Maple-Washing

      Buy Canadian - It's Not So Easy
   The term "maple-washing" appeared in a headline and it is our subject for today. It was new to me. Apparently "it has been coined in popular discourse to describe the lengths that retailers and producers have gone to make their products appear as Canadian as possible."  
   Misleading marketing is not new, but the surge in food patriotism is and that has led to some questionable labelling indicating that a product is "Canadian". To reduce the angst among those who are agitated about all of this, I will reproduce the relevant paragraph from the maple-washing article, which says the rules relating to food are clear about what constitutes "Canadian." I hope they are clear to you, but I remain confused. For example, although coffee is not grown in Canada, I know there are some Canadian coffee companies, as defined by the rules listed below, but I don't think it would be correct to say that Tim Hortons is a Canadian company.

 "According to the Food and Drugs Act, all food labels must be truthful and not misleading or likely to create a false impression. The rules are clear. 
  "Product of Canada" requires that at least 98 per cent of the ingredients and processing be Canadian. "Made in Canada" means the last substantial transformation took place here, and "Prepared in Canada" refers to food that was processed, packaged or handled domestically, regardless of where the ingredients originated." "Retailers Must Guard Against Maple-Washing," Sylvain Charlebois, London Free Press, July 29, 2025.

   To demonstrate the complexity of all of this, here is a bit from the Consumers Council of Canada, which also supplied me with the definition of maple-washing as quoted above.

   "In one typical social media feed, Canadians can see promotion that Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and Mini Eggs are “proudly made for Canada, in Canada from domestic and imported ingredients”, Breyer’s ice cream is “made in Canada with high quality ingredients and Canadian dairy”. Black Diamond cheese will also promote its Canadian origins and production, and sometimes cheekily notes it is made with 0% American cheese.
   Some consumers will appreciate this presentation and favour those products. 
   Of course, Cadbury is a British company, owned by Mondelez international. Breyers has a production facility in Simcoe, Ontario, but it’s owned by Unilever. Black Diamond has origins and production in Belleville, Ontario, but is owned by Lactalis Canada which is part of the Lactalis Group, headquartered in France."

  I suppose that the subject of whether your grocery item is "Canadian" is moot if you purchased it at either Walmart or Costco. 

Buy Ontarian

  Once again, my post is more confusing than it should have been. So, I will conclude by suggesting that you only buy things made in Ontario and supply the source where you can shop: Ontario Made: Great Things are Made Right Here.  You will even find a Canadian coffee company - Club Coffee Craft Roasters, in Etobicoke. 

Post Script:
   The recent concern about buying Canadian is largely a result of the numerous tariffs which have been levied, unlevied and which are about to be levied again. Ontario began the "Support Ontario" program back when the pandemic was the issue that made people think about reshoring and producing things locally. 
See, for example: "Labatt Promotes Ontario Made Label," Jennifer Bieman, LFP, Oct. 30, 2020:
  "Labatt Breweries of Canada signed on to a provincewide push to promote Ontario businesses forging ahead in the pandemic-battered economy. Ninety-six brands, including London-made Bud Light, Budweiser and Labatt Blue, will display an Ontario Made designation, a marketing initiative to promote local products....The province threw its support behind the program in early July, contributing $500,000. The campaign comes after many Ontario businesses retooled during the first wave of the pandemic to manufacture in-demand products, including masks and other personal protective equipment. Premier Doug Ford announced a second phase of the program Thursday, a consumer directory of participating manufacturers at Supportontariomade.ca."

Bonus Links:
  Send your kid to a Canadian Maple League University.
  Travel Locally- Grassroutes.    

   Whether a non-food item is "Canadian" can be complex as well, and that is why we have law firms. And when such firms are involved, suits follow. Take the case of a company named Moose Knuckles, which surely appears to be Canadian, even if their product was not.
   "In recent years, there has only been one enforcement action brought by the Bureau regarding a “Made in Canada” claim. In 2016, the Bureau filed an application with the Competition Tribunal (Tribunal) alleging that Moose Knuckles had marketed their winter parkas as “Made in Canada,” when they were actually imported from Asia in nearly finished form, only to be finalized with zippers, snaps, fur trims and labels in Canada. Moose Knuckles settled the action by, among other things, agreeing to donate C$750,000 over five years to charity and to clarify that some of its parkas are made with Canadian and imported components."
From: "Maple-Washing: Regulatory and Civil Liability Risks of Calling a Product Canadian," By Laura Weinrib, Jonathan Bitran, Simon Seida, Emily Hazlett and Joshua Hutchinson, Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, March 13, 2025.

   It is also noted in the article above that "maple-washing" is sometimes called, "maple glazing".
   For another bonus, search for the meaning of "moose knuckles".  

Travelling From PARIS to ROME

 To Pompano Beach

   This post is provided for my neglected readers. Although the subject heading is not incorrect, it is rather misleading. We were recently in Paris, the smaller one located in Ontario. More recently we were also in Rome, the smaller one in the state of Georgia. While the former doesn't have the Seine, it does have the Grand and the Nith. The latter is not quite the Rome you assumed we were in, but it is not lacking in attractions. It is the home, for example, of the largest college campus in the world and one also finds there enough tennis courts at the hotel we stayed in to support the largest of professional or collegiate tournaments. I provided a post a while back about Berry College and I am glad we detoured off Interstate 75 to see it --- which also allowed us to avoid Atlanta. 
   That we are travelling during such a perilous period can be explained by the fact that I needed to do so for family reasons. Although you are now probably not thinking about heading for the U.S., I will report that the journey, so far, has been uneventful, politically speaking, and the political headlines are more concerning than the heavy traffic.
   There was little traffic at the border and the guard was even polite. There have been no single fingers raised or horns honked when the "Ontario" plate was spotted. When citizenship was mentioned the reaction was one of curiosity rather than condemnation and the young ladies at the pool said they had experienced no problems. They are from Steinbach, Manitoba.
    Although we Canadians are currently very agitated and concerned about such things as "tariffs", for many Americans, Canada is likely as remote as Steinbach, Manitoba and we are far more worried than they are about the relations between the countries. 

The Bonus:
   We have two TVs in our room now, but have not turned any on since we left Canada a week ago. Headlines have been noticed, however, and here is one from The Washington Post, which indicates that many Canadians are cancelling trips across the border:
"Canadian Travel to U.S. is Plummeting: ‘There’s a lot of anger’, By Ben Brasch and Hannah Sampson, April 3, 2025:
“For the nicest people on the planet, who are Canadians, the language is strong,” said Stacy Ritter, head of Visit Lauderdale in South Florida. “There’s a lot of anger out there.”...
"But the love fest may be on thin ice: Industry experts are reporting a steep decrease in Canadian visitors so far in 2025, pointing to a drop in airline and hotel bookings and scaled-back schedules by Canadian airlines for flights into the United States."....
‘Complete collapse’
    McKenzie McMillan, a Vancouver-based adviser with the Travel Group, said his company would typically be busy this time of year arranging last-minute spring break and summer trips for Canadians to such favorite spots as San Diego; Palm Springs, California; Phoenix; and Las Vegas. Instead, he said, “it’s zero.” The steep drop-off started gradually, with some clients in January saying they were thinking they might avoid the U.S. this year. “Since February, it’s been a complete collapse,” he said.McMillan said about 20 percent to 30 percent of trips that were already booked got canceled. Since then, he said, the company has seen about a 90 percent drop in new bookings for U.S. vacations compared with the previous year, as clients opt for other destinations.
   That is in line with what Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, has been expecting. His travel analytics firm predicted that 4 million fewer Canadians will visit the United States this year, a 20 percent decrease that could cost the U.S. $4.3 billion in lost revenue, he said.  PT Tours, a bus tour company based in New Brunswick, called off the eight trips on the books for the United States, including visits to Boston and Washington, along with an October shopping trip to New Hampshire that has been offered for more than 10 years."

Post Script:
   This is likely our last trip.

Survival of the Weakest

  It is my impression, which I think is shared by a few others, that more young people seem to be having psychological problems and that there is also a growing cohort of them with food allergies. Some may have both. If one assumes these things are true, the major question is why there are increasing numbers in each category.
  A few minor questions, likely to be raised by a skeptic or contrarian, have to do with the attempt to ascertain which of these psychological issues and dietary ones are more important than others. Psychological disabilities can be more difficult to diagnose and confirm than physical ones and there needs to be a distinction between actual food allergies and dietary preferences, such as, for example, those required for religious reasons. 
  University settings where young people abound, yield data about such things and here are two articles from campuses about, disabilities and dining. Both indicate that there are indeed more students signing up for clinical help and complaining about the dining halls. Whereas administrators used to be employed to mainly support the faculty and those working in the physical plant, now more are needed to attend to the mental problems of students. The increasing demand is affecting universities with decreasing budgets, which would be most of them here in Ontario.
  I am in the contrarian camp when it comes to the psychological issues as you may recall from my recent related post about, "Prevalence Inflation." (See also: "The PTSD Pandemic," and "STRESS - A Contrarian View.") About the increase in allergies, I am curious, but I think that many who complain about food have too much of it and that generally most things one chews on will not result in an anaphylactic shock.
  Here are the views of others. The first article is a Canadian one and it is followed by an American example, indicating the "disability problem" is also occurring there. The dietary issues follow. (The articles are not provided in full and the bolding is mine.)

Disabilities

"As Demand for Disability Accommodations in Universities Grows, Professors Contend With How to Handle Students’ Requests," Joe Friesen, The Globe and Mail, Dec. 27, 2024 (also the source for the graph.)

   "In Thomas Abrams’s second-year sociology course at Queen’s University in Kingston last year, about one-third of students were registered with the school’s disabilities office.
That means they were eligible for academic accommodations, which can apply to classroom delivery as well as assessment, and can range from more time on assignments to a semi-private room for exams and a memory cue sheet to assist them.
One-third of a single class might sound high, but it’s also increasingly the norm. More than 6,000 of the roughly 28,000 students at Queen’s last year (22 per cent) were approved for such accommodations by the disabilities office. Five years ago, it was about 2,250 students (9 per cent).....
“We are faced with a complex pedagogical, human rights, privacy, labour and psychological issue,” he said.
What’s happening at Queen’s is part of a trend that’s apparent across Ontario and the rest of Canada. The number of students registering with disabilities at universities has rapidly increased, causing resources to become strained. The shift has also raised questions about the fairness of accommodations and triggered frustration among professors who are unsure how to handle the volume of requests...."
Often, these students’ conditions aren’t physical or visible. Three-quarters of those registered with Queen’s Student Accessibility Services (QSAS) have a disability that is not physical: 33 per cent have a mental-health disability, 29 per cent have ADHD and 14 per cent have a learning disability. Most of the growth in accommodation requests across the province over the past decade has been in those three categories...."
An independent report commissioned by Queen’s to examine the university’s accommodations policies, prompted by the rapid increase in student needs and a desire to assess the fairness and adequacy of those policies, was released in June...."
   The report’s authors said they couldn’t discern the reason for the recent increase but described a perception across campus that Queen’s has been hit by a “tsunami” of students asking for accommodations."

  This is the article talking about the situation in the United States.

"Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?"

Higher ed’s maximally inclusive approach hurts those it attempts to help," Chronicle of Higher Education, By Alan Levinovitz September 25, 2024

"Disability accommodations in American higher education are skyrocketing. In the past decade, the proportion of colleges with more than 10 percent of students registered as disabled has quintupled, and accommodation requests have followed the same pattern. Despite increased staff and resources, disability-service providers are overwhelmed, and it’s common for a single staff member to be tasked with serving 500 students. Faculty are also reporting increased workloads as they find themselves continually adjusting teaching and assessment practices.

Providing an accessible education to everyone is a crucial civil-rights issue, one that went unaddressed in this country for far too long. Discrimination against people with disabilities was standard practice until the introduction of legal protections like Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in 1973 and the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. Without these protections, blind students would have no recourse if their community college failed to provide accessible versions of textbooks and library materials, and deaf students participating in online classes would not be entitled to closed-captioning. Even with robust laws in place, disabilities are frequently missed or dismissed, a problem compounded by racial and socioeconomic disparities.

Concern about the validity of surging accommodation requests may therefore seem misplaced. To a certain extent, the trend is a positive development: the product of increased awareness, better screening practices, and less institutional discrimination. We should worry about students’ rising rates of mental-health disorders, many disability advocates say, not the willingness of colleges to accommodate them.

However, a suite of acute, well-documented problems with disability accommodations demand attention. The data is clear, for instance, that a significant minority of diagnoses are fraudulent or mistaken. In many cases, there is no empirical basis for granting common accommodation requests like extended time or distraction-free testing. And there is further evidence that the current state of disability accommodation compounds inequities in student achievement, rather than alleviating them.

Students and instructors are rightfully concerned about fairness and compromised rigor. Resources are being misallocated to unproven interventions and students who don’t need them. Worst of all, the interventions may be harming some of the students they are intended to help, exacerbating their mental-health problems and setting them up for a lifetime of struggle.

Colleges have remained complacent about the status quo for a variety of reasons. Since they want to support students and avoid lawsuits, administrators are incentivized to pursue a maximally inclusive approach to accommodation. Disability advocates fear, understandably, that calling attention to these issues will result in public backlash, creating more stigma around disability and threatening hard-won rights. Outside of academe, alarmism about accommodations has been associated with ableism and culture wars. While researching this piece, multiple people refused to speak with me about their misgivings on the record. There is a chilling effect at work, resulting in a lopsided discussion that leaves educators, students, and the public poorly informed.

However understandable the reluctance to criticize disability accommodations, refusing to do so is antithetical to the mission of higher education. Inaction harms students both with and without disabilities, allows for continued misallocation of limited resources, and calls the integrity of our institutional practices into question. We have a duty to engage in even-handed, critical reflection and pursue necessary reforms — even when it makes us uncomfortable."

Dining

"The New Reality for College Dining Halls: Dozens of Dietary Restrictions:

A surge of students with allergies and special diets is challenging meal services and changing the shape of the campus cafeteria, Priya Krishna NYT - Sept. 5, 2023.

For the staff of the Michigan State University dining halls, serving roughly 27,000 students each semester has never been a picnic. But these days, the job involves an even bigger challenge: One in six of those students has an allergy or other dietary restriction. Just five years ago, it was one in eight.

Once upon a time, running a college meal service was fairly straightforward: Put out one entree, one dessert, maybe a salad bar. Today, dining halls must cater to a student body with increasingly varied and complicated needs and preferences.

Some 6.2 percent of adults in the United States have a food allergy, according to a 2021 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that number reflects only medically diagnosed allergies, and doesn’t include all the restricted diets that many younger people are adopting.

Robert Landolphi, the assistant director of culinary operations at the University of Connecticut, said that two decades ago, “you had your handful of peanut and tree-nut allergies, and back then we had maybe two people with gluten-free diets.” Today, he said, more than 10 percent of those on meal plans have some sort of dietary restriction.

Several dining hall managers and dietitians said they do their best to meet each student’s needs, but acknowledged that it can be difficult and cost-prohibitive to accommodate all of them — especially the less-common requests....

At the University of Connecticut, Mr. Landolphi recalled a student who told him that for animal protein, he ate only fish heads, organ meats and bone broth — and that the dining hall should serve a similar menu, for the sake of student health."

There were many comments about this article. Here is one that I chose:

COMMENT:

"I am a school nurse and am just APPALLED by all of this.

Toughen up people!

True, there are those with life threatening food allergies  but for the most part whatever 'sensitivities' students may have can be taken care of with avoidance or a little Benadryl.

What it says loud and clear is that the parents, and their parenting, of this college generation were hovering too closely overhead making their kids afraid of everything, keeping everything TOO clean so their immune systems now are so untested and their anxiety levels are so high that they'll breakout in a rash over anything. 

It's just a precursor to how they're going to be handling the outside real world : Badly, quivering at every new experience that may cross their path.  And then, God help us all- and save us from the spoiled generation..in other words

GROW UP."

Going To Hell In A Handbasket

    While constructing my last post about Trump and the never ending American electioneering, I thought of the figure of speech noted above since, to me, it implies that things are not going well and I think they are not. I didn't use it, however, because I knew that, once again, the post was likely to be too long and it was.
   I looked up the phrase I didn't use and if you do, you will probably be satisfied with the Wikipedia entry, which is a good one. One possible origin has been traced "to the baskets used to catch guillotined heads in the eighteenth century." The Bosch painting above was also found in the Wikipedia essay and it supposedly illustrates a large cart of hay being drawn by "infernal beings that drag everyone to hell."
  I also found a handbasket column by William Safire and you know that has to be worth reading. It was written back in 1990 and apparently things weren't going well back then either. The wife of Harry Reasoner, who you will remember from 60 Minutes, asked Safire about "going to hell in a handbasket" which they had heard "in conversation five times in the past few months."
   The Safire piece is not mentioned among the Wikipedia sources, so I will offer a portion of it here:

   "Lexicographers call this ''old slang'' - a figure of speech used by people who stopped picking up the latest slang about two generations ago. To hell in a handbasket means either ''to one's doom'' or -if used mockingly to describe a small dissipation - merely ''mildly indulgent.''
   The origin is believed to be to heaven in a handbasket, a locution that Dialect Notes spotted in 1913 in Kansas, where it was taken to mean ''to have a sinecure.'' One who was nicely ensconced in an untouchable job was said to be on the way to heaven in a handbasket. When used in Wisconsin a decade later, the term was defined as ''to do something easily.''
   Then the direction changed. The alliteration remained the same, but the first stage of this rocket dropped off and was lost in the sea of archaic phrases; the second stage, with hell substituted for heaven, took us to where we are today: the meaning is ''to degenerate rapidly; to fall apart suddenly.'' The final stage? We cannot tell; down the tubes in a handbasket uses modern surfers' lingo but lacks the alliterative zing.
   What is it about a handbasket - a word rarely used now outside the hellish phrase - that makes it so useful in talk of decadence, degeneration, declension and downfall?
The key quality is portability; the basket is small enough to be carried in one hand, and anything in it is little or light."

Source:
   If you look this up, you will also learn about, "long in the tooth" and "dressed to the nines." "On Language: To Wherever in a Handbasket," William Safire, New York Times, April 29, 1990.
   It was also from Safire that I learned and posted about Genug Shoyn, which is a fitting way to end.