As the head of the Craft Distillers Guild of B.C., I work with a lot of our distillers across Canada. A lot of the early-stages stuff was working with government to remove roadblocks. If you remember, in the early stages there was even a question—Spirit of York was going to be caught up in this as well—of what happens when we use our own products for making sanitizer. The federal government was still charging us $12.61 a litre on that. Were we going to have to pay it [Technical difficulty—Editor] have to happen?
A lot of the stuff I was dealing with in terms of government was about what sorts of roadblocks needed to be removed. It was also at the provincial level immediately, and then at the federal, saying, “Hey, there are some really great opportunities here to have a made-in-Canada solution.” As my colleague stated, it was already occurring. Letters went out [Technical difficulty—Editor] PM's Office at the federal level, because I deal with excise a lot federally. I was dealing with the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Finance, sending letters through just saying that this made good economic sense.
We have a structure in place across Canada—it's maybe not as robust as it could be—of 250-plus distilleries. A lot of them were already starting to pivot or were following the lead of Spirit of York and Okanagan Spirits and were going ahead despite the rules that were blocking them.
I think it's fair to say that we reached out to almost everyone we possibly could. Yes, we encouraged all of our members to go through the federal procurement site and the provincial ones.