Despite the bottoming out of restaurants sales, the sustainable fish wholesaler and retailer says sales for 2020 dropped by just 10 per cent. The reason: “We have too few customers [in Atlantic Canada] and our fish is harvested in export-level quantities,” says Nelson, with the U.S. its biggest export partner. “I just spoke to a farmer who picked up four new customers yesterday, half in the States,” she says.
It was “hard,” he says, “because we felt trapped inside.” The crew pined for familiar foods so their employers dropped off tortillas, fresh cheese and jalapeno peppers at their hotel. Gomez’s $14-an-hour Ontario minimum wage – compared to the roughly $10 a day he would receive in his home state of Chiapas, Mexico – has allowed him to buy livestock for his farm back home.