Aahana Swrup
The crime-comedy show ‘The Sticky’ presents an eccentrically compelling caper story about a maple syrup black market operating in Canada during 2011. Ruth Landry is at the center of the narrative as a maple syrup farmer who has a bone to pick with The Quebec Maple Association, the organization hellbent on swiping the Landry farm. Therefore, she willingly agrees when the guard at the association’s reserve warehouse reaches out to her and the Boston mobster, Mike Byrne, with the opportunity to make millions from a simple theft. However, once the trio embarks on their ambitious mission to steal syrupy merchandise from under the association’s noses, unpredictable trouble arrives in Quebec from Boston. The Quebec Maple Association remains at the center of the various outlandish plots that Ruth and her collaborators unearth in their adventures. Naturally, given the show’s partial basis on reality, the on-screen syrup syndicate inherits intriguing origins.
The Quebec Maple Association: A Fictionalization of the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers
The base premise for ‘The Sticky’ is inspired by the real-life Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist that took place in Quebec from 2011 to 2012. Although the show doesn’t directly adapt a majority of the elements, including the thieves involved in the actual crime, it still retains many threads of the real-life event. The on-screen Quebec Maple Association is one such thread. In the show, The Quebec Maple Association is portrayed as an organization that the protagonist helped form alongside Leonard Gauthier to help the local maple syrup farmers with their business. However, in the years since its establishment, Leonard’s greed turned the business into a restricting force that limits the profit of the syrup producers.
For the same reason, when Leonard turns to dirty tricks to push Ruth from her and her husband’s farm, the latter decides to take her revenge by agreeing to rob the association’s reserve warehouse. A similar thing happened in real life in 2011 after a group of thieves, led by the accused mastermind, Richard Vallières, stole maple syrup from the reserves of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (Producteurs et Productrices Acéricoles du Québec, or PPAQ, in French) over the course of 10 months. Although the magnitude of the actual theft differed from its on-screen iteration, the position of the QMSP remained somewhat identical to the Quebec Maple Association.
Around the early 2010s, the QMSP was often in hot waters with Québécois maple syrup farmers—so much so that it was sometimes facetiously dubbed the “maple mafia.” Many considered the organization’s supposed iron hand to be “totalitarian,” as it restricted people from selling their products on their own terms. In fact, many of the individuals arrested alongside Vallières for the heist reportedly accused the QMSP of unfairness and claimed they didn’t consider their actions to be acts of theft. The show takes this same sentiment and compresses it into Ruth’s narrative, infusing feelings of injustice into her motives. As such, even though the portrayal of the Quebec Maple Association departs from reality on certain occasions—mostly in service of the show’s comedic tone and plot—it retains an off-screen counterpart in the QMSP.
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