The federal government is moving ahead with plans to sell the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation after years of financial mismanagement, failed audits, and political embarrassment.Cabinet said it will table legislative amendments to the Freshwater Fish Marketing Act to allow the long-discussed privatization of the Winnipeg-based Crown corporation, which once held a monopoly on lake fish sales across Western Canada. Blacklock's Reporter says no timeline has been set for the sale.The corporation, created in 1969, was intended to centralize and streamline the processing and export of lake fish — mainly pickerel and whitefish — to U.S. and European buyers. But over time, provinces began abandoning the program. Ontario pulled out in 2011, followed by Saskatchewan in 2012, Alberta in 2014, and Manitoba in 2017.The agency’s decline became public after it failed three federal audits in just over a decade. .“What an absolute mess,” said then-NDP MP David Christopherson during a 2017 parliamentary hearing. The same year, auditors found serious management failures, including hiring unqualified staff, buying unnecessary equipment, and ignoring previous audit recommendations.Internal turmoil followed. Within two years, a third of employees and two board directors resigned. Records also showed the corporation spent $88,200 on a Winnipeg publicist for “general support in protecting the corporation’s reputation.”In 2016, cabinet fired CEO Donald Salkeld, who earned $175,000 a year, following an investigation into questionable expenses. Access-to-information records revealed Salkeld billed taxpayers for Winnipeg hotel stays even though he lived just an hour away in Petersfield, Manitoba. .Staff accused him of misusing corporate loyalty points for personal travel and “loose business meetings” in the city.Auditors later concluded management had “disregarded key controls” and routinely filled jobs without proper descriptions or merit-based processes.Despite those red flags, Ottawa initially resisted privatization. “I think the corporation has provided a very important economic benefit,” then-fisheries minister Dominic LeBlanc said in 2017.But by 2021, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans admitted the sale was inevitable, citing a “willingness and capacity to pursue negotiation of transferring the corporation to a harvester-led entity.”
