Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members. My name is Phil Barnes. I represent the Fogo Island Co-Operative Society Limited, out of Fogo Island. The co-operative was formed back in the sixties as part of an initiative that was taken on by fishermen on the island, and with the aid of the provincial government they developed an industry and continue to build in that industry. I wanted to give you a little bit of background about that.
My presence here today basically is to speak on some of the issues and challenges that we face in the industry, as a processor. We have an aging population, as was mentioned by some of the people here earlier. We have young entrants trying to get into the industry, young entrants in terms of fish harvesters. I have been presented with this challenge for the last two years. There's a couple of fishermen I've devoted my time to trying to put into a boat, and the challenges are that the banks won't look at them. These young people are in their twenties and they don't have the cash or the equity to put into an enterprise at this point in time. However, they've been fishing for seven or eight years and have good backgrounds. They have their licences. They're qualified. Yet we run into stumbling blocks. The banks won't look at them. They have no equity.
Those are only a couple of issues. Skilled labour continues to be a big issue at our plant. How do you replace an electrician? Today I'm going to run my shrimp operation in Fogo without an electrician. You have a tremendous cost. You'd probably end up making more money than I do if you came to the island to work for us, but that's the challenge we face. Skilled labour, maintenance people, and the list goes on.
I want to go back to the aging population. In our workforce today, it's tough. We have people who are in their mid-fifties, the average age in our plants. How do you replace these workers? There are no young people staying around who want to work in this industry. There are no jobs they're going to want to do, as young people graduating from school and so on. So these are big, big changes, and we have to look at modernization of our plants, new technology. Or we have to look at immigration, workers coming in from other countries. So those are some of the challenges that we do face.
I want to also touch on, I guess, the biggest question. Every time I go anywhere, someone asks how the Fogo Island co-op could open its doors this year at $1.35 on crab and all the other processors could not.
Well, we do a lot of thinking when it comes to this time of the year, and we looked at the dollar being at par. Basically, that's what we built our business model on, that we'd look for a break-even, because at the best of times the only thing we're trying to do is to keep our fishermen and our plant workers working. We're a different beast. We're a different animal. We have a different chemistry.
The Fogo Island Co-Operative Society has a membership and the fishermen and the plant workers own that business. We're not profit-driven to the extent that the big corporations are, so in a nutshell, I'd have to say that that's what it came down to. You have two risks basically. The risk not to open, and the risk to open, and we felt the former was the worst to do at the time.
That's where it was, and I hope that answers the question that you were looking for, Gerry, in terms of our position. If there are any other questions, I'll gladly take them.