Photo courtesy of freshwaterfish.com
A scathing report into the operation of the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation of Canada comes as no surprise to local industry experts, who say the corporation has been poorly run for years.
Canada’s auditor general released a report yesterday that listed numerous shortcomings. Among them, the board’s oversight of the corporation was inadequate, and important business practices and controls were lacking or were disregarded by management.
The federal crown corporation acts as a marketing board for fishers in Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories. In 2012, Saskatchewan pulled out of the monopoly, leaving the choice to fishers on who they wanted to sell to. Last year, Manitoba, which supplies 80 per cent of the fish to the corporation, announced it was pulling out.
The auditor’s report found the corporation did not identify Manitoba’s withdrawal as a significant risk or develop a strategy to deal with it.
Recruitment and staffing were also listed as being severely deficient, with the president creating positions without job descriptions, revising salaries without proper justification and filling positions without conducting a competitive selection process.
The president of Saskatchewan Cooperative Fisheries Limited, Marie Hildebrandt, could see this one coming. She says since Saskatchewan ended its agreement with the corporation in 2012, more and more fishers are signing up with a new buyer, called Arctic Blue, which is based out of Vancouver. She says that company has big plans, including the opening of a fish processing plant in North Battleford by November.
“It’s going to be huge,” she said. “They are going through preliminary work of everything that has to be changed because they are redesigning the whole inside.”
Hildebrandt doesn’t think the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation has much of a future.
“You know it’s their own doing if they lose a lot of their customers,” she said.
Hildebrandt expects there will also be more lost customers in Saskatchewan when current contracts with the corporation expire in November.
In Saskatchewan, fishers have the option of signing contracts with the corporation or selling on their own.
Hildebrandt says many of them report a doubling of earnings since getting out of contracts with the corporation and signing on with Arctic Blue.