Government Operations committee  Thank you very much. Hello. My name is Tyler Dyck. Our family owns and operates western Canada's original craft distillery, Okanagan Spirits. I'm also the president of the Craft Distillers Guild of B.C. and the spokesperson for more than 250 craft distilleries right across this

Government Operations committee  Okay, I can start again. Should I start from the beginning?

Government Operations committee  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 coll

Government Operations committee  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 ca

Government Operations committee  Not that I'm aware of, and for our members out here in B.C., some of them actually, when.... You have to remember that in the early days you couldn't even buy NGS, the base material alcohol for sanitizer, so most of us were using our own. Instead of making whisky, we were making

Government Operations committee  We were maybe a little different than some. Early on, a lot of people were making and donating. We donated over half a million dollars in sanitizer, and we continually made donations through shelters and through the hospitals. We were entirely donating. That was mainly because as

Government Operations committee  No. I was polling our members all the time, and they would say “still haven't heard anything, still hoping, still haven't heard...”. You have to imagine that after months and months of nothing and—

Government Operations committee  Exactly, and it was getting worse and worse. They just had to pull aside. Then the slap in the face, really, came with that December investigative report, where, whoa, $300 million was spent and it didn't go to a Canadian company. One guy jumped in—

Government Operations committee  You have to remember that at that time everything was pretty much shuttered. People weren't coming in and buying high-end, premium products, and that's what made-in-Canada products are. They're not mass producing this stuff. The proposition was, “Hey, there are many of us who a

Government Operations committee  Yes, many of our members did. A lot of us were already supplying the COVID wards in hospitals. We supplied the whole centre of the province. The hospitals, the ambulance, fire services, front-line workers, and every single doctor's office throughout Thompson Okanagan was supplied

Government Operations committee  I'd have to go back and check in my notes, but I believe usually we would go through at the federal level, because a lot of what we deal with is excise, and that's what I was alluding to for the other competitiveness model. We'd go through Finance or Agriculture and would usually

Government Operations committee  I will keep it short so that maybe my colleague can answer too. I feel like I'm robbing all the time here. At our distillery, we are 100% farm-to-flask. We do not buy in any alcohol. What happened is we ceased production of all our whisky lines. We do 32 different products. All

Government Operations committee  As far as I know, none of our members have received assistance directly linked to production changeover. I'm talking about B.C. We have 70 craft distilleries here in B.C. Early on there were only a couple of dozen who did the conversion. A bunch of others were waiting to see. Wi

Government Operations committee  It's a difficult one. I can tell you in talking with distillers across Canada, I think most of us are much more interested in working collaboratively with government to find solutions that would allow our industry to be more robust moving forward. Almost all of our other G7 trad

Government Operations committee  Yes, it's 12.7¢ now. It goes up every year.