Tag Archives: Fishery Products International
‘This place was cod’
If you took a drive through Port Union in the 1980s, you would have had to slow down driving past the fish plant. In those days, over 1000 people worked at the plant — then owned by Fishery Products International (FPI) — and vehicles filled the plant parking lot and lined both sides of the road. With three shifts, working day and night, the plant was operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, processing cod fish landed by the FPI offshore trawlers. Back then the plant was operating almost 52 weeks of the year, with a 10-day shutdown during Christmas when the trawlers came in for the holidays. An estimated 1,400 workers in that area alone were directly affected by the closure of the cod fishery in 1992. Darryl Johnson was one of them. click here to read the story 12:03
Is John Risely out to gut Ocean Choice International like a fish? By Ryan Cleary
Nova Scotian John Risley who led a hostile takeover of Fishery Products International in 2001 that led to the company’s demise and the loss of hundreds of rural jobs — appears to be attempting another such takeover. This time of Newfoundland and Labrador-based Ocean Choice International — which bills itself as Canada’s “largest wild fish quota holder,” including highly lucrative snow crab, shrimp, scallops, cod, and turbot. If Risley succeeds he could potentially do to OCI what he did to FPI — gut it like a fish. I say that Risley is no friend of Newfoundland and Labrador, and if he gets his hands on OCI’s quotas the Grand Banks will be sold off to the highest bidder.Ryan Cleary is a former Newfoundland and Labrador MP, long-time journalist, and leader of FISH-NL, a group attempting to represent the province’s fish harvesters in a break-away union from the FFAW. Read the full piece, click here 22:21
