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For the love of God, won't somebody please think of the CANADIANS?!?

Fixed that for you.

No doubt. Canadian here.

Canada supplies around 71% of the worlds maple syrup. Which contributes around $381,000,000 CAD to our economy just in exports.

Source: http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/industry-markets-and-trade/market-information-by-sector/horticulture/horticulture-sector-reports/statistical-overview-of-the-canadian-maple-industry-2016/?id=1509039990148

which lends a different flavour than the glucose/fructose mix that's typical in Canada

That "different flavour" is all in your head. Read this, specifically the paragraph that reads as follows (bold added for emphasis):

Key commodity inputs needed to make carbonated soft drinks include concentrates, sugar (cane or beet), glucose/fructose, aspartame, acesulfame-potassium, caramel colour, sodium benzoate, phosphoric and citric acids, caffeine, seasonings, carbon dioxide and specially treated water. (Glucose/fructose is a generic term for high fructose corn syrup or HFCS, now more commonly referred to as "'corn sugar'".) The industry uses about 20 times as much corn sugar as it does cane/beet sugar as the sweetening agent. Except for water, the bulk of raw inputs for this industry are imported, mostly from the U.S. However a small portion of the corn sugar is supplied domestically.

You say Glucose/Fructose, we say HFCS. Same stuff.

This makes sense, until you realize that maple syrup production really is highly variable from year to year. That means some years people will be clamoring for the stuff, but unable to get it at any price, thus switch to alternatives; and other years people will be awash in the stuff and producers will go broke. It's not so much a matter of getting people to pay more, but a buffer against wildly-fluctuating markets that wouldn't be helpful to either producers or consumers. What do you think would happen if the supply of oil went up and down by as much as 2x every year? It would be nuts.

Where do you pay Broccoli -- $1.12/lb?

It's 2 heads for 5$ cheapest where I am.
Bread is double that, for the unhealthy fortified bread. That's store brand bread btw.
Chicken skin and bone intact: 2-3.99 /lb Bonesless you have to be kidding me? That's like 4.99-6.99 a lb

This was 2 years ago..... the latest data I could find. Food and meat prices have jumped over 50% from that time:

http://www3.agr.gc.ca/apps/aimis-simia/rp/index-eng.cfm?report_format_type_code=11&action=gR&signature=35B31A62666C5EB5E8F3901657969FB1&pdctc=&r=17&pTpl=1&btnDownload=View

Not sure how this got modded up, it's just plain wrong. Trees never stop growing. Those rings you see when you cut a tree down? That's how they grow - by adding a new ring of cellulose throughout the year. If you look closely, you'll notice the width of the annual rings do not vary with the age of the tree. And in fact, since the outer rings have a greater circumference, they're growing faster as the tree gets older.

The CO2 trees (and plants) remove from the air gets converted into sugars, which are linked into longer sugars called cellulose. All the carbon in wood used to be CO2. Yes plants respire some CO2 - their cells use the same mechanism of breaking down sugar to release energy to power the cell as in animals (sugar is the energy storage medium of choice for aerobic life). But it is far, far exceeded by the amount of CO2 they take in for photosynthesis. The correct rate of carbon sequestration is typically several to tens of kg per tree per year. Per hectare, you're probably talking about tons or tens of tons per year. The parent post is off by many orders of magnitude.

Every time I hear some moron say that "you live in a disaster area you should move" I wonder where they live?

Canada :-) We're predicted to be a net benefitor of global warming over the long run, but only compared to what's going to be going on south of the border ... its not going to be pleasant uphere either.

Keep in mind that less temperature differential means less air circulating, meaning less rainfall, meaning higher temps in the interior of the continent, meaning crop failures, meaning ... In the case of Canada, as seen here

Canada is a major agricultural producer with a relatively small population. As a result, we export almost half of our farm products, either directly as primary products or indirectly as value-added processed products.

Disagree. As someone who actually uses cloth diapers (on my kids, I'm not incontinent, thanks) absorbency is a huge factor in their functionality.
The Canadian Agricultural site references hemp as having excellent absorbency (in addition to other attributes you mention below).

Hemp does have a number of advantages, including durability, better rot-resistance, and great strength.

That agrees with the information I've seen. It's one reason, I suppose, that hemp was used for many years for roping on ships. The longer fibres contribute to the strength, and it seems to resist bacterial damage better than cotton.

It's also quite expensive as production is very labor-intensive, and use of hemp fiber is not nearly as environmentally sound as people would have you believe.

I must've been reading all the wrong hippie sites, then. :)

For instance, while it does produce more fiber per acre than, say, a pine farm, you wind up discarding 75% of the fiber to get the good bast off the stems. So to produce the same end-user products winds up requiring far more acreage than alternative crops--and it's acreage that contributes far more to soil erosion than a wood or cotton farm.

Um, so this is not the best reference at all, but I haven't much time, soo..Toilet Paper World says:
Most hemp paper made today uses the entire hemp stalk, bast and hurd. High-strength fiber paper can be made from the hemp baste, also without chemicals. According to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, one acre of hemp can produce 4 times more paper than one acre of trees!

And, of course, most hemp used in the US is grown in China with all the labor issues that encompasses (though sane public policy legalizing hemp use could eliminate that problem).

Yeah, if only the government would realize that industrial hemp contains no THC and therefore isn't totally relevant in the war on drugs... but it "looks" like Marijuana and is therefore evil, so we must outlaw it.

That said, hemp is a good crop for some applications--tea bags, cigarette papers, canvas, rope, etc. And it's a useful mixin for strengthening other fibers in some cloths.

Indeed, although thanks to a small market and high importation costs, it's usually the crazy hippies buying the stuff right now. Like you said, people who buy hemp just because it says "hemp" on the label. Personally I think there are many more constructive uses for the stuff, but since we can't grow it in the US any more...well, small market = small production = small market.

Most of the marijuana I get seems to come from British Columbia these days. As we all know the Al-Canuck and Hoser-amas cartels are notorious terrorist groups funded through Molson and the Canadian Snack-Food Industry.

Agriculture Canada has been doing research in this since the early 80's. I worked with people writing QNX software for it in 1986. Originally it used transmitters at corners of sectors to triangulate the tractor. After the GPS service came more widely available, these were replace with GPS sensors, originally differential(one land with satellite), then finally satellite only after the U.S. government stopped mucking about with the GPS signal so much. see Research from Neil B. McLaughlin, Ph.D.