I became involved in the fishery in 1974, and with another partner I spent 20 years in industry. I was an owner-operator of two fish processing plants. One in particular was primarily for groundfish, but it also did pelagics, tuna, salmon—just about anything that swam and was available to be harvested and purchased.
We marketed deboned and individually wrapped packages to a variety of different markets—several different types of products. We marketed primarily in the United States. We had a significant demand for skin-on cod fillets in the U.K. market, tuna in the Japanese market, and squid in the Japanese market and other Asian markets. We dealt with salmon when it was on a commercial basis to domestic markets here in Canada. We also operated a salt fishing operation that marketed salt fish primarily to European countries.
We had reasonably extensive operations at that time and significant volume, with a daily capacity for groundfish of about 130,000 pounds a day and a capacity on pelagics of about 140,000 pounds a day. That was the maximum volume of the operations there.