just the beginning of the issues at hand. Here, Yes, trouble was on the horizon. Well, pause for word from our sponsor. We'll return with more, unless, of course, Big Maple gets us. We've returned yet. So Grenier is often quoted she's you'll you'll find her mention and her story mentioned multiple local, regional, and international articles about this situation. She has been her case when all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court. By the way, just give you a sense of how how important this was, and all of this, this uh, this boiling, massive cultural sap. This is the context in which the maple syrup heist occurs, and from a cinematic perspective, it's pretty impressive. So the reserve calling a singular thing might be a little misleading to people because it's located in a series of three warehouses in rural Quebec, and over the course of twenty eleven and this group of conspirators stole thousands and thousands of tons of maple syrup and it was a slow motion operation. You know, they Federation themselves only found out about this when they had that. It's another moment from the heist review, like the High Story, which is just a neat montage of tropes. Basically, uh, the there's always the moment in the heist where there's the big reveal. You know, someone opens the safe and it's gone. It turns out that the cops were also working with the robbers. And then you know the main like the bad guy whomever in this case, Um, the Federation doesn't see themselves to the bad guy, but you know, like the heist crew probably saw them as the bad guy. There's this moment if you could picture Oceans levin Quebec, where someone from the Federation opens one of these syrup barrels and says, holy oh no, that's that's water, that's not syrup. How much did they get us for? And they found out that this was easily like a quarter of the Syrup Strategic Reserve, which means it's easily quarter of the world saved up supply. And yeah, the police were involved, this was a huge crime. In just a few days in December of Canadian police ended up arresting like seventeen different people who had some connection with the plot, and that was on the orders of this cartel which continues today. And again we can't emphasize this enough. We're not we're not calling them villains. It does have ardent supporters and it does have die hard opponents, and we have to remember, as silly as a headline might sound, these are real people. This maple syrup stuff is not their hobby. They get up every day and think about it because it's their livelihood. And Grenier is a famous example, but there are other sugar makers who have been slapped with fines, huge fines. They've also had their syrup, the stuff they made, seized by this organization for going outside of its its rules. And that's why you'll hear people like Grene say the federation says they own my trees they make. They treat it like it's their property. Uh. Really interesting article by a reporter named Ross Merrowitz who said that the cartel may accidentally, to a degree, be working against its own interest because their rules may be strengthening competition from other provinces in Canada and non Canadian competition in the US. And I think Ross actually has a you know, a pretty compelling case there, because if you can get look if the reason why I bought this particular maple syrup was because it was like five or six dollar is less than the other ones, not the not the fully like single barreled ones you were mentioning their and all, but you know the maple syrups that existed where I went to buy syrup, and it's still on maple syrup, but it's significantly less expensive. And if you if you've got competitors out there that are that are able to have stuff on the market that is not at the prices you're fixing that that are lower than those prices, then you could be in very big trouble, especially if you get them to big you know, distributors like um, I don't know here in Atlanta, like a Kroger or a Walmart or a Whole Foods or something like that. Yeah, the Canadians apply in the cartel itself could be in trouble. I gotta imagine too, Like I mean, there's this thing called oh gosh, it's not the not AOC, what's that's the lawmaker. But there's an organization in France that regulates like what products can be given what names like for example, true French champagne can only be called Champagne if it comes from the Champagne region of France. UM does this Cartel also UM govern kind of purity claims, like if you're calling something pure maple syrup or even just pure maple syrup, like in terms of how to use the wire terms how much it can be stepped on, you know, because I imagine that some maple syrup is diluted in some way so that you can make your yield go further. I don't have specifics on that. Uh. I would just say that in something like this product that I have here, the only ingredient is maple syrup. So I've seen others that are like pure maple syrup and then extra stuff or something like that. Um, but I don't know the naming conventions and how they're applied. Yeah, because it may be sold not directly to the end consumer, but it might be sold to a company that then makes something that's a lends somehow of the syrups. So it's it's interesting because they're trying to they're trying It's phrased in a very optimistic way by the Federation They're like, we want to take place, we want to participate in this expanding market. But it's, um, it's not inaccurate, because the production in Quebec has increased, you know, year over year for a decade. It increased from two thousand seven and twenty sev. But it's also understandable how if you're making maple syrup in Quebec you might feel these rules, however well intentioned, hurt you more than they help you. Because imagine you're seeing some you know, uh, some guy who's like a weird equivalent of reverse carpet bagging out from Vermont, crosses over the border and the same rules don't apply to them. They can sell the Vermont Sarah all the livelong day. And so these other, these Kabbaqua sugar makers, the ones who are opposed to the federation, which again, um, the research that we saw seems to indicate there in the minority. But these folks feel that they may have traded one disadvantage for another. You know, they're saying, look, is hedging against unpredictable weather. Is it worth knowing that I have to wait for months or years to get paid? Is it worth knowing that I can't do what I want with the trees that I or my family have spent forty years minimum growing. Uh. Supporters of the end, the staff of the Federation, people like Simon Trepanner, the executive director, they disagree with being characterized in some shady behemith. You know. Again, they're they're not. They wouldn't say they're like Tycoon, certainly not oil country level wealthy. They claim that their first and foremost concern is to represent people who actually make maple syrup. But here we get to the end because if you are outside of the industry and you are thinking about this, it may represent a much older conundrum, which is the philosophical conflict between a controlled market and a free market. And this is a very This conversation is cyclical. In the mainstream. It comes up pretty often, you know, and sometimes it's phrased in very very simplistic terms like someone's quoting Iron Rand at you or whatever. But the real question here is what what would be the benefit if there's a syrup free market, if there's an unfettered sea free for all, which is weird image out of context, would that would that be better for these individuals or would it instead lead back to like crazy fluctuations and results in you know, the surplus as you describe mad or people having to find like close down their family sugar shacks. What would happen? Who knows? And there's uncertainty in there, right, And that's kind of maybe the whole point. I really want to look at who does this benefit the most by following the money? So the federation itself we talked about, they get eleven cents per pound of maple syrup produced, so the federation gets that benefit. UM. They also get benefit when they expand, so if they add more producers they can they continue to make that eleven cents per pound. Right. So in the Federation made a move they said they're gonna add five million new taps. So that's like taps not necessarily an individual tree, but individual taps in trees to it's existing forty three million taps. And the goal there is too really just more fully participate in that larger market that we talked about UM, And what they really want to see is an increased production overall by thirty percent of so for you know, until or whatever if they can, they want to do that, right, And what I'm what my understanding is controlling these prices guaranteeing that a sugar maker is going to make this money. The biggest benefit is that the bank knows that if you're producing maple, they will back you up with with money for loans to either continue your business or expand your business, because they are guaranteed to get paid back at least some amount, because you are guaranteed to be making money by this cartel. And and if if the banks, if the banks in the cartel are like, yeah, we're all good here, we can expand we'll give you money to expand, the cartel's making money on the top of the bank is lending out tons of money, that's making tons of interest on all these loans. Everybody's like doing great, and the sugar makers are making you know, whatever the prices are that the cartel says they're going to be. Uh, I don't know. I mean, it feels like the banks are actually winning. And I mean the banks are usually waiting and a lot of a lot of things unfortunately, but but they're designed to write. So that's that's a very great point about controlled market. You know, it does does this collective action you could call it, to control the quebecs spice. Does it ultimately make it easier for people to succeed? Or is it really hurting more people than it helps? Or who is it really helping? To your to your question, that's that's something again that we're not making a call on, but a lot of bowl are, a lot of people are trying to answer that question, and for others and for me as well. You know, one thing that really stuck out was the concept of consent. Consent informed consent is is a huge, hugely important thing in every aspect of your life, professional and personal, and it's a key factor. So would the federation, I would ask, would they get less criticism if they didn't mandate or force people to participate? So again, while these questions, the tricky thing with these questions is that they all verge into prognostication and philosophy. You can't really predict the future unless you're unless dark is a little further ahead than I think. And as a result, right now these questions are not easy to answer. It does go to show that, just like in the case of the Great Cheese Spiracy, though even the most in knock with seeming things can have a conspiracy behind them, and so with this, we want to ask you folks, First off, waffles or pancakes. When I'm not letting it go, I I gotta tell you I respect your decision. If you're a pancake person, more pancakes for you. But while you're thinking about that, ask yourself. Should maple producers be required to join this federation? Is it helping or hurting them? Overall? With this heist still have occurred if the federation didn't exist. I mean, let us know, and let us know if you'd like to hear more stories about food conspiracies. Though, be warned, friends, some of these stories are much much darker than this one. Cough cough, palm oil cough cough, chocolate cough cough. Is that a subtle enough hint? You guys don't even don't even look into the gack industry that Oh god, it's bad. Oh no, we can't. We've since it's hired. Hi, we've been doing a podcast for fun, but we're really we're ghackman at the end of the gackmananaman? How how can how can people find us? How can they tell us these things? They just shout out into the void into the sky. Yeah, so Yeah, what is your what cartel are you associated with? Tell us about it? Blow the old whistle. You can find us on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube where we are conspiracy stuff. On Instagram we are conspiracy stuff show. Oh and I forgot to point out the trees do not get paid. But if you're if there's something, uh, if there's something you do want to take away from this with the idea of tree rights. Here in nearby Athens, Georgia, there is a tree that owns itself. Wow, that's it. That's a that's you can find that online too. You know what, the tree these maples get paid in love because as we said, the sugar those the sugar makers, they gotta take care of them. Trees worth it? I don't know is love worth it? I don't know, God, what's love got to do with it? Love always friends away and you can find you can find a way to contact us that doesn't depend on the internet. Should you like to give us a call, We have a phone number just for you and our fellow conspiracy realist. It is one eight three three st d w y t K. You'll hear a message. You'll have three minutes. They belong to you. Let us know what's on your mind, give yourself a sick nickname, bonus arbitrary points for the nickname in fact, and most importantly, let us know if we can use your voice and or message on air. Equally, most importantly, don't feel like you need to edit yourself. If your story needs more than three minutes, If you have links you want to send, if you have additional information, go ahead and write to us directly. We read every single email we get. All you have to do is shoot us a lied online where we are. Look, I know, I know. This is the part where we're going to tell you the email address. We always do it every every episode. We're gonna tell you the email address. But before that, we're recording this on September two one and the Matrix Resurrections trailer just came out, and I know you're excited. I'm excited. You said you weren't going to watch it. Oh no, I'm gonna watch every bit of it seven times in the theater. I don't care if I've got to wear a full Bubba Boy outfit. I'm watching the end of theater the trailer. You're gonna watch the trailer that many times? The movie the movie itself. It's happening. By the way, our email addresses conspiracy and I hire radio dot com. Yeah, stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.