MP Peter Stoffer deftly pushed one hot button recently and lit up several red lights.

He asked incoming prime minister Paul Martin to take advantage of his fresh start to overhaul the operations of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, notably with regard to the “creeping corporate influence” gaining all the time in the fishery despite stated DFO policy against it.

In so doing, the NDP member for Sackville-Musquodoboit Valley-Eastern Shore in Nova Scotia also raised the question of who bankrolls Martin, whose side he’s on when it comes to corporations versus the little guy, and ultimately where Atlantic Canada stands in his scheme of things.

The creeping corporate influence is no abstract thing. Fishery groups complain constantly and increasingly about “trust agreements,” whereby companies bankroll and own the boats and licenses of individual fishermen in private agreements. Although the boat and licence remain in the fisherman’s name for bureaucratic purposes, the captain and hands are basically employees of the company. In the inshore fishery, DFO policy requires the owner of the boat to be also the operator.

Fishing for scallops, groundfish, herring, crabs and shrimp is being done by fewer and fewer owners, and the phenomenon is now eating into the lobster fishery, mainstay of the economy of Western Nova Scotia in particular.

The implications are that the more corporate centralization there is, the more fishery operations get consolidated elsewhere, the more communities lose their livelihoods, and the less money fishermen and their crews make as they get squeezed by corporate owners.

And whenever corporate concentration comes up, Clearwater Fine Foods and its president, John Risley, usually come up in the same conversation. Risley controls a massive chunk of the Maritime fishery, including most of the offshore, and his intent seems to be to control nearly all of it before he calls it a day.

As it turns out, he and Clearwater together have contributed some $70,000 to Martin’s campaign, according to published figures. This is the local version of the big question hanging over Martin: How friendly will this most corporate of prime ministers be towards his big business buddies and backers, even while proclaiming himself a man of the people?

Fisheries Minister Robert Thibault has recently made noises about enforcing the DFO policy — fishermen want it written into regulation — but the scuttlebutt is that Thibault, a Chrétien supporter, might be out of Martin’s new cabinet.

Meanwhile, the fishing community is worried about the even longer term, says Alain Meuse, editor of the Sou’wester, a Yarmouth-based fishery magazine. Risley and Comeau Seafoods and the other big boys are at least homegrown entrepreneurs. “After they pack it in, then what? Bankers, lawyers as controlling investors — maybe not even Canadians? That’s what fishermen are afraid of.”

This is already the way it is on the West Coast, and Meuse says it’s, in part, a function of the cost of fishing these days. In the lobster fishery, for example, a licence and modern boat in Western Nova Scotia costs up to $1 million. Banks won’t finance such a purchase since they don’t consider a licence, the value of which depends on the state of the fish stocks, as sound collateral. That leaves a would-be buyer to seek other backers, and processors, at least for now, are the most ready source of financing.

Meanwhile, an inquiry into all this would be good in other ways as well. Since the collapse of the groundfish stocks, DFO has increasingly become a defensive, Ottawa-bound bureaucracy beset by highly-charged entanglements such as the native fishery, by the non-return of groundfish and by generally worsening ocean conditions both here and on the B.C. coast.

Bringing some of this into broad daylight would be a darn good idea. Over to you, Paul Martin.