Suffocated by its debts, the Madelinan company LA Renaissance des Îles ended up collapsing. Its recovery plan was refused by its creditors on Thursday, confirming its bankruptcy and leaving some 300 employees in limbo. A fishermen’s cooperative is now asking to be born from the ashes of the company.
It is an entrepreneurial death that hurts in the archipelago. LA Renaissance and its factories in Gros-Cap and Grande-Entrée processed and marketed almost a quarter of the seafood caught in the archipelago. Despite its preponderant position in the Magdalen Islands, the company founded in 2014 was dragging a debt of nearly 20 million dollars. Half of that liability, or $9.2 million, was to go to 325 unsecured creditors who will never see their money back.
Among them, 67 Magdalen lobster fishermen who will each lose, on average, more than $40,000 in bankruptcy.
The recovery plan refused Thursday at the Percé courthouse provided that unsecured creditors would recover 54% of the amounts due within a seven-year horizon. A proposal that is too wobbly and above all, humiliating in the eyes of the fishermen concerned.
“It literally insulted them,” confirms Alexandre Bourgeois, vice-president of the Magdalen Islands Lobster Fishermen’s Office.
The plan depended in particular on still uncertain government aid and a bank loan, also hypothetical given the financial difficulties of the company.
“It was doomed to failure, believes Nadine Cyr, director general of the Office. Trust was broken, no fisherman would have agreed to do business with LA Renaissance if the company had managed to avoid bankruptcy. »
The relationship between the fishermen and the company had degenerated from last year, when the company failed to pay two weeks of fishing to the sailors. All of them, without exception, preferred to lose all of their marbles in the bankruptcy rather than give LA Renaissance a second chance with the hope of recovering some 20,000 dollars.
“My primary concern is to resume operations at LA Renaissance in time for the fishing season,” indicated the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, André Lamontagne, who said he was “aware of the importance that this plant has for Madelinot fishermen.
He points out that his ministry, like that of the Economy, “are already in support mode” to help the trustee in bankruptcy find buyers.
A buyer, and quickly
With the approach of the fishing season, at the beginning of May, everyone now wants a buyer to appear quickly. With the bankruptcy of LA Renaissance, the Islands have only five processors left to add value to seafood products and market them.
“The two factories are now offered to the highest bidder,” explains the Member of Parliament for the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Joël Arseneau. The priority now is to save operations and 300 jobs in time for the start of the next fishing season. »
The elected PQ believes that the assets must remain in the bosom of Quebec. “I would even say that in an ideal world, it would be Madelinots who would take over business. “ An opinion shared by the vice-president of the Office of lobster fishers of the Islands.
“When the interests remain on the Islands, it’s a plus, it facilitates the relationship, believes Alexandre Bourgeois. If you don’t have someone, on the other hand, it’s better to have an outside buyer than nothing at all. »
The government will also have to ensure that the recovery plan presented by a possible buyer will hold water, underlines Joël Arseneau, “to avoid ending up with another lame duck. The elected PQ underlines that past governments have injected large sums of public money into LA Renaissance, to end with the unfortunate outcome of Thursday.
The fishermen are mobilizing
Shortly before the formalization of the bankruptcy, fishermen from the Magdalen Islands had expressed the desire to take over the reins of the company.
“We want to form a fishermen’s cooperative that will take charge of all the assets,” they wrote in a letter sent to Minister Lamontagne and his colleague from the Economy, Pierre Fitzgibbon, whose The duty got a copy.
The recovery of assets would preserve 120 local jobs “ [essentiels] for the economy, development and survival of the Magdalen Islands,” say the authors. It would also guarantee the maintenance, according to them, of the marketing capacity of the archipelago, thus sparing fishermen the task of having to find a buyer outside Quebec if they cannot sell directly to the Islands.
Cap-Dauphin, a cooperative of mostly English-speaking fishermen based in Grosse-Île, is a model of success, believes Mr. Arseneau, who sees favorably the fact that people from the community want to take their destiny into their own hands and their economy. “The government must listen,” adds the elected Parti Québécois. Seems minimal to me. »