Rancid Newfoundland fish sauce plant will be cleaned up. Whose responsibility is it?

ST. JOHN’S — Two governments appear to disagree on who will pay to clean up an abandoned rural Newfoundland fish sauce factory that has tormented residents with its fetid stench for years.

Provincial and federal officials were in St. Mary’s, N.L., this week to discuss the decaying building on the community’s shoreline, after high winds tore off the plant’s oceanside wall on the weekend.

Chris Tibbs, Newfoundland and Labrador’s environment minister, said the first priority was to secure the building so nothing else flies off in the wind. Work was also underway to find a disposal site for the leaking vats of fish sauce that have formed sloshing pools of sludge on the factory floor.

Tibbs said the Canadian government holds some responsibility for the deteriorating situation and he was pleased to hear the local member of Parliament — Paul Connors — say there would be federal money to help clean up the site.

Connors had a different message in an interview Tuesday. The Liberal said he was looking for funding, but there was no program or pot of cash immediately available to tap.

The fish sauce plant problem, he said, is provincial jurisdiction.

There was one thing the two leaders enthusiastically agreed on: The people of St. Mary’s have suffered long enough.

“The smell is very strong,” Connors said. “It is a foul odour.”

St. Mary’s is a quiet town of about 300 people on the shore of St. Mary’s Bay in eastern Newfoundland. The Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company factory opened there in 1990, bringing much-needed jobs to the town. The owners abandoned it about a decade later, after a series of legal and regulatory battles.

More than 100 vats of fermenting fish were left behind, alongside about six pallets of bottled product, said Steve Ryan, the town’s mayor. Liquids have slowly seeped from the vats over the years, pooling in reeking swamps throughout the massive building.

A picture in Memorial University’s online archive shows John Crosbie, then a federal minister, cutting the ribbon at the factory’s opening ceremony in September 1990. The business received federal funding through the federal Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Ryan said.

Run-off from the plant could pose a threat to the fishing grounds nearby, which is the purview of the federal Fisheries Department, Ryan said. Fisheries and Oceans Canada said in a statement Tuesday that it visited the factory in 2023 and found there was no threat to fish or fish habitat.

Ryan noted that plenty had changed since 2023.

Bickering between governments has kept the factory standing, Ryan said. Nobody could agree on who should foot the bill to tear it down. The province’s previous Liberal government finally gave up the fight and set aside about $1.5 million for the cleanup in the current budget, the mayor said.

Ryan is confident the work will now be done, and he expects the first vat of fish sauce to be removed from the building in a matter of weeks, he said. However, he said the cost could run well over $1.5 million and he’d be “disgusted” if the federal government didn’t chip in.

“If we need another million to finish this project and get it over the finish line, and you don’t stand up for the people of St. Mary’s, don’t come to me for any more votes,” Ryan said. “Like, come on, you don’t leave this on anybody’s doorstep.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 22, 2026.

Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press