Throughout the 1990s, the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corp. sold as kosher fish that wasn’t, well, kosher. It should have been a scandal, but it wasn’t because word never got out.

Even today, if you call the president and CEO of FFMC, as I did, you will find that he knows nothing about it — he arrived long after this took place and it seems no one with knowledge of it has seen reason to tell the new boss.

So why raise the issue today, more than seven years after it was hushed up?

Because the federal Conservative government has commissioned a comprehensive study of the Crown corporation’s less-than-stellar operation, which was created in the late ’60s to market all of the catch of the inland fishery. In fact, the George Morris Centre, an international research organization, has recently completed this study and hopefully it will be released soon.

This study will have to deal with the “ghosts of years past” and there are many, as scandalous in their own ways as was the kosher coverup:

* In the past three years sales are down 20 per cent or $13 million.

* Fish deliveries are down 26 per cent from 50 million pounds to 37 million pounds.

* Loans payable over the past 20 years averaged between $6 million and $12 million annually but over the past four years these loans have skyrocketed to $18 million to $23 million.

* The organization claims to be the “fisherman’s friend,” but almost 45 per cent have pulled up their nets for good. There were nearly 4,000 fishers in the 1980s; now there are about 2,300 left to eke out a living feeding the monopoly.

* The marketing board was created ostensibly to improve the lot of fishers from Great Slave Lake in the north and west to northwestern Ontario by taking away their right to sell to whom they pleased and putting in its place a monopoly and fish processing plant in Transcona.

There is not much evidence of the vaunted efficiencies that bureaucrats were to deliver. In fact, the price paid for fish today is almost the same as it was in the early 1980s, while the cost of boats, fuel, nets, motors and labour has dramatically increased. The monopoly, meanwhile, still sends fish to China to be processed instead of to the communities where the fish come from and where 80 per cent to 90 per cent of residents are unemployed.

* Recently, the auditor general of Canada waded into the finances of the fish board. The auditor general’s “special examination” recommended changing the profile of the board of directors to include some financial expertise and to establish an audit committee to deal with financial matters. If this was a private company it would be seeking bankruptcy protection and going through a restructuring process. Instead, it went to Ottawa in July 2006 and requested its line of credit be raised from $30 million to a staggering $50 million — and got it!

Another “ghost” haunting FFMC is the kosher coverup, of which the review of the corporation should be made aware.

The FFMC is the largest North American supplier of fish minced to produce kosher fish called “gefilte fish.” Its plant is certified by the Orthodox Union (OU), the most respected kosher certification organization in the United States.

To be OU certified, the FFMC employed a rabbi to supervise the processing and cleaning required for the kosher certification. This is very important to all who eat kosher food, whether they are Jews who observe kosher practices or consumers who simply want to be assured that their food has been prepared according to strict hygienic guidelines.

But according to information obtained from employees at FFMC, the rabbi was often derelict in his duties and management knew it.

While he was required to observe the production line at all times, he spent a great deal of time in an office on a computer, or was simply absent.

He was obliged to make sure that only fish with fins and scales were being processed, that species like burbot and catfish were not in the mix. Allowing a catfish into the mix would be as offensive to Jews as dropping pork into ground beef would be to Muslims.

The rabbi inspector was in the employ of the FFMC from the late 1980s until 2000. But for at least the last five of those years, he lived in Kenora and commuted to Winnipeg once every couple of weeks to pick up his Government of Canada paycheque.

In his absence, former workers say they were instructed to make OU labels to seal each box of minced fish, and processing lines were operated at maximum rates without due respect for the Jewish Sabbath and holidays.

(Click HERE to read the rest of this exclusive article on the Winnipeg Free Press website.)