By Michael Ganley -- The price per pound of whitefish is so low that there aren’t many fishermen. With so few fishermen, the catch is small. With such a small catch, nobody’s investing in infrastructure. Without new infrastructure, costs go up. As costs go up, there’s less money to be made so fewer people go fishing. And so it goes: The Great Slave fishery is caught in a downward spiral and the debate about how to reverse the trend sounds like the old story of which came first.

It’s early June in Hay River and Great Slave Lake is still covered with ice. Shawn Buckley is tinkering with his nets and other gear on his 43-foot fishing boat, itching to get out there. “It’s about a week to two weeks behind normal,” he says, gazing out at the sheet of white. “By the third week of June we’re usually gone on the lake somewhere.”

A late start to the 2009 season is just the latest setback for an industry in decline. There are only a handful of full-time commercial fishermen on Great Slave now, certainly fewer than a dozen. It’s a far cry from the fisheries’ heyday in the 1960s, when there were as many as 100 commercial fishing boats on the lake.

While the fishery has never been a great money- maker for the people involved, there was a time when it was a significant contributor to the economy, especially in and around Hay River. Buckley, a third-generation fisherman, has spent 25 years on the lake.

“It’s just heartbreaking,” he says. “You try as much as you can, and it looks stupid in some people’s eyes – these fishermen struggling to survive and complaining but yet they’re still going out. The reason for that is because it’s all they know how to do, so you’re obliged to go out. That’s why this fishery has survived a long time past when it was supposed to shut down.”

Depending on who you talk to, the problem with the Great Slave fishery lies at the feet of passive, old-fashioned fishermen, it lies with the federal department of Fisheries and Oceans for failing to gather statistics on the fishery, or it lies with the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corp., which is the sole selling company out of the NWT. Regardless of which side of that discussion you find most convincing, there’s one thing for sure: The problem is not with the resource. Great Slave Lake has been under-fished for years and there’s a market out there for whitefish. But the grinding sounds coming from the machinations of corporate and government bureaucracy suggest that this fishery will remain underused, that this resource will remain in the lake, and that the NWT will continue for the foreseeable future to fail to take advantage of this great gift at its doorstep.

The quota for Great Slave Lake – the tenth largest freshwater lake in the world – is up around 1,700 tonnes (more than 1.5 million kilograms) per year. The actual catch has not approached that figure since 1990. In recent years it has dropped below 400 tonnes, around 20 per cent of what is allowed. The vast majority of the catch is whitefish, with a bit of trout thrown in.

As the catch has declined, Freshwater – the Winnipeg-based federal crown corporation that is the sole buyer, processor and marketer of freshwater fish from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the NWT –has closed the three small plants around the lake that fishermen used to be able to pull into to unload their catch. Now, they have to travel to Hay River, burning gas, time and money in the process. Even the plant in Hay River is now closed in the winter. “Operating costs are just ridiculous compared to the amount of fish coming in,” says Dennis Geisler, the regional field operations manager for Freshwater. “It forces us to make a business decision to close these places down.”

The plant, owned by Freshwater, is also in desperate need of some investment. It is several decades old and was designed as a receiving station and processing plant for a million kilograms of fish per year. Now, handling a fifth of that, the overhead costs make it economically inefficient. “It’s an elephant, I admit it,” says Geisler. “Right now it’s costing us a lot of money per kilogram of packed fish to operate that building.”

Geisler says investment in the plant would happen if only the fishery could get kickstarted. He also says global prices for whitefish are reasonable and there are healthy or expanding markets in Finland, Russia and New York, where the Jewish community is a huge consumer of fresh whitefish. So why can’t the two ends of this chain be brought together?

Freshwater is best compared to the Canadian Wheat Board, and indeed was modeled after it. Like the wheat board, Freshwater posts a guaranteed price for fish at the beginning of the season and will top it up if buyers eventually agree to higher prices.

Also like the wheat board, Freshwater frequently comes in for criticism from producers forced to sell through it: Complaints are frequently heard from fishermen that they could do better if they were on their own, selling directly to fish buyers. Buckley harkens back to the day when there were eight or nine buyers on Great Slave Lake. “It was a tough living but you could still make a little bit of money,” he says. “The last few years we’ve been trying to get a good price for our fish but Freshwater wouldn’t budge. The prices have been dropping, dropping, dropping and I think it’s because there’s no competition.”

Geisler has a different recollection of the old days. “In the private fish company days, a lot of the fishermen were working for nothing,” he says. “There was no guaranteed price at the beginning of the season. They were gambling as to what they were going to get and they wouldn’t know until that fish made it to Chicago or New York, and then it would depend on how much was culled at the other end. They got paid what was left over.” Indeed, it was a movement by fishermen in Western Canada that first called on the federal government to establish a marketing system for fish like the wheat board.

For this season, the price for whitefish is 59 cents a pound, and Geisler says it’s enough for a fisherman to make a living if they do it right. “There are guys who could gross $100,000 in the summer if they wanted to,” he says. “You have to be energetic, you have to be a good operator, and you have to fish seven days a week, but it’s been done before when whitefish prices weren’t what they are today.”

Hope for the Great Slave fishery lies in a couple of possible directions. Freshwater and the Great Slave Lake Advisory Committee (made up of representatives from aboriginal, territorial and federal governments and from sport and commercial fishermen) have begun to encourage fishermen from outside the territory to get involved. “We’re trying to get some more aggressive guys going, some new blood into the fishery,” says Geisler.

"We have to get more participation on the lake. We have ample room in the Hay River plant to take 10 times as much fish as we’re getting.”

Buckley, who has had enquiries from southern fishermen looking to lease his equipment, is suspicious of the initiative. “One guy phoned me and I honestly told him, ‘Look, if I’m a commercial fisherman and I know the area and I know the fishing and I know the lake, and I’m not going out, how are you going to come here and lease a boat off me in a new area and make money?’ It just won’t work.”

But Geisler says there has been interest from southern fishermen and there are a couple of them on the lake this summer. If they have success, Geisler says, word will spread. It’s one way to get the catch up to a level that would allow for investment in the fishery infrastructure. He also points out that regardless of who is doing the fishing, there will be economic spinoffs, particularly for Hay River, in the form of jobs and local spending.

Another sign of hope comes from the potential for “eco-labelling” the fish from Great Slave. The European market in particular is driving the trend toward sustainable fishing, and even the Walmart stores in Europe only sell eco-labelled fish. “The day is coming where we’re not going to have any choice on that one,” says Geisler. “We’re going to have to jump on that train just to maintain market position.”

While one might assume that Great Slave – a massive, pristine, under-fished lake – would be a shoe-in for an eco-label, it’s not that easy. First, you have to gather the data to prove the point. “There are a lot of holes in our knowledge that we need to fill,” says Deanna Leonard, the South Slave area manager for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “For example, we don’t currently have a good understanding of what the quantity of discarded species are. You can’t say you’re sustainable if you don’t have that information.” One of the things DFO has done this year is to implement mandatory log books. Now, says Leonard, the fishermen have to buy in and fill them out accurately.

There are some other baby steps being taken. Freshwater has hired a private agent out of Alberta to purchase whitefish from the fishermen. The company pays him by the kilogram, and Geisler thinks that having some boots on the ground in Hay River will encourage more participation on the lake.

Geisler says Freshwater also has a longterm plan for a new plant in Hay River. The company owns a lot of property in town, and is looking to subdivide it and sell off some of the lots. It would then knock the old building down and build a new, much more efficient plant. “But we have to have some commitment from the fishery that we’re going to have some fish to put in that building,” he says.

There are also some efforts underway to develop a caviar market for the roe of both whitefish and northern pike. In recent years Manitoba has become a major producer of caviar. Freshwater is now producing about 70 tonnes of whitefish roe out of Manitoba lakes for caviar, and Geisler says he could sell another 20 tonnes into the European market if he could get his hands on it. Freshwater used to process caviar in Hay River, but has not done so for years.

Whether any or all of these initiatives bear fruit and return the Great Slave fishery to a significant economic contributor remains to be seen. What is clear is that it will take more effort on everyone’s part – fishermen, regulators and Freshwater – to make it happen. “It’s a cycle but it has to get started somewhere,” says Leonard. “I think the fishermen are starting to come around to the concept of ecolabelling and are starting to feel pretty good about it. I also think that Freshwater is starting to look at Great Slave in a positive way.”

“The potential’s there, and everyone knows the potential’s there,” she says. “It’s just a matter of are there enough people here to champion this fishery and bring it back?”