Lobster Processors Association President Jerry Amirault

by Sandra Dinsmore

Jerry Amirault, a ninth-generation Acadian, and his wife Rhonda, on the porch of their farm house and office in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. Sandra Dinsmore photo

Jerry Amirault has a business office that has to be the envy of just about any man who visits it. Not only is it spacious at 16 or 18 by 20, it’s attached to his farmhouse, which is on his working, 150-acre farm in the Mi’kmaq-named village of Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. (Tatamagouche means the meeting of two waters.) The room is filled with light from windows on the south wall. Two impressive coyote hides hang from one side of the room’s entrance wall; a working cobblestone fireplace fills a third wall, and a large, competent desk, behind which an impressive computer set-up commands the fourth wall, opposite the light-filled windows. Fishing poles leaning up against the corner of one wall speak to one of Jerry’s personal pleasures and a single image, a print of lobstering, hanging on the entrance wall to the left of his desk announces Jerry’s work as president of the Lobster Processors Association of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Jerry, a ninth-generation Acadian with, he says, “some Mi’kmaq,” also works his beef farm. He and his wife Rhonda raise cows and calves and sell the calves each November. (When he gets a call while out in a field, he’s apt to say to the caller, “Wait till I shut down the tractor.”)

How does he manage to combine these two very different businesses? Jerry replies, “I’m a businessman. In business the principals are the same.” A graduate of St Francis Xavier University, where he majored in business, then McGill for graduate school, he went on to become a Chartered Accountant (CA), though he didn’t stay in public practice long.

He’s a problem solver. Listen to his story and you’ll hear that somebody in the fishing industry was either asking him to take a look at a company that was having problems or a group of people were asking him to start a fisheries association. It’s happened over and over throughout his career.

But you’ll notice, Jerry is the president of the Lobster Processors Association of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. “I’ve never been a so-called executive director,” he said, “because that implies a board setting directions. And I do have discussions with many people within the industry to determine the correct direction. This, candidly,” he said, “because I respect that they are fiercely independent. And I’m only as effective as I have their knowledge, insight, and co-operation.”

He says throughout his career his job has been to eliminate obstacles: first, to identify the obstacle, and then to help the company or group to remove it. His skill, he says, “Is using the appropriate people in the appropriate spots.” In conversation with a company or group, he says, “I’m processing information as we’re going, using the information that I have in order to do that.” But he’s always dealt at the top level, saying, “Two things: I have a lot of experience in understanding people: listening. What are intuitively the salient points that make [this business] successful? How can I enhance it? Then once it’s there,” he said, “I exit the organization. I’m not looking for a career.”

In other words, Jerry is in and out of these organizations every five or six years. It’s the way he works.

But right now Jerry is running the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia lobster processors association. Processors compete for product with live side for product because both groups want maximum yield. Although processors can deal with weak, not fully meated product, that’s not what they are looking for. As Jerry explains, “We buy 100 lbs. of lobsters, Maine shedders give us 28 percent. So for every hundred lbs. you’ve got 28 lbs. of salable product. That’s very expensive. But if you get into the good, hard shell lobster where you’re getting 40 percent, out of every hundred lbs., you’re getting 40 lbs. of saleable product.”

And there’s also the challenge Canadian processors have of coming up with the working capital to buy 60 million lbs. of US lobsters. In Canadian money, or at $5/lb., that comes to $300 million dollars. “To be able to have that money; to be able to buy those lobsters,” Jerry said, “we have to process them and hold them from six up to 12 months. That’s a huge investment.

“If we did not have the working capital,” he continued, “then we might have to reduce our selling price in order to get the product faster and get the money back.

“That’s what a lot of people don’t understand,” Jerry said: “the differentiation in currency between Canada and the US has meant that we have to raise more working capital in order to buy US product. It’s a matter of carrying the investment. Yes, we’re going to sell it in US dollars, but we have to convert some of those US dollars to pay our Canadian expenses, wages primarily.”

The difference in currency between the US and Canada has meant an increase in working capital, Jerry said. “It drives everything up.”

There are three major lobster areas: the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which produces 65 million lbs., spring and fall; the Gulf of Maine, which probably produces 275 to 280 million lbs., of which 125 million is in Maine; and the remaining portion is in Canada and comprises southwest Nova, the Bay of Fundy and down into Grand Manan and the Grey Zone.

“We [the Canadian processors] can deal with weak, not fully meated product,” Jerry said, but unlike Americans, because no one knows when the molt will be completed and when the animal will fully recover, he’d prefer to manage the fishery the way the Canadian company Clearwater Lobster manages a fishing area that holds 1.4 million lbs. “They let Mother Nature hold the lobsters,” he said. “They harvest them when they are at their absolute premium.”