CAP-PELE, New Brunswick — August 11, 2012 — Jean-Pierre Cormier stood on the dock at Aboiteau Wharf last week in this southeastern New Brunswick fishing town. A dozen or so fellow lobstermen stood with him and chatted about the weather and where to go for lunch.
Behind them were neat rows of lobster traps stacked six high. Their boats were tied up to the dock in a perfect line along the water's edge.
In a normal year, the lobstermen and their boats would be motoring around Northumberland Strait, setting traps for the start of a short late-summer season.
But this is no normal year.
"We can't fish for $2.50 a pound," said Cormier, the spokesman for a group of lobstermen who call Aboiteau Wharf home. "How do you make a living on that?"
Last week, $2.50 a pound is what Cormier and others were being offered for their catch by processors. It was the lowest price they had seen in decades, but the processors — nearly 20 in New Brunswick alone — said that's the price they were paying for lobsters brought in from Maine, so that's the price the market would bear.
"They are selling their lobsters for nothing," Cormier said of the Maine lobstermen. "They are flooding the market with cheap lobster before we even have a chance to get started."
But then, late Friday night, the New Brunswick processors and the Maritime Fishermen's Union struck a compromise.
Canadian lobstermen will get $3 per pound for cannery lobster and $3.50 for market lobster. It's unclear what effect, if any, the deal will have on Maine trade.
The agreement likely ends the threat of further protests at New Brunswick processors, which were at the center of the crisis last week. The demonstrations sent ripples down the coast because Maine trucks were prevented from reaching the facilities.
Cormier and some of his friends were there. Their message was simple: Reject these cheap Maine lobsters and pay us at least $3.50 to $4 a pound for Canadian lobsters.
"I don't know why they are willing to accept so little," he said of Maine's lobstermen.
Maine lobstermen don't like the low price, either. They haven't since earlier this summer, when the early glut of soft-shell lobsters made for a supply that exceeded demand.
But $2.50 a pound is better than nothing. They need Canadian processors to take those lobsters because there is not enough demand for live lobsters and because there are far fewer processors in Maine.
Read the full story in the Portland Press Herald