The Canadian Wheat Board isn’t the only prairie-based single desk marketing organization whose monopoly powers are under scrutiny.
The Freshwater Fish Marketing Corp. is the subject of a federally funded study looking at the possibility of replacing its single desk with a dual market.
The Winnipeg-based crown corporation is the single desk marketing agency for 2,400 fishermen in the three prairie provinces, Northwest Territories and part of northwestern Ontario.
Established in 1969, the FFMC is the sole buyer, processor and marketer of fish harvested from 400 lakes in its designated area.
Read Also
Stacking Canada up on gene editing livestock
Canada may want to gauge how Argentina and other countries have approached gene editing in livestock and what that has meant for local innovation.
It also owns a plant in Winnipeg where it processes the fish into frozen and fresh consumer products for sale in Canada and abroad.
Earnings from the corporation’s sales are returned to fishermen in a manner similar to the CWB payment system. Sales in 2006 totalled $55.3 million.
The federal department of fisheries and oceans, which oversees the FFMC, recently hired a private, open-market-oriented think-tank to study the options and impacts of dual marketing in the fishing industry.
The study, which had been conducted in secret until information about it was leaked to the media, is slated to be completed by June 15.
The debate over the future of the FFMC is almost a carbon copy of the debate over the CWB: a group of disgruntled fishermen, unhappy with the prices they’re receiving, lobbying the federal government for a dual market.
One big difference is that there is no indication the federal government has the same desire to dismantle the single desk for fish as it does for grain.
“The government is not pushing this ” said FFMC chief executive officer John Wood.
He said the federal government initiated the study in response to lobbying last fall by a small group of fishermen.Any recommendations, he said, will be incorporated into a review of the corporation’s future direction, which has been underway since January.
“I see it as more research and information for me to use in our strategic review.”
Wood, who took the job as CEO last November, said conversations he’s had with directors and fishermen indicate there’s strong support for retaining the single desk.
“Any fishers I’ve talked to who remember the so-called good old days before FFMC do not want to go back to that,” he said. “You had 2,400 small businesses all trying to sell their product to a few dozen small buyers. It was chaotic, there was no quality control and sometimes they didn’t get paid.”
Prices may not be as high as some would like, due mainly to the strong Canadian dollar, but at least they know they’ll get paid, he said.
Fisheries minister Loyola Hearn, who last November publicly stated his support for the corporation’s role as a single desk seller, insists the government isn’t trying to force change.
The study was a response to requests from industry stakeholders, he said, and will be presented to the FFMC for consideration.
“The board can use it to inform their decision-making, but there is no requirement that they adopt any elements of the study,” he said in a letter to the editor published in the Winnipeg Free Press.
The government is always looking for ways to improve fishermen’s bottom lines, said Hearn, and information generated from the study may help in that regard.
However, he said any decision on the agency’s future as a single desk seller will be made by the industry, not by Ottawa.
“If the (FFMC) board and the fishermen who it serves feel that the current model is the one that suits them best, then they can absolutely stay with the status quo,” he said.
News of the government review triggered harsh criticisms from opposition MPs, who immediately drew parallels to Ottawa’s plans to dismantle the CWB’s single desk for barley and wheat.
Manitoba Liberal MP Ray Simard said the government clearly has an anti-single desk, anti-supply management agenda that it wants to impose on the agriculture and food sector.
He also took the government to task for conducting the FFMC review in secret.
“This kind of thing should be an open and transparent process,” he said. “Let people see what is going on and then let the fishers decide.”
Simard said it’s outrageous that while Hearn was saying publicly the single desk was not under threat, the government was organizing a study of a dual market.
“I know FFMC has some issues and some of the fishers have concerns. It’s not a perfect system by any means,” he said. “But for me it’s more the betrayal that’s the problem.”
In his letter to the editor, Hearn noted that since the provincial governments in the FFMC’s designated area are partners in administering the corporation, Ottawa couldn’t make unilateral changes even if it wanted to.
