Starting with price setting, Nova Scotia does not have a price-setting mechanism. This is a total harvester-buyer arrangement. We do not intervene in any way with any legislative price mechanism or system to negotiate prices.
Historically, we have had serious issues on price setting and our pricing of crab. We've actually had a task group with industry, and both the processors and the harvesters sat down and worked on trying to resolve some of these issues. We resolved the immediate ones, not the long-term ones. There will always be questions about whether the prices are fair. We will have the harvesters' concern that they're too low, the processors' concern that they simply can't make any money at some of the prices. But by and large, it's a free enterprise system on pricing in Nova Scotia.
On the processing facilities, there are probably in the order of a dozen plants that are geared up to process snow crab in Nova Scotia. I'd have to count around the province, but there are probably seven or eight of them that are active now.
Again, as a province we don't dictate where and how crab processing should be established. We don't give government money to establish a crab plant, for example. If someone came in and said this community has landed all kinds of crab, and we want to build a crab plant here, so give us so much money.... We do license the crab plants, but we don't actively go out there and try to build plants. We don't actively go and try to remove them. I guess some of the business forces have made that happen.
We only had a couple of crab plants in Nova Scotia. Then particularly with the huge expansion in area 23 and 24, a lot of people saw opportunities and built plants. Some of them have come and gone, and others are surviving and providing very important employment in the community.
On the number of harvesters, the example of probably the extreme is when I spoke about area 19. There are 180 fishermen there. If it was crab alone, there's no way this area would support those. But if the approach is a multi-species-type fishery with supplement lobster and what little groundfish is left--not much any more--maybe some herring and some other fisheries.... There is some transferability within that fishery where you could buy more traps, but not more than.... You can't eliminate a three-trapper, basically. That three-trapper has to be transferred to a new fisherman. So the fishermen themselves set up a system where there's still an opportunity for a young fisherman to get in at a low price and a low trap number and in time work his way up.
It has worked fairly well. The question is if it can survive the low prices that we've experienced in the last couple of years. That's a real concern. I'm sure industry, when they're faced with that, will have to deal with that in area 19.
In the other areas, the outer coast, 20 to 22, it's tough going, because landings are very low, but it's a multi-species fishery set-up there, so crab is a contribution.
The set-up in area 23 and 24, all the new players came in groups, as you've heard, rather than as individuals. So that dramatically reduced the number of fishing enterprises that could be out there, which kept the capacity down. There is some transferability there as well.
With interprovincial competition, we have open borders and movement of crab in the Maritimes. We have a problem with Newfoundland. We have a situation where there is a restriction of movement of crab, unprocessed crab, from Newfoundland to anywhere else. We asked the Newfoundland government multiple times to remove that to have unrestricted movement of crab and other fish products. But it's a priority policy area for Newfoundland, so we haven't been successful there.
So we have one restriction when it comes to movement of fish, and that's on crab in Newfoundland and Quebec. It is basically a countermeasure, because our industry was being hurt so badly by one-way movement of crab. We used the interprovincial trade agreement, the clause that states that if one jurisdiction has a barrier, another jurisdiction can use the same one if your industry is being hurt. These are the only restrictions we have. Other than that, we have interprovincial trade in all fish, and in the Maritimes for snow crab.