MPs suggest shuttering fish agency

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This article was published 23/10/2017 (3164 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Federal politicians are thinking of closing the Winnipeg-based Freshwater Fish Marketing Corp. after an audit found that a decade of mismanagement has worsened.

One Manitoba MP compared the agency’s pricing practices, which targeted the province’s environmentally sensitive fish, as “tantamount to raping that population,” at a committee hearing in Ottawa last week.

Ottawa established the agency in 1969 to help fishermen in Western and Northern Canada sell their catches from isolated communities to businesses across Canada and abroad.

But in recent years, the Crown corporation has been plagued by dysfunction. Its last president, Donald Salkeld — hired to clean up management problems — was fired within 14 months.

In May, the auditor general produced a report saying the corporation had bought equipment it didn’t need, hired staff without a normal interview process, skipped health and safety training, and bungled basic business plans. It was the agency’s third damning audit in 12 years, with little change over that period.

The agency employs 250 full-time and 150 seasonal workers, all based in Transcona. Each year, it handles 15 million kilograms of freshwater fish from roughly 1,600 fishermen. In the 2015-16 year, it brought in $73.2 million, netting a $1.5-million profit.

The audit found the agency’s balance sheet only stayed in the black because of an uncharacteristically high Canadian dollar. It noted that staff failed to anticipate how Canada’s sanctions against Russia would block a key market for whitefish.

Manitoba pulled out of the monopoly in July, despite accounting for 80 per cent of the corporation’s fish.

Saskatchewan walked away in 2012, but officials told Parliament last week that more than 95 per cent of the province’s commercial catch is still marketed through the agency, likely due to a lack of competition.

Alberta and the Northwest Territories are the only jurisdictions that remain in the monopoly. (Alberta’s environment ministry suspended all commercial fishing in 2014, so only recreational anglers can fish.)

Two Liberal MPs from Ontario suggested the time has come to consider closing the agency — a stunning suggestion from members of a governing party.

At a meeting of the public accounts committee, Paul Lefebvre of Sudbury said the agency faces “an existential crisis,” while Ottawa-area MP Chandra Arya said the agency isn’t relevant after five decades.

Manitoba Conservative MP Robert Sopuck was troubled by the agency’s mismanagement, but livid at its apparent overreliance on Lake Winnipeg, which he said has unstable fish stocks.

Sopuck, the Tory conservation critic whose riding spans Dauphin and Neepawa, pressed bureaucrats on why they were pricing large female walleye at a high rate, which would encourage people to catch and sell the very type of fish needed to keep the species alive.

“That’s devastating from a sustainability standpoint, and I’m shocked that you don’t consider that a risk. Targeting the most valuable individuals in a fish population is tantamount to raping that population,” said Sopuck, a former fisheries biologist.

“When that Lake Winnipeg walleye fishery collapses, what are you going to do then?”

The corporation’s interim president, Stan Lazar, said he’d been assured that walleye stocks are sustainable. That’s when Sopuck cut him off: “The recent science disputes that, and I’ve read it.”

But Sopuck did praise the agency for selling carp, because the species has reduced Manitoba’s vegetation and biodiversity.

The NDP suggested a deadline to get the agency in order.

“It’s like, where do you begin?” MP David Christopherson said.

“It would almost be easier for us to talk about the things that were done right because it’s a much shorter list.”

Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc wouldn’t say whether it’s time to close the corporation.

“We have been actively engaging with fishers and other stakeholders throughout Manitoba and the Northwest Territories during this period of transition, and the process will continue throughout the fall as we work together on a path forward,” he wrote on Friday.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca