As the seven-year lifespan of the Atlantic Fisheries Fund (AFF) comes to a close, program director Rob McDonald looks back at the achievements of the program and the future of the AFF.
The AFF was conceived as a way to steer Canada’s seafood industry towards producing high-quality, value-added and sustainable-sourced products to meet an ever-growing market demand.
The $400-million program, in which the federal government covered 70 per cent and the Atlantic provinces cover the other 30 per cent, is set to hit its sunset clause in March of this year.
According to McDonald, the seven-year term of the AFF was subject to a two-year reprofile extension, which will allow the AFF to continue funding projects right up to the March 2024 closing date.
“On average, it takes between 18 and 24 months for clients to complete their projects after we approve them. So, that extra two years allows them the time to fully implement their projects,” said McDonald. “It took a few months to stand the program up. The first 18 months was spent building the program, building our partnerships with the provinces and creating awareness within industry about the programs, because they had never heard of us before.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, AFF funding requests shot through the roof as many companies sought to surmount the labour shortage exacerbated by lockdowns. According to McDonald, about 70 per cent of AFF funding went into technology adoptions and equipment acquisitions to surmount these shortages.
“Labour availability and overreliance on temporary foreign workers is probably the number one issue in the sector,” said McDonald. “It provides a much safer and more inviting work environment for the workers when you automate. It’s less labour-intensive and less dirty work in the plants. We’ve found, particularly in some of the bigger processing [plants], it’s been a powerful tool for worker retention and recruitment.”
Besides automation providing a greater quality of life in processing plants, McDonald said that upgrades to plant technology often result in an overall better product coming out of said plants.
“There’s a more consistent and better-quality product coming out the other end,” said McDonald. “You have more control over the quality chain.”
The pandemic did, however, extend the timeline of many funded projects due to the supply chain issues that it created.
“With the pandemic, a lot of those projects had to be delayed because of the delays of getting equipment onsite and getting people onsite to deal with the installation,” said McDonald. “The other thing that was really positive is that most if not all of the clients stuck with their projects — they didn’t give up on them and got them done and continue to do so.”
As of now, the AFF has around 80 per cent of their funding committed to various projects in Atlantic Canada. According to McDonald, the process of getting approved for AFF funding can take some time, which has led to the extension of their initial closing date.
“We’ve got enough demand in-house to commit, we believe, the rest of it,” said McDonald. “But these projects take a lot of work to evaluate, and we have to seek provincial and federal ministerial approval, so there’s a bit of a process to get an approved project and to get it contracted.”
Overall, the AFF has been well-received by the federal and provincial governments, as well as by industry. The success of the program has some wondering if there will be a second iteration of the program in the near future. McDonald said it is too early to tell, but the appetite for one is there.
“We’re in significant consultation with our provincial partners and our colleagues in Ottawa around that. So, that’s still a work in progress, because we still have an active program for the next little while,” said McDonald. “There’s strong interest. We feel like we have a strong business case for a renewal given how the program has gone.”
