Le Panier Bleu offers 100,000 products, of which barely 600 carry a Products of Quebec certification. “It’s not a lot,” concedes the Minister of the Economy, Pierre Fitzgibbon.
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The transactional site, which now belongs to the private sector, was one of the subjects on the agenda on Tuesday during the study of the budget appropriations of the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy.
The subsidy from Quebec to the company now reaches 5.47 million dollars, moreover underlined the Liberal critic for the economy, Frédéric Beauchemin.
He also asked Minister Fitzgibbon if the 246 merchants registered with the Blue Basket are enough when we know that there are 220,000 businesses in Quebec.
“There is a crying need to help digitize our merchants,” replied the Minister.
- Listen to the interview with Alain Dumas, General Manager of Le Panier Bleu, on Yasmine Abdelfadel’s show via QUB-radio:
Initially, “the goal was not to have 1,000 merchants on a specific date,” Mr. Fitzgibbon added, but rather to have a platform that allows merchants here to start buying online.
“Then they will go to Amazon or whatever. What we want is for manufacturers to have access to a platform, regardless of which one,” he said.
As for the small number of certified local products, the elected caquiste “hopes that it will increase”.
“There are [commerçants] who do not see the usefulness of certification. It will come with demand: the more the consumer will demand it, the more people will do it. We must continue to promote it,” he commented.
Public funds invested
Created by the Ministry of the Economy just after the start of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, the Blue Basket was an order from François Legault.
The Prime Minister wanted to make Quebecers aware of buying local and help people buy online.
The site became a private company in the summer of 2022, then a transactional platform the following fall.
As private as it is, the Blue Basket has benefited from investments from Investissement Québec ($12M), the Fonds de solidarité FTQ ($5M), Desjardins ($4M) and Lightspeed ($1M).