It prohibits the making of false or misleading representations and sets out specifications for mandatory label information such as the product's name, net quantity, and dealer identity.
[2] The CPLA broadly defines "product" to mean any article that is, or may be, the subject of trade or commerce, including both food and non-food items.
Their offense was fraudulently putting "Product of Canada" labels on large quantities of peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers grown mainly in Mexico.
The fraudulent labelling was discovered in 2012 at the Ontario Food Terminal, and investigators later executed three search warrants in 2013 and 2014, which resulted in the seizure of more than 70 boxes of documents.
[12] In November 2017, a tomato processing company in Maidstone, Ontario—which had received a controversial $3-million provincial grant—was convicted of fraudulently mislabelling products as organic under the CPLA as well as other legislation.
[13][14] On 12 March 2018, AMCO Produce, a greenhouse grower in Leamington, Ontario—along with its directors Fausto Amicone and Mark Wehby—answered to charges brought by the CFIA for origin-of-vegetable fraud in a Windsor court.
[16] The sentence included "intrusive" probation for a period of time under which the CFIA gains "unfettered" access to company records.