MONTREAL – It is tempting to think of Le Panier Bleu as a noble failure.

The made-in-Quebec online shopping portal was born in the midst of COVID-19-era shutdowns and the resulting misery visited upon the province’s small businesses. The provincial  government’s solution: an Amazon-esque platform for these businesses to sell their wares to fellow Quebecers.

Like Amazon, Le Panier Bleu (“the blue basket”) would be seamless and convenient. Unlike Amazon, it would be a “collective movement” instead of a soulless multinational. Through Investissement Québec, the government’s investment arm, Quebec Premier François Legault shoveled in $12 million to seed the development of the site’s backend payments and shipping options. Lightspeed, Desjardins and other investors contributed $10 million. Not a bad investment, considering the blue basket was going to leapfrog the likes of Google and Amazon, spur Quebec’s self-sufficiency and reduce Quebec’s trade deficit, as many serious people posited.

Spoiler alert: none of that happened.

Last week, to the surprise of few, Pierre Fitzgibbon telegraphed Panier Bleu’s demise. Quebec’s innovation minister, who was as gung ho as his boss on Panier Bleu four years ago, said the endeavor had “come to an end.” Though the site is still up, there is a dead-man-walking vibe to it, with former director general Alain Dumas writing a LinkedIn eulogy of the Panier’s “noble and necessary mission”—without naming the panier in question.

For the service’s early proponents, this is an easy argument to mount. The pandemic was a time when governments the world over, including Canada’s, were throwing money around in frenzied attempts to keep economies afloat until normality returned. Also, building stuff is hard, particularly in the tech-retail space, whose incumbent players are ubiquitous and entrenched.

There was always a whiff of delusion, though, to the idea that Quebecers would flock to a made-in-Quebec Amazon. The prevalent conceit within the province’s political and intellectual class is that the distinct language tumbling from the mouths of Quebecers somehow makes them distinct in other ways. That, presented with an Amazonian array of, say, maple syrup products, and Panier Bleu’s version thereof, Quebecers will instinctively drift towards Panier Bleu, even if said array is often more expensive and slower to arrive upon purchase. 

Consider, too, that (maple syrup notwithstanding) the vast majority of the items for sale on Panier Bleu aren’t even made in Quebec—they are only sold by Quebec businesses. In 2022 I bought six Quebec flags—one from Amazon and five from Party Shop, a brick-and-mortar outfit selling party-themed accoutrements on Panier Bleu. All of the flags were made in China. The only difference was that Amazon’s were cheaper and arrived the next day. My Party Shop delivery showed up four days later. “It will always fail,” Party Shop owner Daniel Désy said of the site at the time.

I called up Désy the other day. After confirming that my order was the only one he ever received by way of Panier Bleu, his harsh judgment of the site was tempered by a kind of wistfulness. “The idea isn’t bad,” he said more than once. 

The problem, Désy said, was everything else. “If they want something like this to work, do everything well that the competitor does poorly,” he told me. Panier Bleu, Désy said, should have rid itself of all the chnoute–a brilliant Québécois term for, essentially, “worthless crap”—and stocked itself instead with certified vendors selling made-in-Quebec goods and products of its terroir. “People have to go, ‘OK, I like this platform because it has official products.’ People are willing to pay more when they know it’s legit.”

Then there was the rollout of the site itself. After its launch in 2020, Panier Bleu sat for years, looking like some GeoCities-era mock-up—less a platform than a referral service for Quebec businesses, all of whom had to process their own payments and organize their own shipping. It took two years and that wallop of government cash before the site could actually host transactions.

Even now, it appears cut and pasted from an earlier, less-intuitive version of Amazon. On a recent visit, the front page was hawking a children’s Montessori playset, a Levono laptop, a tawa frypan and Oakley ski goggles—items readily available on Amazon, in many cases for less coin. Also, Amazon has an app, as you might have heard. Panier Bleu has no such thing.

Quebecers have responded in kind. Panier Bleu had an average of just under 190,000 monthly visits between November 2023 and January 2024, according to traffic data from Similarweb. The bookseller Renaud-Bray, the province’s go-to purveyor of terroir for the mind, had roughly 1.63 million in the same period. Rather than stir the economically nationalist cockles of Quebecers’ hearts, the site has been a running gag for almost the entirety of its existence. 

Finally, the coup de grâce: On the day Fitzgibbon signaled Panier Bleu’s demise, Amazon announced it would certify goods produced, manufactured or designed in Quebec—thanks to a  partnership with an organization funded by…Legault’s government. 

It seems no one expected the blue basket would actually succeed.

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”