MHA for Placentia–St. Mary’s, Sherry Gambin-Walsh, is welcoming the start of the long-awaited cleanup of the former Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company site in St. Mary’s, building on the significant work she and the previous Liberal government did to make this happen.
Work is scheduled to begin in the last week of June.
The project marks the culmination of more than a decade of work involving the Town of St. Mary’s, multiple provincial and federal government departments, environmental regulators, and community advocates to address the abandoned site and remove approximately 110 vats of fish sauce material.
The file was inherited by MHA Gambin-Walsh following her election in 2015 and involved numerous challenges, including private ownership issues, property liens, environmental assessments, changing regulations, and jurisdictional questions regarding responsibility for an ACOA-funded project dating back to the 1990s.
“Our former Liberal government committed significant resources in Budget 2025 to resolving this issue, including funding assessments, supporting the transfer of ownership to the Town of St. Mary’s, and ultimately allocating more than $1.5 million toward the removal of the material,” says Gambin-Walsh. “The people of St. Mary’s have waited patiently for certainty. They worked with me for ten years to get to this point, and I am pleased to see this important project finally moving forward.”
The material will be mixed with peat moss and transported in sealed containers to the Sunnyside Waste Management Facility. Gambin-Walsh is encouraging the provincial government to continue securing federal cost-sharing support for the cleanup of legacy ACOA-funded projects throughout Newfoundland and Labrador where responsibility has fallen to local taxpayers.
This situation exposed significant gaps in the environmental and funding requirements that existed decades ago, but it also demonstrated that modern environmental assessment and remediation processes are much stronger today.
The people of St. Mary’s, and all of Newfoundland and Labrador, deserve clean and safe communities.
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