If you’re really into this, like me, I suggest using Edmonton’s “Shop Canadian” app. There’s other apps too. As you use it, you’re going going to find ratings from other users as to how Canadian it is. It’s data crowdsourcing at its best.

CBC’s other apps: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/buying-canadian-shopping-apps-barcode-scanners-1.7463039

Ratings are from 1 to 5 stars, where 5 should be “Product of Canada” owned by a Canadian company. A rating of 1 is not Canadian at all. I usually rate a 3 or 4 for “Made in Canada”. I rate a 2 on things like NoName where it’s “prepared for” a Canadian company.

You can rate each product yourself, if you want, and it can save you a lot of time reading labels when there’s ten ketchup brands to look through.

Maple-washing sounds delicious.

Disgusting, but not surprising.

I noticed many of the same things mentioned in the article, and I noticed it almost immediately.

There’s a New Brunswick-based company – Bourbors – that makes, among other things, peanut butter. Sobeys does not list the product as Canadian.

Right below it is Kraft peanut butter, which gets a big ol’ Maple Leaf next to its price tag.

Now, I know little about peanut butter, but what I do know is that A) we don’t grow peanuts in Canada, at least not to scale, B) Bourbors is a Canadian company, and C) Kraft is not. Even if Kraft is grinding the peanut butter in Canada, its operations are not more Canadian than Bourbors.

I wandered the store looking at other products, and noticed the same thing: Products from bigger companies were labeled as Canadian, with very little pretense, while things I knew were made in Canada and sold by Canadian companies were not. Almost anything with Compliments branding was labelled as Canadian, even if I knew the product likely wasn’t made in Canada.

You can’t trust the big grocery stores. Not for a second.

I’ve started moving the little flags whenever I see a mislabeled product. It’s a small thing, but it gives me a little joy.

I had these same questions when I started seeing these tags as well. If we’re going to tag Canadian products, at the very least all Canadian products should get tagged. Considering how a lot of stores are turning to digital shelf tags it shouldn’t take a whole lot of effort to put a little digital maple leaf on each item.