Amazon is partnering with nonprofit Les Produits du Québec to offer a portal where consumers can order more than 1,000 Quebec-made products, CBC News reports. The province’s government launched Le Panier Bleu, at first a directory and later a transactional website for purchasing Quebec products, four years ago.
Christopher Skeete, Quebec’s junior economy minister, painted the Amazon partnership as a complement to that initiative, saying “you have to be where the customers are.” But others are concerned the original site could be cannibalized instead. “The Quebec government is taking a chainsaw to Panier Bleu,” said François Vincent, VP of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business’s Quebec division. “It’s sure that they won’t be able to compete.”
