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Herald
Magazine
Issue 6 Volume 2
September 14, 2013
Making a new
life in Canada
New Brunswick’s A study in
sturgeon general citizenship
One family pursues
a better future here
A scientist, a fish
and caviar is involved
New Canadians have
to know their stuff
PITCHING NEWCOMERS
What it takes to convince immigrants to stay
BY JOHN DEMONT
Herald Magazine
04 Contents
September 2013
CONTENTS
THE CHRONICLE HERALD
EDITORIAL
EDITOR, HERALD MAGAZINE Deborah Wiles
DIRECTOR, NEWSROOM Frank De Palma
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, NEWSROOM
Paul O’Connell
CONTENT EDITORS Bill Johnston, Randy Jones,
Bob Burgess, Tim Arsenault, Tom McCoag,
Ed MacLellan
DESIGN AND MULTIMEDIA
DIRECTOR DESIGN, MULTIMEDIA
Jayson Taylor
PHOTO EDITOR Darren Pittman
ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Mike Harvey
GRAPHIC DESIGNER Matt Dempsey
08
In pursuit of a better life
Unsure about their future in Israel, one family settles in Halifax
15
No risk, no gain
A lesson gleaned from safe playgrounds
16
Breaching the bastion
Four decades ago, some doors were closed to young lawyer Noella Fisher
18
26
DIRECTOR, IT Paul Williams
DIRECTOR, PRODUCTION Michael Murtha
DIRECTOR, DIGITAL Sheryl Grant
DIRECTOR, CUSTOM MEDIA Jeff Nearing
DIRECTOR, HUMAN RESOURCES
Theresa Williams
DIRECTOR, FINANCE/CONTROLLER
Jocelyn Green
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Copyright 2013, The Chronicle Herald.
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Sturgeon resurgent
Cover Story: Potential abounds on a Halifax cricket pitch
34
To know it is to love it
Immigrants must pass an extensive test on Canada to become citizens
38
Welcome to the country, sort of
Help is limited for immigrants who want to settle in rural areas
40
Pictures at an exhibition
A photographic roundup of the 60th annual country fair at Crapaud, P.E.I.
42
Have a sip
Bartender Jeff Van Horne shakes up a new drink for fall
47
Rural reality
P.E.I.’s Georgetown Conference takes aim at reversing a disturbing trend
50
Random Thoughts
Susan Kent of This Hour Has 22 Minutes shares her brand of humour
Cover
Photographer Adrien Veczan captured this shot of bowler Daksh Talwar delivering
a ball during a Nova Scotia Cricket Association match in Halifax in late July.
Herald Magazine
18 The Sturgeon General
September 2013
ROMANIAN-BORN SCIENTIST CORNEL CEAPA IS PAINSTAKINGLY
BUILDING A LEGACY, ONE STURGEON EGG AT A TIME. THERE IS A READY MARKET FOR CAVIAR
AND OTHER PRODUCTS FROM ACADIAN STURGEON AND CAVIAR INC., HIS
FAMILY-OWNED OPERATION ON THE SHORES OF THE ST. JOHN RIVER, AND IF HE HAS
HIS WAY, ONE DAY ALL THE STURGEON IN THE ONCE-DEPLETED
BALTIC SEA WILL HAVE COME FROM HIS FARM.
By Reid Southwick
Photography by Viktor Pivovarov
Caviar from Acadian Sturgeon and Caviar Inc.
is the star in this appetizer served
at Toronto’s Oyster Boy restaurant.
Photo by CHARLA JONES
20 The Sturgeon General
Herald Magazine
September 2013
t an oyster restaurant in downtown
Toronto, waiters serve up a delicacy
Cornel Ceapa’s dream is to run an aquaculture
caught and harvested by an immigrant
farm and fishery that are equally sustainable,
family in a small, unsuspecting
avoiding the overfishing that collapsed sturgeon
Maritime community.
Oyster Boy has offered sturgeon
stocks around the world.
caviar on its menu for the past five
or so years, a testament to the $80
appetizer’s depth of flavour, its
prestige. And its longevity there and
in restaurants from St. John’s, N.L., to Vancouver is proof of the Ceapa
family’s triumph over the odds — financial walls, regulatory hurdles,
the doubters, the discouragers — to get their Maritime fare onto dinner
plates. “I love caviar, but you couldn’t get it anywhere because it’s not
sustainably grown and fished around the
world,” says Adam Colquhoun, the restaurant’s owner. Then he stumbled onto
the Ceapas’ website. After a trip to see
their fishery and processing plant in New
Brunswick, he was hooked. “When I got
back to Toronto, I said to my chef, we’ve
got to do this.”
The caviar, which Colquhoun serves
with buckwheat blini, hard-cooked egg,
creme fraiche and minced shallot, traces
back to the banks of the St. John River
and a southern New Brunswick swath of
land reachable only by water and dirt
road. From here, the home of the
Ceapas’ sturgeon fishery and processing
plant at Carters Point, the family is
attempting to salvage the commercial
viability of a fish deemed threatened or
endangered around the globe.
Acadian Sturgeon and Caviar Inc. is the
brainchild of Cornel Ceapa, a Romanian
scientist who was driven to these shores
by circumstance and his passion for
sturgeon, a fish that has swum through
the St. John River for millions of years.
Running the business with wife Dorina
and son Michael since 2005, he is not as
financially comfortable as he would like
Cornel Ceapa and Gary Ouellette pull a sturgeon that measures 2 1/2 metres into their boat on the St. John River.
to be, but that is not his only ambition,
far from it. Ceapa is out to create a legacy. His dream is to run an aquaculture
farm and fishery that are equally sustainable, avoiding the overfishing
that collapsed sturgeon stocks around the world. And if he has his way,
one day all the sturgeon in the once-depleted Baltic Sea will have
come from his farm.
The journey to that end is a long, tiresome slog that keeps him on the
road to pitch his products to potential customers or in his boat hauling
up the day’s catch. (Nowadays, he tends to stay out of the hatchery,
where technicians spawn and grow fish, because, “at some point, you
have to learn to delegate.”)
“We live a crazy life. But I love it,” he says. “I’m an adrenalin junky.”
Work rarely stops, usually stretching from the early morning to the
evening, says Dorina Ceapa, Cornel’s high school sweetheart who
22 The Sturgeon General
“They are cool. They are different. It’s their biology,
and the taste.”
— Cornel Ceapa
makes caviar during the fishing season and helps run the business
the rest of the time — marketing, sales, networking, you name it.
“I’m chasing the dream,” she says.
A former technician at a Romanian natural science museum, Dorina
Ceapa earned a business degree at the University of New Brunswick to
chase that dream, to realize that legacy.
Friends sometimes ask her, “Can’t you have a rest, can’t you have a
vacation?” and she replies, “I consider that I took vacation until I came
here in Canada. So let’s just do the work and do the dream.”
Cornel Ceapa, born under Communist rule, is a scientist with a PhD
in sturgeon biology. He is a conservationist. A researcher. A fisherman.
A businessman. A roving salesman. And an unadulterated
sturgeon geek who can spend hours talking about sturgeon migration,
sturgeon anatomy (including male sturgeon gonads he sells in Italy for
cosmetics), sturgeon fishing, sturgeon recipes, sturgeon everything.
“They are cool. They are different. It’s their biology, and the taste,”
Ceapa says, explaining what it is about sturgeon that wakes him up in
the morning. “I mean, caviar is really, really — and I don’t exaggerate
this — the best gourmet food you can eat. And it’s healthy.”
At 6:30 a.m. every morning during the sturgeon fishing season,
which runs roughly in May, July and August, Ceapa and Bill Ford, a
commercial fisherman, run a roughly five-metre boat. The boat launch
offers breathtaking views of rolling green hills and a mighty body of
water, just 30 kilometres upstream from the river’s mouth at the Bay
of Fundy.
The fishermen haul in eight nets, some within view of Ceapa’s property, others around the bend, to inspect the daily catch. They release
about half the fish that get tangled in their nets, “which can be crazy
for a fisherman,” Ceapa acknowledges, but they want to squeeze the
most value from a precious fishery.
Females without any eggs and males not fully grown are tagged and
released because they are worth more when the Ceapa clan can glean
caviar and more lucrative meat from their bodies.
The nets — Ceapa owns six, with the remaining two belonging to
Ford — can yield 150 sturgeon in 10 or 15 days, the fish usually 1.8 to
2.5 metres long, although their efforts are limited by an annual quota
of 350 sturgeon. Once the daily haul is ashore, five crews in the processing plant get to work cleaning them, removing unfertilized eggs
The Sturgeon General
23
Photos from left:
A sturgeon is removed from the net during a day of fishing
on the St. John River in early July.
Cornel Ceapa is attempting to thrust caviar back into
consumer diets by appealing to their inner romantic.
Ceapa (left) and Gary Ouellette toss a sturgeon back into
the water.
Day-old Atlantic sturgeon swim in tanks at the hatchery.
It can take 10 years to grow sturgeon from egg to adult.
for caviar, skinning and slicing the meat, vacuum sealing it and,
finally, flash-freezing it. The industrial blast freezer can chill
sturgeon meat in about two hours.
Very little is wasted. Loins are made into steaks; shavings are packaged for burgers. Cartilage and bone marrow are made ready for soup,
while male gonads, which can weigh four or five kilograms each, are
frozen and shipped for cosmetics. Then there is the paté, the smoked
sturgeon, the fins, all prepared in the processing and packaging plant,
a sea of stainless steel.
Reaching inside the walk-in fridge, Ceapa can hold up any one of his
products and recite the best recipes to make them sing on your taste
buds. He is constantly talking to chefs; he is friends with more than
1,500 on Facebook.
Ceapa just as easily lists what he calls misconceptions about caviar;
that it is a “salty, dirty thing for rich people,” that if fishmongers and
chefs put it on their menus, nobody would buy it. He knows what he is
up against. But if Ceapa listened to his critics, he wouldn’t have started
in the first place, and he certainly wouldn’t be selling 1,000-gram tins
of premium caviar for $2,200.
Undaunted, he is attempting to thrust caviar back into consumer
diets by appealing to their inner romantic. “Life is beautiful; you have
things to celebrate in life,” he says through a thick, eastern European
accent. “If you have someone that you really love or someone that you
really want to show your appreciation to, you go into a restaurant
and you order caviar and champagne.”
When Ceapa selected his PhD subject in 1995, he wanted to do
something special, something he could leave behind, a legacy. His
professor and academic peers discouraged him from studying
sturgeon, calling it suicide. Stocks had been depleted and it was
difficult to access the fish. But he did it anyway, publishing his paper
in 2001 with the horrifying conclusion that it was too late to rescue
populations in the Danube River, where sturgeon had once been
abundant. The fish was nearing extinction.
Two years later, Ceapa moved his family to Saint John, where there
was an opening for a research technician at the University of New
Brunswick, one of a few post-secondary institutions in Canada studying sturgeon at the time. Four years later, after struggling to find other
companies in the province to build a sturgeon aquaculture business
with, he and his family started their own.
It has not been easy, but he had been expecting that from the beginning. Two New Brunswick sturgeon farms had failed before he started
leasing land on the banks of the St. John River. It can take 10 years to
grow sturgeon from egg to adult, and finding a lender willing to wait
that long for a return is impossible, especially for an immigrant family
who had no credit history.
They got started by convincing a North Carolina customer to pay
Herald Magazine
24 The Sturgeon General
September 2013
(Photos clockwise from top) Gary Ouellette, left, and Cornel Ceapa release a male sturgeon into a hatchery tank. Dorina Ceapa opens a fridge that is stocked with caviar.
Jordan Raynes skins sturgeon at the processing plant.
50 per cent up front for baby sturgeon spawned from wild fish.
Little by little, they developed the business, selling live baby sturgeon
to researchers restocking the Baltic Sea, to aquaculture companies,
many of them Asian, and to American researchers. Four years ago,
they started renting space at an aquaculture farm in Minto, N.B., which
means the first eggs they sent over will be adults by 2019. They have
been waiting to build their own farm to shrink the amount of time
investors have to wait until they get their return. Meantime, they sell
caviar, meat and byproducts from wild sturgeon across the country,
whetting consumer appetites before their aquaculture fish is mature.
“I pay my technicians more than I pay myself,” he says, sitting in a
kitchen that sits overtop his office, snacking on paté and smoked
sturgeon. “I live a good life. I’m happy. But we invest, and we believe
that you need to sacrifice in order to get to where you want to go.”
He travels from his Saint John home to work on a landscape many
visit on summer vacations, an isolated waterfront sanctuary tucked
inside the woods. No longer a university professor, a profession that
“gets boring after a while” because of the repetitive lectures and reading material, he is motivated by an ever-changing business where
“there is always something new, always something special.”
“Having this processing plant that is (government) inspected, having
the hatchery, having the exports, having the sales, having the marketing is like having a full-scale business, but we’re just three people.
“I love it. I wouldn’t do anything else.” I
[email protected]
@theredsouth
Reid Southwick grew up in Halifax, worked in New Brwunswick and recently moved
to Calgary.