MONTREAL — For years, the northern shrimp fished in the Quebec waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence have been known as"crevettes de Matane," named after the town where much of the province's harvest has been processed since the 1960s.
"It's more than a worry. It's a quasi-certainty that if it continues to decline like last year, it's the end, especially with economic conditions that don't help us either," Element said in a phone interview. Element said the quotas were about 35,000 tonnes as recently as 2015. What remains, he said, is enough for a handful of boats and crews, rather than the 80 or 90 that currently exist.
Given these changes, she said it’s likely the northern shrimp will become “commercially extinct” in the St. Lawrence, meaning it will continue to exist but in numbers too small to support a fishery. Métivier said that while the industry's troubles are nothing new, the closure was a shock because Royal Greenland had recently upgraded its facilities to expand into crab and lobster transformation and built new housing for the roughly 150 temporary workers -- mostly Mexican -- who work there every year.