The Great Margarine Debate (Throwback Thursday)

September 25, 2014

By Jenneth Hogan

You make your grocery list and you head to the store. Making your way down the frigid isles of dairy products gleaming with creamy white to buttery yellow versions of every household’s staple, you have a choice to make, butter or margarine? With so many versions out there – all vegetable, low fat, non-fat, with omega fatty acids – margarine seems to be the popular choice to stock our fridges, but there wasn’t always an option. In fact, from 1886 to 1948 margarine was banned across Canada, although the ban was temporarily lifted between 1917 and 1923 due to a shortage in dairy.

If you do your math right you’ll realize that at the same time Americans were smuggling in bootleg liquor from Canada, Canadians were smuggling bootleg margarine in from Newfoundland, not yet a part of Canada.  Made by the Newfoundland Butter Company from whale, seal and fish oils and sold for half the price of butter, margarine was making its way to kitchen tables and pantries across the country, prompting the Supreme Court of Canada to lift the ban in 1948. That same year Newfoundland negotiated its entry into the Canadian Confederation making one of its three non-negotiable conditions for union with Canada a constitutional protection for the new province’s right to manufacture margarine.

From Section 46 of the 1949 British North American Act:

Oleomargarine

6. (1) Oleomargarine or margarine may be manufactured or sold in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador after the date of the Union and the Parliament of Canada shall not prohibit or restrict such manufacture or sale except at the request of the Legislature of the Province of Newfoundland, but nothing in this Term shall affect the power of the Parliament of Canada to require compliance with standards of quality applicable throughout Canada.
   (2) Unless the Parliament of Canada otherwise provides or unless the sale and manufacture in, and the interprovincial movement between, all provinces of Canada other than Newfoundland and Labrador, of oleomargarine and margarine, is lawful under the laws of Canada, oleomargarine or margarine shall not be sent, shipped, brought, or carried from the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador into any other province of Canada.

In 1950 the landmark “margarine reference” removed federal jurisdiction over margarine but provincial strictures remained for decades, implementing rules regarding the color of the product. Most provinces required margarine to be a bright yellow or orange product and in some provinces it was to be colorless. In Ontario it was not legal to sell butter-colored margarine until 1995 and Quebec’s ban on colorized margarine was not repealed until 2008.

 

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine