Mezcal, Tequila, and the Three Boards That Decide What Canadians Can Buy

Buying a bottle of mezcal in Canada means passing through two layers of gatekeeping most drinkers never think about: a federal regulation that defines what is legally allowed to be called mezcal at all, and a provincial liquor monopoly that decides, store by store, whether it's worth stocking. Both layers are older and stricter than most people assume.

The federal rule: mezcal has a legal definition in Canada

Canada's Food and Drug Regulations (C.R.C., c. 870) contain specific sections defining these spirits by name: section B.02.090 for Tequila and B.02.091 for Mezcal, according to the consolidated regulations published by the Department of Justice (current to September 3, 2026, per the site's own version notice). We confirmed these sections exist in the regulation's table of contents but were not able to load the full regulatory text of either provision during this session — the specific page we needed returned only a partial excerpt.

What we could confirm, from a secondary compilation on Wikipedia's "Mezcal" entry, is the substance of the rule: products labelled, packaged, sold, or advertised as mezcal in Canada must be manufactured in Mexico as mezcal under Mexico's own appellation-of-origin guidelines — Canada does not allow domestically distilled agave spirits to be marketed under the name "mezcal." Canadian distributors are permitted to import mezcal in bulk and rebottle it locally after adjusting its alcohol content with added water, and agave spirits that don't meet the certified mezcal standard can still be sold in Canada, but only under the alternate labels "destilados de agave" or "agave spirits." This is a real legal distinction with real market consequences: a bottle labelled "mezcal" on a Canadian shelf is, by law, an authentic Mexican product, not a domestic imitation.

Mezcal's international growth has been rapid by the numbers we could source. It has carried Appellation of Origin status since 1994. By 2008, certified mezcal production topped 2 million litres, of which 434,000 litres were exported for roughly $21 million in revenue, according to the Wikipedia entry. By 2019, Mexican mezcal production had grown to 7.1 million litres. The spirit is now sold in 27 countries across three continents, with the United States and Japan cited as its primary export markets. Canada is not broken out separately in the source we consulted, which means we cannot state Canada's specific share of that export volume — a real and declared gap below.

Three provinces, three monopolies, three different histories

Mezcal and tequila reach Canadian consumers through provincial liquor authorities that, unlike the federal rule above, long predate any interest in agave spirits. All three were born out of the same early-20th-century prohibition-and-repeal era, though not in the same year:

British Columbia's government liquor stores opened on June 15, 1921, after the province became, as of 1920, the only one in Canada to have voted in favour of government-controlled liquor sales, according to Wikipedia's "BC Liquor Stores" entry. Quebec's SAQ traces to the same year, founded as the Quebec Liquor Commission in 1921 and holding, per its Wikipedia entry, "a legal monopoly on all distribution of alcohol in Quebec" to this day — operated today across store formats branded Classique, Express, Sélection, and Dépôt. Ontario's LCBO came six years later, in 1927, established by the Liquor Control Act following the end of provincial prohibition, per its own Wikipedia entry.

All three remain large commercial operations regardless of age. The LCBO reported CA$7.21 billion in revenue and CA$2.54 billion in net income for 2020–21, and is described on Wikipedia as "one of the world's largest purchasers of alcoholic beverages." BC Liquor Stores reported CA$3.33 billion in revenue and CA$1.08 billion in net income for 2016–17, operating 198 locations out of its Burnaby headquarters. We were not able to source a comparably specific, recent revenue figure for the SAQ during this session.

It's also worth noting that none of these three monopolies is quite as absolute as it once was. Ontario opened beer, wine, and cider sales to supermarkets starting in December 2015, ending nearly ninety years of LCBO exclusivity on those categories (spirits remain LCBO-exclusive for retail). British Columbia allowed private liquor retail stores starting in 1988. Quebec's SAQ retains the broadest legal monopoly of the three, per its own Wikipedia entry, though grocery and convenience stores have long been permitted to sell beer and wine under separate, longstanding rules not detailed in the source we consulted.

What we couldn't find: actual mezcal sales data

This is the biggest gap in this article, and we're stating it plainly rather than filling it with a plausible-sounding estimate. We could not source specific mezcal or tequila sales volumes, growth rates, or shelf-count figures for the LCBO, SAQ, or BC Liquor Stores individually. Each board publishes detailed product catalogues and, in some cases, category sales data on its own website, but we could not load lcbo.com's relevant pages during this session (the specific URL we tried returned a 404), and we did not attempt saq.com or bcliquorstores.com directly. Any claim about how much mezcal Ontario, Quebec, or B.C. drinkers are actually buying, or how fast that category is growing relative to tequila or Mexican beer, remains unverified and should not be asserted without going back to each board's own current data.