My name is Tyler Dyck. Our family owns and operates western Canada's original craft distillery, Okanagan Spirits. I am also the president of the Craft Distillers Guild of B.C. and the spokesperson for more than 250 craft distilleries right across Canada.
At the heart of our collective lack of preparedness for this pandemic is the overarching issue that, for too long, Canada has abandoned policies that champion value-added made-in-Canada production chains. This, unfortunately, has allowed for an almost total lack of self-sufficiency when catastrophic challenges appear. We have become a nation purchasing the cheapest finished products from afar and have lost most, if not all, capacity to look after ourselves and provide for ourselves when no one else can or will.
This weakness has become brilliantly exposed during COVID-19, especially in regard to an almost total lack of ability to look after our own PPE needs right here at home in Canada. This situation of ill-preparedness could have and should have been avoided, or at least severely reduced, if the sitting and past governments had heeded the calls from Canada's domestic distilling sector to mirror the policies of our greatest trading partners, policies that celebrate and reward start-to-finish domestic industry, calls that we had been making for over a decade.
My hope is that in speaking to you, I can illuminate how important it is for government to meet with our sector so that we can work together to make these changes to allow for an authentic Canadian distilling sector to thrive, not only to avoid being caught in a position of not being able to look after ourselves again but also so that we can collectively reap the massive economic rewards that spin out of supporting made in Canada.
First I'd like to highlight how the lack of a robust domestic industry led to the situation. To set the stage, I want to take you back to the early days of the pandemic. They were scary times. Almost immediately it became apparent that the internationally produced sanitizer we had grown accustomed to depending on was not to be available in Canada.
By this time, dozens of Canadian distilleries, including my own, had already retooled and converted over in an effort to try to fill the void of sanitizer domestically. We did this because we make high-test drinking alcohol. The base for sanitizers is alcohol. If we didn't step in, there would literally be no one else.
Most of us at that time did this entirely with our own funds, without any help or assistance from local government. Many of us were donating our sanitizer just to keep our front-line medical heroes safe so that they would be there in times of need.
Initially we worked with provincial and federal government bodies to highlight and remove the areas of red tape so that we would legally be allowed to produce and, in many cases, continue to produce the sanitizer to fill the growing demand.
While we were doing this, we continually told these government officials and their staff that our distillers could not continue to do this all on their own—they couldn't pay for this all out of their own pockets—but that there was a made-in-Canada solution that would allow us to continue. All we would need would be for the governments, both provincial and federal, to cover the base production cost of the raw materials—no profits, just the base production cost of the hand sanitizer produced and donated in Canada to our Canadian front-line heroes. This would not only allow us to meet a major portion of the domestic demand for sanitizer but also keep Canadian producers working instead of being paid to be at home on CERB.
The response from the federal side was crickets, and when there was a reply, that reply was, “Apply online through our national procurement site for obtaining PPE contracts.” When I reiterated that we were not looking for a fat paycheque or a contract but merely an opportunity that would keep Canadians working as well as provide much-needed sanitizer, again I was directed to tell our members to apply online.
Many of the distillers did, but others, frustrated by the process, just stopped producing. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, almost none of our members have received any help in covering the expenses associated with their altruistic efforts or have received government contracts. Even more shocking, as we found out later only through a CBC investigative series, when contracts were awarded both provincially and federally to companies for that hand sanitizer, they were awarded to foreign companies with little to no domestic presence or to massive corporations. They were basically purchasing non-domestically produced alcohol for the basis for sanitizer. This meant little to no value-added domestic production and hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars were going to for-profit production, with most of those dollars leaving the country.
My goal today is not to talk about hurt feelings and missed opportunities. More importantly, it is to call on this government to change course when it comes to supporting and championing domestic industry, domestic industry that, if supported, not only will be there in a far more robust fashion to do its part when the next crisis emerges but also will restore this country's ability to rely on itself as a nation.
On behalf of the hundreds of authentic farm-to-flask distilleries right across this wonderful country, I thank you for your time and thoughtful consideration of this submission.
Thank you.