MEETING WITH MINISTER O’DRISCOLL

On Wednesday afternoon we met with Loyola O’Driscoll, Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture.

It was not a photo-op or a box-ticking exercise. We went there with a purpose, and that was to deliver a clear message to the Minister. While his predecessors created this current lack of competition and this stranglehold processors have over our multi-billion-dollar industry, it’s now in his hands to make a change for the better.

We laid out the solution, and it’s not complicated: issue more processing licenses and hold current license holders accountable.

A step was made in the right direction with buyers’ licenses under the Furey Government, but the very thing that was put in place to introduce competition actually stifled it. NL processors acquired those licenses and used them to ship unprocessed crab to the Maritimes in exchange for processors in those provinces staying out of NL. Any progress that was being made on this issue was quickly undone when the Hogan government came in and reversed course almost immediately. .  

Harvesters in this province will never get a fair price for their product with just five large suppliers controlling the market. NL is the largest producer of snow crab in the world; the supply is controlled by five very large companies, and those companies are protected by provincial policies that severely restrict new entrants. This has to change.

Obviously, a significant amount of time was spent talking about the crab rebate and the pricing structure in place this year. We made it clear that this structure can work, but only if processors are held accountable. They’re operating under a set of government rules that restrict competition. Until that is rectified, they need to have a level of accountability beyond what would be expected in a free-market system.

We showed the Minister the following graph from Urner Barry of NL and Gulf 5-8 oz sections in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Each year, the gap between the two indices widens, going from almost a complete overlap (i.e., no difference in the NL and Gulf market prices) in 2022 to the wide gap you see this year (the light pink and purple lines).

The mess in the lap of the Minister O’Driscoll wasn’t made by him or this current administration, but it can start to be fixed by them. They owe it to the fish harvesters, plant workers, and other voters in rural areas across the province who put this government into power. Minister O’Driscoll heard our message and committed to be readily available going forward to meet and help put this industry on the right track.