Americans are focused on the wrong border. It’s not Mexico, with all this dubious talk about building a wall, but Canada, with its Mounties, and comedy writers who move among us, betrayed only by the occasional mispronunciation of “about,” that threatens our way of life. If this nation was not founded on the free flow of syrup, it should have been. And now, as anyone with kids can tell you, the price of syrup has remained stable and high; it’s more expensive than oil. Is it Arab sheikhs who did this, Russian oligarchs? No. It’s Canadians, who, organized into an ironfisted cartel, have established a stranglehold on that honey-flavored elixir.

In short, FPAQ—the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers—is OPEC. Formed in 1966, the federation was tasked with taking a business in which few could make a decent living—the price went north to south with the quality of the yield, which went north to south with the quality of the spring—and turning it into a respectable trade. This was accomplished in the classic way: quotas, rules. You control supply, you control price. You limit supply, you raise price. Because Quebec makes 72 percent of the world’s maple syrup, it’s been able to set the price. As of this writing, the commodity is valued at just over $1,300 a barrel, 26 times more expensive than crude. (If Jed Clampett shot up a sugar maple instead of a mountain holler, he’d have been a whole different order of rich.) I discovered this for myself on a recent trip to the supermarket. My son returned from the shelves with a small artisanal jug of Canadian syrup—“genuine maple” has prospered in concert with the boom in organic food—which cost . . . $15! It shocked me. I stormed up the aisle to see for myself, where I discovered Aunt Jemima, companion of so many Sunday mornings, in her babushka, costing just four bucks for a family-size jug. When I asked the cashier to explain this discrepancy, she pointed rudely at Aunt Jemima and said, “ ‘Cause that’s not real syrup.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know. High-fructose corn syrup? Food coloring? Goo?”

It’s an answer that would bring joy in Quebec—authenticity is what FPAQ is selling. Canadian maple is real, while all those high-fructose Jemimas are as phony as the bottle that is the body of Mrs. Butterworth. In a world covered in plastic and going to hell, there’s nothing more honest than sap. In Canada, people tell you the trappers got it from the Indians, who got it from their ancestors, who got it from the gods. It’s the death and rebirth of the forest turned into wine. If consumers know that, it’s partly because of FPAQ, which has turned Quebec into a brand.

Have there been side effects to all this success? Has the federation, with its quotas and its methods of control (quotas must be enforced), reaped its own sticky harvest?

Start with those high prices. By making syrup production seem like a good business instead of just an eccentric survivalist hobby, it has brought a great increase in production, much of it in the U.S. Just like OPEC, which, with its near monopoly, spurred the search for new sources. With oil, it’s the deep deposits reached only by fracking. With syrup, it’s forests in Vermont, New Hampshire, and especially New York State, which, Canadians tell you with a shudder, has three times more maple trees than all of Quebec’s maple farms combined. The French province produces 72 percent of the world supply, but if the Americans ever make the push to self-sufficiency, French Canada is cooked. In 2015, Quebec’s minister of agriculture, Pierre Paradis, commissioned a report on FPAQ and the industry—just how far could that 72 percent fall? While giving proper credit to the cartel, the report, noting, among other things, how readily journalists like me compare FPAQ to OPEC, called on the federation to loosen its rules, scrap its quotas, and let a thousand flowers bloom. “It’s a mafia,” a producer who has defied the cartel recently said to The Globe and Mail of FPAQ. “Last year, they tried to seize my syrup. I had to [move the product into New Brunswick] at night. This year, they hit me with an injunction.”

And what about that most troubling of unintended consequences: the black market, the subterranean world of contraband sap where wildcatters move unmarked barrels through Elmore Leonard country, the seedy history behind your stack of morning hotcakes or pancakes, or, as they insisted everywhere I went, crêpes. Especially interesting are the criminals, pirates of syrup nation, who, attracted by the peak prices, skulk through warehouses, waiting for the watchman to doze off over his Hockey News as the getaway truck idles.

Sweet Nothings

Aunt Jemima is a phony, a fake. In fact, there really was no Aunt Jemima. The original character was borrowed from a minstrel show that was touring the South at the end of the 19th century. The original Jemima was a white man in black face, possibly a German. The character was re-purposed in the 1890s by an American mill owner who sold pancake mix with an Aunt Jemima who, though smiling beneath her headscarf, looks nothing like the Aunt Jemima of my childhood. In 1893, marketers hired Nancy Green, who’d been a slave in Kentucky, to play Aunt Jemima, which she did till her death, in 1923. By the 1930s, General Mills, which had bought the company, had begun to churn through Aunt Jemimas, printing up frankly offensive catchphrases such as “Let ol’ Auntie sing in yo’ kitchen.” The Aunt Jemima on the label today is a composite, a dream of antebellum domesticity, the bosomy warmth of Sunday in Dixieland, where Jim calls Huck “honey” as they float down the big river. Why does that trademark still exist? Probably because no group has yet turned its attention to it: #jemimasoracist. Enjoy your view from the Stop & Shop shelf, Aunt Jemima, your days are numbered.

Which is what I was thinking about as I drove across Canada, en route to perhaps the holiest place in syrup. America has its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In case of embargo, nukes, Mad Max. Canada has a Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. In case of Butterworth, Jemima, who knows what. Jemima stands for everything Canadians distrust about the planet and the syrup much of it consumes.

It’s one of the things FPAQ was organized to battle. Phony syrup and its lies, fake backstories cooked up for Aunt Jemima and her pal, Mrs. Butterworth. Caroline Cyr, a spokesperson for the federation—perfect name for a syrup lady—seemed especially irritated by varieties of what is essentially high-fructose corn syrup, products that often decorate their labels with maple trees and log cabins, implying a connection to the forest that simply does not exist. FPAQ fights with advertising and fancy recipes—Crustless Vegetable Quiche with Maple Syrup, Crêpes with Kale and Maple Syrup, Maple-Almond Truffles—but mostly by controlling the quality and quantity of the product.

Hence the Reserve.

Barrel In

Here’s how it works: there are 13,500 maple-syrup producers in Quebec. Each is permitted to send a fixed amount to FPAQ for sale that year, a quota that was established in 2004, even as U.S. production has exploded (up 27 percent from 2015). Members of the federation—Quebec’s bulk producers are required to join—give their harvest over to FPAQ, which inspects, tastes, and grades the syrup. Some of it is sold immediately; the rest is stored in the Reserve. Producers are paid only when the syrup is sold, which can mean years. FPAQ keeps $54 for each barrel, a kind of tax that pays for the advertising, the testing of the recipes, the upkeep of the Reserve, and so on. In this way, the federation steadies supply, filling the coffers in banner years, satisfying demand in fallow. In this way, the price of syrup is stabilized, benefiting even the competitors across the border.

The Reserve is in Laurierville, a town in the heart of Quebec. Steeples, snowy roads, hills, old men in berets eating croissants at McDonald’s. It’s reached via spotless highways where no one tailgates or cuts you off or honks in anger. It’s just the polite double beep in Quebec, a state of play that seems connected to how most syrup producers have been content to leave the free market for the safety of a cartel. It’s a better life, with less road rage, but also not as colorful, nor as interesting, and forget about the windfall and resulting spree.

Caroline Cyr met me at the back door of the Reserve and took me on a tour. As I said, it’s the holy of holies, where oceans of syrup, the accumulated wealth of Canadian forests, hibernates, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. I had a clear mental picture of the Reserve: huge vats, surface crusted and covered with flies; tanks reached by tottering ziggurats; visitors in perpetual danger of falling in and doing the slowest, stickiest, sweetest dead man’s float of all time. In fact, the Reserve, which might hold 7.5 million gallons on a typical day, is a warehouse filled with barrels, white drums stacked from floor to ceiling, nearly 20 feet high. There was a Charles Sheeler-like quality to the place, an industrial awesomeness, the barrels in endless rows, the implied weight of them, persnickety and precise in a way that seems especially Canadian. It’s almost like the life we know, but not quite. It’s so close, yet so different. A treasure trove, with inventory, at any given time, worth perhaps $185 million. The syrup is tested when it comes in, then sent through a Willie Wonka-esque conveyor system where it’s pasteurized and sealed in a barrel, forklifted and stacked. Each barrel carries a label with a grade (Extra Light, Light, Medium, Amber, Dark) and percentage. When maple water exits a maple tree, it’s 2 to 4 percent sugar. As it’s boiled, the sugar concentrates. To be syrup, it must be 66 percent sugar. Below that, it’s not stable. Above 69 percent, it turns into something else. Butter. Taffy. Candy. There were two or three guys cruising around on forklifts, in hairnets. “We’re all waiting for the spring,” Cyr told me, “when this place will be filled with barrels.” Being in syrup is like being a tax accountant. Three or four weeks of intensity followed by months of waiting and wondering.

I asked Cyr if there’d ever been a spill. She looked at me like I was a fool. I told her about a molasses spill that had once smothered Boston’s North End, a wave that upended trees, drove horses mad, and killed 21. “No,” she said calmly. “We have never had a spill.”

The Reserve is a monument to collective planning, to thousands of little guys each giving up a little freedom in return for security. Canadians call this a better life. Americans call it socialism. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek might call it “the Road to Serfdom.” It’s like all the other roads in Quebec. Calm and predictable, without a single Camaro blasting Bon Jovi, or a sticker of a cartoon man flipping you off while peeing. But it’s had the perverse effect of pooling wealth, of creating just the sort of target Willie Sutton meant when he supposedly said he robs banks because that’s where the money is. Cyr encouraged me to lift one of the barrels. I couldn’t budge it. Imagine trying to steal one of those barrels—now imagine trying to steal 10,000.

Inside Job

It was the Lufthansa heist of the syrup world. In the summer of 2012, on one of those July days when the first hint of autumn cools the northern forest, Michel Gauvreau began his precarious climb up the barrels in St.-Louis-de-Blandford, a town outside Laurierville, where part of the Reserve was stored in a rented warehouse. Once a year, FPAQ takes an inventory of the barrels. Gauvreau was near the top of the stack when one of the barrels teetered, then nearly gave way. “He almost fell,” Cyr said, pausing to let the picture form. A small man, astride a tower of syrup, realizing, suddenly, there’s nothing beneath his feet. Normally, weighing more than 600 pounds when filled, the barrels are sturdy, so something was clearly amiss. When Gauvreau knocked on the barrel, it tolled like a gong. When he unscrewed the cap, he discovered it empty. At first, it seemed like this might have been a glitch, a mistake, but soon more punk barrels were found—many more. Even barrels that seemed full had been emptied of syrup and filled with water—a sure sign of thieves who’d covered their tracks. My God, they could be in Thunder Bay by now! In most cases, when a boring, bureaucratic job turns interesting, there’s trouble.

Inspectors called FPAQ HQ and sounded the alarm. Just like that, the facility was swarming with cops. It was a great mystery. There were no security cameras. Who would steal syrup? And, even if some sick bastard wanted to, what would he carry it away in? How far could he get?

The investigation was headed by the Sûreté du Québec police, which was soon joined by the Royal Mounties and U.S. Customs. They promised to spare no expense. These heartless criminals would be brought to justice, and the syrup, described as “hot,” would be recovered. About 300 people were questioned, 40 search warrants executed. It was not O.J. and the knife. It was not the bearded doctor and one-armed man. But it was special, strange. There was something stirring about making off with all that syrup; it boggled the mind. It felt less like a crime than a prank, what you might do to your brother if you were all-powerful and he had a lot of syrup. Of course it was serious business to FPAQ; nearly 540,000 gallons of syrup had been stolen—12.5 percent of the Reserve—with a street value of $13.4 million. It became known as the Great Maple Syrup Heist and was said to be among the most fantastic agricultural crimes ever committed, which, granted, is an odd subset. Everyone figured it was people who’d done it—Martians don’t love syrup—but no one could figure out how. “Try to think up the scenario and it’s impossible,” a friendly hotel waiter told me in Montreal. “Syrup is heavy. And sticky. How do you hide it? Who do you get to smuggle it? Where can you sell it? It’s like stealing the salt out of the sea.”

It was most likely an inside job. Not a member of FPAQ—though rogue syrup producers have their theories—nor a manufacturer, but a tenant who happened to be renting space in the same facility. That would mean access: keys, ID card, reason to be there. FPAQ supplied the motive. The value of the commodity, the tight control of supply, the resulting black market. (In the post-apocalyptic world, as Mad Max runs the gauntlet for petrol, Canucks will be fighting over those last precious drops of genuine maple.) Several conspirators were pursued, including alleged ringleaders Avik Caron and Richard Vallières. Working with a handful of others, some with knowledge of the trade, they apparently went after the bounty like Mickey in the Night Kitchen, dreaming their dream between midnight and dawn, when the world is half realized, insubstantial. According to the prosecutor, the gang would truck barrels out of the Reserve to a sugar shack where they would siphon the syrup in the way you siphon gasoline from a semi, feeding it, a cask at a time, into their own ramshackle barrels and then re-filling the originals with water. As the operation grew, the masterminds allegedly brought on accomplices and began siphoning the syrup directly from barrels in the Reserve. Nearly 10,000 barrels of syrup were stolen and trucked to points south and east, where the market is free. So far, prosecutors have brought four men to trial.

The case was worked in the textbook way. Chase down every lead, question every witness, identify the ringleaders. In December 2012, the police arrested two alleged ringleaders and one other suspect. A large portion of the syrup would ultimately be recovered. It took serious sleuthing. The story of the heist is currently being developed as a movie, starring Jason Segel. I don’t know much about the movie, but my guess is the criminals will be the protagonists. That’s how Hollywood usually does it. But it’s the cops who achieved the miraculous. If it’s hard to steal syrup, imagine how much harder it is to recover syrup that’s been stolen. Like oil, syrup is a fungible commodity. Once it’s on the market, it’s just syrup. Oil is oil. Syrup is syrup.

So how did they do it?

Gumshoe policework, retracing the footsteps of the criminals, following their trail through the black market, a trail that led past lonely crossroads and out of Quebec. The goods were scattered: some of it in New Brunswick, which is as loose with syrup as Deadwood was with silver claims; some of it across the border in Vermont, stashed in the factory of a candy-maker who swore he had no goddamn idea the syrup was hot. Several of the crooks have pleaded guilty and have paid fines or are serving sentences. Vallières has pleaded not guilty to trafficking and fraud. The other alleged ringleader, Avik Caron, has pleaded not guilty to theft, conspiracy, and fraud. He allegedly cooked up the conspiracy and is to go on trial in January. He could get 14 years, but that’s in Canadian, so I’m not exactly sure.

The Giving Tree

I don’t know what the home office of OPEC looks like, but I do know what I think it looks like. Glass and steel; massive desks occupied by sheikhs in flowing robes, kaffiyehs, and Vuarnets, quoting prices on the phone while looking out at the desert sand and deep-blue sea; gleaming storage tanks; oil tankers stacked to the horizon. I was expecting something like that from FPAQ. A gleaming tower, walls covered with maps, tacks showing the location of each rogue. I instead found myself in a very non-evil office outside Montreal, standing beside Simon Trépanier, the tall, sweetly bearded executive director of FPAQ, who was pointing out a window, annotating the landscape as if it were a passage in a book.

The country around Montreal is strange. As flat as Illinois, extended sunsets, vistas. But here and there mountains rise without the prelude of foothills. Flat, flat, mountain, flat, flat. A landscape designed by a person with no experience in geology, nor knowledge of tectonic plates. When I asked Trépanier to explain, he pointed out each mountain—a chain of peaks, an archipelago, what the Caribbean might look like if the plug could be pulled and the sea drained—and said, “Volcanoes. Extinct volcanoes. They blew up and died and over time were covered by forests. It’s where the city gets its name. Montreal comes from Mount Royal.” We stood for a moment, looking. And I got the sense that we were looking at something more than a panorama, more than the view to the east. Peaks and forests, gullies and ravines, hollers and hidden places, the sun rising and falling, the earth pitched on its axis, winter giving way to spring, time unraveling from solstice to solstice. We were looking at the seasons. We were looking at syrup. It’s why it’s holy to French Canadians. They got whipped by the British and have had to live as a minority in their country, but they still retain the sweet essence of the New World. In this way, syrup really is oil. It’s not man-made, nor invented. It’s the land. The people working in the trade are merely its enablers, acting as middlemen or agents. No one creates syrup.

When we sat down, Trépanier spoke about oil, telling me the analogy goes only so far. Oil can be found almost anywhere on the planet, he said. Sink a drill, you’ll hit it. But maple syrup comes only from the red- and sugar-maple forests found in the upper right-hand corner of North America, just where you’d sign your name if this were a test. “That’s why FPAQ is necessary,” he told me. “If one country stops producing oil, the slack can be picked up by others all over the world. But if we have a bad season here, you’re going to have a year without maple syrup. That’s why the Reserve is so important.”

Trépanier handed me a drink box, the kind you pack with lunch. It was filled with maple water as it comes from the tree, before it’s been boiled into syrup, butter, taffy. Thick and not quite delicious, it made me think of the heavy water the Nazis were experimenting with in attempts to build an A-bomb. I sipped it slowly as Trépanier told me the history of maple syrup, where it comes from, what it means. In Salem, the Wampanoag Indians taught starving British farmers how to bury a fish head beside corn seeds, a natural fertilizer that greatly increased yield. In Quebec, Indians, probably Algonquins, showed French trappers how to tap maple trees and collect the heavy water that the Indians used as balm and elixir. To Canadians, it’s a story of cooperation. The Indians had the sap but did not realize its potential until the French brought over the cast-iron pots needed to boil it down. Each side had half, Trépanier explained. When they came together, they made something new.

Drinking the Forest and the Landscape

In some ways, François Roberge comes across as a man in the midst of a mania. His wife, charming, exasperated, and game, seems to think so. He spent part of his childhood on a farm in Quebec but left when he was barely out of school. He got a job in the lower precincts of the garment trade, then worked his way up. He is currently president and C.E.O. of La Vie en Rose, a Canadian lingerie company akin to Victoria’s Secret. More than a dozen years ago, at the insistence of his kids, Roberge bought a chalet on one of those odd peaks outside Montreal. As he does not especially like to ski, he began to cast about for something to do while his family was off on the slopes. In this casting about, he remembered that, when he was on the farm, he enjoyed chopping down trees. For Roberge, felling a fat trunk was like hitting a perfect tee shot. He bought a stretch of forest near the chalet, then went to work with chain saw and ax. There was an operating sugar shack already on the grounds, which was fine with Roberge. His only change was to paint the shack pink, a nod to La Vie en Rose, which means seeing life in pink. He quickly became interested in the works. Then more than just interested. By the time I met Roberge, he was heading two major operations. One cranks out underwear, teddies, sexy garments, swimwear. The other cranks out syrup. Fifty-four barrels last year, boiled off and loaded up and sent into the world. During the season, he’s at his desk in Montreal from six till noon, then in his car, barreling down those super-polite highways, then in the woods, working the lines.

He led me through his forest, which was as white and pristine as a forest in a storybook, crossed by a river that triumphed in a waterfall. He wore rubber boots and a heavy coat and moved fast, smiling as he talked. He showed me the network of tubes that suck sap from the trees like poison from a snakebite. He explained the process, how the tubes carry sap to a tank where excess water is drained away, and how what’s left continues on to the sugar shack. We sat in a warm room in back of the shack, the pasteboard walls covered with mounted animal heads, which I contemplated—is that a wolverine?—as he loaded me with the products of his operation. Taffy. Butter. Little maple-leaf candies you stop eating only when you feel ill. We talked about rogue producers, wildcatters angry at the cartel. He thought a moment, then said, “But, you know, when you get into the politics, it’s easy to forget what this is all about.” He led me to the barnlike main room of his facility, where he stood beside a gleaming stainless-steel machine that cooks maple water down to 66 percent sugar. It was being tended to by a master, Roberge’s mentor. Friendly and warm, the master explained everything in a language I don’t understand, but by following his gestures and eyes I could see where the water came in and how it worked its way through the pipes and tanks, exiting into a bowl as syrup. Roberge poured me a glass. Golden, blond. I waited for it to cool, then sipped slowly, as if it were 20-year-old scotch. It went to my head in the same way, delicious and pure. Like drinking the forest, the landscape. Roberge filled several jugs for me, the first batch of the season. They were still warm when I got back to Montreal.

Correction (December 5, 2016): Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the amount the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ) keeps per barrel of maple syrup. It is $54 per barrel, not $540.