Blind-sided by a consultant's report, a delegation of Island lobster fisherman stormed out of a meeting in Moncton Wednesday with the future of the P.E.I. lobster industry on the line.
New Brunswick wants the smallest legal size of lobster to steadily increase over the next three years in the Northumberland Strait.
That will wipe out most of the P.E.I. industry, says Minister of Fisheries Ron MacKinley.
His staff was on the phone Wednesday, lining up a meeting next Friday, 1 February, with Keith Ashfield, federal fisheries minister who also happens to be an MP for New Brunswick.
"P.E.I. catches 80 percent of the canner lobsters that are caught and New Brunswick catches the other 20, so we have the most to lose," said MacKinley.
Of all the lobster caught on P.E.I., some 57 percent are the smaller canners and Island processors have found a way to market them, he said. Losing that fishery would be devastating, said MacKinley.
The New Brunswick crew at Wednesday's meeting argued that by hiking the minimum size, DFO would help all the fishermen in the region increase their landings because mature females would be left in the water to produce more eggs rather than ending up on a plate in Europe or China, says a report in the Times Transcript newspaper.
