MONTREAL — Last week, I ordered six Quebec flags. One was from Amazon, and arrived on my doorstep 19 hours later in one of those padded, can-I-recycle-it packages. The other five I ordered from Le Panier Bleu (the blue basket), a Quebec government-sponsored online portal that promotes and sells goods from Quebec merchants, and is designed, as its own tagline goes, to “get our economy rolling.”

Launched in COVID-19-addled April 2020, the initiative certainly doesn’t lack in ambition. More than allowing Quebec businesses to sell their tchotchkes online, Le Panier Bleu would bypass search engines like Google to the benefit of smaller businesses, the Quebec government said, while competing with the likes of Amazon. In doing so, it would reduce Quebec’s trade deficit. “A bit of competition for Amazon … and protection for Quebec products,” Premier François Legault recently tweeted.

People seemed delighted by the idea. One regional-economy professor said Le Panier Bleu could be a boon for Quebec terroir, while Le Devoir columnist Michel David wrote that it could stir a desire among Quebecers for “relative self-sufficiency.” In June, the Quebec government, through its investment arm Investissement Québec, put money behind this lofty project, to the tune of $12 million.

I’ll try to be polite here, so let’s start with sympathetic caveats. Le Panier Bleu came about when governments around the world were trying to do something, anything, for businesses shuttered due to COVID-19 restrictions. This alone merits applause, regardless of outcome. Also, building stuff is hard. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage in 1994. Nearly a quarter-century went by before he bought his first superyacht. 

And Le Panier Bleu is not yet transactional, meaning it only directs shoppers to stores, and doesn’t process payments or handle shipping. This is set to change in time for the Christmas rush thanks to the government’s dough, along with a total of $10 million from the likes of Desjardins, Fonds de solidarité FTQ and the point-of-sale giant Lightspeed.

But, wow, Le Panier Bleu is a mess. Consider those flags I ordered. Considering that it’s a made-in-Quebec venture, I figured the site would be chockablock with the fleur-de-lys. Yet the iconic banner was available only from Party Shop, which sells exactly what its name suggests: balloons, costumes, baby gender-reveal smoke bombs. 

The accompanying picture was blurry and there was no indication of the flag’s size. I called Party Shop, which has two locations on Montreal’s South Shore. A very nice woman named Aleezia told me the flag was two feet by three feet. I had to order five to make the minimum order amount. About an hour after I placed my order, another nice woman named Sarah called back to say they didn’t have enough two-by-three flags in stock. But they had plenty of three-by-fives, she said. Did I want them? Of course! The bigger the better.

The phone calls were necessary, because to shop on Le Panier Bleu in 2022 is to travel back two decades or so, to an age when online stores were taking their first tentative steps on the web. A search for the aforementioned “terroir” results in a haphazard blast of books, wine, handsoap, gift baskets and dog-sledding expeditions. The display is a touch above Geocities-grade. Far as I can tell, there are no algorithms following you around, keeping you and your credit card engaged. 

The flags arrived four days after my Amazon delivery. And here’s the thing: like the Amazon wares, the Panier Bleu flags were made in China—which, given the site’s economic-nationalist pretensions, felt like a pretty good argument why economic nationalism doesn’t work.

Daniel Désy agrees. He founded Party Shop in 2003 and, until the pandemic, made a decent living sculpting balloons and supplying party accoutrements to Quebec’s festive types. He signed up for Le Panier Bleu in the midst of the pandemic when he and his wife were, as he recalls, “tearing our hair out” trying to save the business. “We listened to the premier when he said he wanted to compete with Amazon, and we were open to the idea. And it’s a good idea, but everything is from China,” he told me in French, noting how the site sells itself as a storefront for made-in-Quebec wares. “I have an ethical problem with how they market it.”

Désy’s situation is common amongst Quebec businesses. While he estimates that 40 per cent of his business is tied up in the tying up of balloons—“I’ve been making balloon animals for 27 years,” he says—almost all the products he sells come from away. The balloons themselves are from India and the United States. His helium comes from the U.S. and, until recently, Russia. Nearly everything else comes from China—Quebec’s second-largest supplier of goods, after the U.S.

In any case, Désy says his Panier Bleu experience didn’t benefit Party Shop’s bottom line. My $45.89 purchase of five flags was the only order he recalls receiving by way of the site. “Panier Bleu has a problem. It can’t compete against Amazon. It will always fail,” he told me. Part of the problem is fading public awareness. While 52 per cent of Quebecers knew about Panier Bleu in 2021, only 14 per cent had availed themselves of the service, according to a Université Laval study. Meanwhile, nearly half of Quebecers had used Amazon in 2021—an increase of seven percentage points from 2020.

The thing is, contrary to Premier Legault’s spiel, Le Panier Bleu isn’t competing against Amazon. At least, that’s what Alain Dumas told me. Since 2020, Dumas has served as director general for Le Panier Bleu, and is now overseeing its shift from a government-initiated stopgap to a government-sponsored marketplace. Public funding was crucial, he said, in part to ensure Le Panier Bleu had a “long-term financial outlook.” He said the made-in-Quebec mantra extends to Le Panier Bleu’s backend, developed by the Sherbrooke-based pick-pack-ship outfit Wiptec.

Dumas says Le Panier Bleu cannot afford to shun Chinese businesses, and rightly points out that the Quebec economy benefits when Quebec-based businesses sell goods, regardless of where they come from. But these days, he spends considerable time tamping down expectations raised by Legault and the government. “We don’t position ourselves as an Amazon competitor. Amazon’s focus is the product. Ours is the merchant,” he told me. “We were inspired by the Amazon model, and painted it blue.”

It’s a bit rich, then, to hear Legault and his government fret about Amazon’s sizable Quebec footprint to the extent that they have. In September 2020—the very month the province seeded Le Panier Bleu with $3.15 million to “continue to promote buying local—Investissement Québec was inviting Quebec companies to Amazon-sponsored conferences about how best to market their wares on Amazon’s platform. The Caisse de dépôt et placement is similarly cozy with the Bezos beast. By way of its real estate arm Ivanhoé Cambridge, the public pension fund manager and $420-billion model of Quebec economic might is part owner of a Montreal-area Amazon sorting facility. 

Still, with an October election looming, we can expect Legault to keep up the “made-in-Quebec” conceit while wrapped tightly in the flag. Even if the flag is made in China. 

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.” @MartinPatriquin