Montreal: ‘It isn’t widely known, but Canada’s fate was shaped by the big sugar lobby,’ says writer/director Brian McKenna, who started production April 19 on his new docudrama Big Sugar. ‘There are no doctoral theses on this topic, nothing.’

In two 50-minute segments shot in HD, Big Sugar shows how the influential sugar lobby swayed the history of Canada. It starts with the Treaty of Paris, in which England was successfully pressured to choose Canada for its own and return Guadeloupe to France. The entrenched sugar cartel crowed at their victory, claiming England ‘traded sugar for snow’ because Guadeloupe produced four times the revenue that Canada provided.

Big Sugar also investigates the evils of slavery on sugar plantations and outlines the abolitionists’ efforts in England in the 1790s to defeat sugar slavery. The show’s second episode explores the power of today’s Bacardi-Fanjuls sugar cartel in Florida. It also handles the recent political hot potato of sugar’s role in runaway epidemics of diabetes and obesity.

The $1.2-million project, shot over 36 days, will take McKenna and his crew to Barbados, Geneva, Washington, DC, London, Liverpool, Miami, the Dominican Republic and Toronto. Big Sugar is produced by Galafilm Productions in association with the CBC and Radio-Canada. Executive producer Arnie Gelbart is behind the project, along with Galafilm producers Sylvia Wilson and Stephen Phizicky. McKenna wrote and is directing the docudrama, while Stefan Nitoslawski is the DOP.

‘We go to Barbados with Lisa Codrington, a 25-year-old writer from Toronto who is a descendant of the slaves on the famous Codrington sugar plantation,’ says McKenna, winner of the Gordon Sinclair Award for journalism. ‘It was considered an enlightened plantation, but we discover that many of the Codrington slaves died of hunger and mistreatment… This is a plantation that was eventually run by the Anglican Church, which kept it operating, with slaves, until slavery was abolished.’

Big Sugar will air on the CBC and SRC in 2005/06.