Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to come here today and speak to your committee.
I'm a general manager at a local fishermen's co-op in northern Cape Breton, so we're in a rural area. We're a major employer in our county, and this year marks 60 years of operation. We were incorporated back in 1956, and started out as more or less a fresh-fish operation and progressed into a ground fishery. We all know the history of the ground fishery. In the early 1990s that closed out, but the co-op members and the board had the wisdom to switch gears very quickly and get into shellfish, both processing of lobster—we're the only company in Cape Breton that processes lobster—and into snow crab, as the two primary ones. We also handle other species such as halibut. We're into Jonah crab, rock crab, and mackerel, so there's a variety of species.
In 2015, we basically purchased about $20 million's worth of product from our local fishermen. That spans about 100 miles of coast and seven small harbours, from 10 vessels to 35 vessels, and our sales were in excess of $26 million.
In the past few years we've started to look into other markets, because primarily our market is the U.S. We spent a number of years travelling on trade missions, notably Brussels for four years now. China would be year two, times two, because I had just come back when Minister Colwell and Premier McNeil were there. We were in Hong Kong as well, and China. We also obviously travel to the big show in Boston.
We decided to make a decision to start to move some of our sales and some of our product into the Asian market, which I think is a heck of an opportunity for us, and to look at diversifying a bit so we don't have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak.
With regard to free trade agreements in general, whether NAFTA or CETA, which we've heard about for a number of years, or TPP, in the seafood industry and in terms of our export industry, it's certainly positive anytime we can reduce tariffs and reduce restrictions. There's always a caution, as a Canadian citizen, that there could be other impacts. As we heard earlier from agriculture, there are positives and negatives. Hopefully with wisdom, governments can provide protection for the industries, because there are going to be winners and losers, as there are in any kind of an agreement.
For us, in terms of tariffs, we're doing business now or have shipped to five of the 12 countries involved, namely Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, the U.S., and Canada. When I look at Vietnam, there is potential to reduce the tariff by 34% on processed lobster. It's significant. Even in the case of Japan, we're talking 4% on snow crab products—and they are a big consumer of snow crab—or 5% on lobster, and there is 3.5% or so referenced on halibut there and in some of the other countries. There is potential for reducing those tariffs and to increase our opportunities to export.
Some of the challenge we have as we go forward and increase our production levels occurs because we're in a rural community. The vast majority of processing facilities in Nova Scotia are in rural communities. I can only think of maybe two that are near Halifax, so it's near and dear to the coastal communities. The labour force is a continual challenge, seasonal portions of it, at least for us. There are peaks and valleys and landings. That will be an ongoing challenge.
We have used foreign workers in the past from the temporary foreign worker program. It is extremely costly and entails a lot of red tape. Our local workers were supportive of that because without the foreign workers in a couple of those years, I don't know how we would have pulled it off. Certainly going forward, we see that as a challenge as we increase the trade.
We have people of the age of 70 to the age of 16 working at times in our processing facility, and we're competing with the local fishing industry, which is growing in leaps and bounds. We're competing with the tourism industry, so especially in our April to October season we're extremely challenged by the workforce situation.
If we look at CETA, which hopefully we will finalize somewhere along the way, as the minister mentioned earlier, we see that this whole proposed Swedish-EU ban on lobster needs to be taken very seriously as an example of what could happen in another trade agreement. Lobster is part of a list of species. The rest are all non-commercial under this proposed ban, but lobster is tagged on with the rest. There's real argument from industry to separate lobster on this EU ban. If it isn't separated and the committee decides to go ahead on flawed science, it all goes as one package. There's no passing part of it and not the other. I throw that caution out to every member here to really raise that issue with anyone and everyone that we can. There's intergovernmental involvement, both provincially and federally, and everybody working on it. Hopefully, we won't see something similar under the trans-Pacific partnership agreement.