Certainly the food industry is a uniting factor in Atlantic Canada, tied as it is to the fish and seafood processing industry. But there's beef on those islands too.
      Enough that the Atlantic Beef Producers Cooperative has banded together to build its own US$8.7 million, 70-employee processing plant at Borden-Carleton business park in Albany, PEI, after a Moncton, N.B., plant closed late in 2003.
      But it's traditionally been cod, not cow, that feeds the region's economy. There may be no better portrait of the Atlantic Canada food industry's changing face than the fate of the real estate once belonging to fish and lobster plant operator Polar Foods International, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

Colin MacDonald, Clearwater Seafoods

      In March 2004, the company's holdings throughout the provinces were put out for bid to about 200 fish processors, with the May-June lobster season bearing down fast. Just in time, Newfoundland-based Ocean Choice bought up five plants, but chose to open only two for processing, employing about 600 people in the PEI towns of Souris and Beach Point.
      Such is the expected course in an industry that has seen the number of processing plants numerically reversed from 221 in 1990 to 122 in 2003, with a concomitant 42-percent drop in already low-paying employment. New federal employment insurance rules aren't making it any easier. Nor is overfishing by rogue foreign trawlers.
      Yet even as buildings sit dormant and shrimp and crab take the place of cod in the region's fishery profile, new projects in aquaculture and fish processing continue to build a profile all their own. In Sydney, Nova Scotia, Scatarie Seafoods is developing a facility to make salmon sausage. In North Sydney, Clearwater Seafoods Limited Partnership is investing CA$1.2 million and adding 23 jobs at its processing and canning complex. And in April 2004, Halifax-based sister company Ocean Nutrition Canada completed the US$7.3 million, 35,000-sq.-ft. (3,252-sq.-m.) expansion of its Omega-3 fish oil concentrate facility in Mulgrave, expanding capacity by more than 400 percent.
      In addition to the 90,000-sq.-ft. (8,361-sq.-m.) refining, concentrating, packaging and pilot plant facility in Mulgrave, the company also maintains a headquarters, a micro-encapsulation pilot and production plant and an R&D facility in the Halifax area.
      Clearwater Seafoods Limited Partnership operates five processing facilities in Nova Scotia and two in Newfoundland. It also operates four distribution centers: one in Bedford, N.S., and one each in Louisville, Ky.; Brussels, Belgium; and London, U.K. Clearwater is also in the final stages of negotiation on a US$36.5 million factory freezer clam vessel, which will replace an existing vessel once it's complete in 18-24 months.
      Clearwater CEO Colin MacDonald tells Site Selection that the biggest single business climate issue for his company -- which exports approximately 85 percent of its production -- is foreign exchange. Certainty and stability are crucial in that context, he says, and the same could be said of the natural resource from which Clearwater makes its living.
      "It's an international responsibility," he says. "There is not a lot of willingness on the parts of some countries to manage their fleet or keep them within conservative guidelines. We're a company dedicated to sustainable seafood excellence. The underlying resource must be sustainable over the long term. All of our investments are for the long term -- a CA$50-million [US$36.5-million] vessel is obviously going to have a longer-term payback, and the underlying resource has to be intact for us to be successful with that business. All of our initiatives are to protect the resource."
      MacDonald says the company partners with the federal government's Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans in managing the resources, and has been at the forefront in research and ocean bottom mapping projects. One area in which the company further differentiates itself from many in the industry is in its employment patterns.
      "Our objective as a company has been to fully utilize our assets," says MacDonald. "Our business isn't structured around laying people off."
      MacDonald cites the company's purchase of a Cape Breton groundfish operation, which provided only 10 weeks of work for its small work force at the time.
      "Now it provides 50 weeks of work for a larger number of people," he says.