Developing the Canadian Wine Industry

Abstract

Abstract The Canadian wine industry has a relatively short, yet successful, history. Beginning in the 1970s, two parallel policy tracks emerged: the first is a sector development one, and the second a retail and trade one. Together they fostered the development of the industry, especially at the domestic level, by modernizing the cultivation and wine-making processes and by supporting the increased demand for Canadian products both domestically and internationally. The sector, marked by a complex set of actors that are often in only partial policy alignment and have diverse goals, has developed through three temporal stages: Emergence (1970s–1995), Expansion (1996–2005), and Maturity (2006 onward) and, in the latter, the booming domestic wine consumption has drawn attention to a policy regime that—largely in the hands of provincial authorities—has been criticized for creating a series of impediments to trade and fair access to the provincial market. Policy shifts are being imposed by Canada’s international trade commitments and by the evolution of the industry itself—this will have important effects on the policy latitude of the actors and likely will rewrite some of the approaches that the provincial governments have been relying on for the past decades.