It’s not a “strategic reserve” in the traditional sense. Typically a strategic reserve is a store held by a country to survive through difficult circumstances.

It’s not a “strategic reserve” in the traditional sense. Typically a strategic reserve is a store held by a country to survive through difficult circumstances. The reserve here is basically overproduction from Quebec’s maple syrup cartel. There is a state government-granted monopoly to this cartel, which forces all syrup producers to only sell via the cartel, at amounts allocated to each producer by the cartel. Any excess is held in this reserve across various warehouses, and it is only sold in years of low production or unusual demand that exceeds production. I personally find the idea of this cartel really disagreeable. There’s a Netflix documentary series that covers the background here (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7909196/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7909196/), and the person running the cartel is basically an egotistic power hoarder whose family managed to steer the state government into implementing this cartel to the benefit of a few producers, which then forced every other producer to join in. Small farmers who want to operate outside the cartel cannot do so. The lady in the documentary tries to get around it by selling her small production to distributors from other states instead of the cartel, but the well-funded cartel uses their legal team to shut her down and basically drive her to financial ruin. One way to get around the cartel is to buy maple syrup from Vermont.