Aaron Beswick has been reporting on Atlantic Canada’s fishing industry for 20 years, the last 13 of which have been in Nova Scotia for The Chronicle Herald, a Postmedia publication. He was named 2024 Journalist of the Year by the National Newspaper Awards for this coverage.
In the chill dark of a March night on a Nova Scotia river, a hip-wader-wearing woman put Canda’s sovereignty to the test.
Or rather, the 40 or so net-wielding members of Sipekne’katik First Nation on the opposite bank were calling Canada’s bluff.
They caught juvenile American eels (elvers) under their own band-issued licenses in defiance of a Fisheries Act requiring them to have licenses approved by the federal fisheries minister.
“I think it was the fourth call to DFO I asked their dispatch if they could say whether any officers were on duty,” said Suzy Edwards, a commercial elver harvester.
“They wouldn’t. We flagged down a passing RCMP officer and he said they’d been told to stand down on elver-related matters.”
The issue at hand is larger than the tiny translucent juvenile American eels being dumped into buckets that night.
It’s whether the federal government will enforce its own laws when challenged by First Nations claiming a sovereignty that goes well beyond that acknowledged by the Supreme Court of Canada.
The lucrative East Coast fishery — lobster is Canada’s most valuable seafood export — has been made a testing ground for federal government reconciliation policies.
More than a billion dollars has been spent in a wholesale transfer of access from traditional fishing communities to East Coast First Nations.
And yet, somehow, individual band members often have no ability to fish within Canada’s laws. When they fish outside of those laws, enforcement ranges from inconsistent to nonexistent.
Organized crime and unscrupulous foreign buyers profiting off the consequent black market export trade have been terrorizing both commercial and First Nation fishing communities through shootings, arson and other forms of violence.
It has rived the federal department of fisheries itself — frontline officers across the region refused to do enforcement patrols for over two months last year. In refusal to do unsafe work letters submitted under the Canada Labour Code, the officers claimed they’ve been subjected to assaults by armed unlicensed harvesters, their families have been threatened and that there’s been no support for enforcement from top brass or a series of federal fisheries ministers.
The elvers are first.
They’re a harbinger of spring and a series of seasonal fisheries that over the coming months will fill Nova Scotian harbours with life and industry. And of communities
pitted against one another
over a shared resource by a federal government that refuses to govern.
The greatest victim may be the American eels.
Nobody knows how many times greater than Canada’s 9,860 kilogram total allowable catch have been pulled from rivers and flown under the noses of
multiple federal agencies
for seed stock in Chinese aquaculture facilities.
But according to Hong Kong import data, almost four times our quota for the species — listed as threatened by the Committe on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada — arrived in 2023 labelled “product of Canada.”
On March 30, Suzy Edwards stood in the dark on a rock in a river and called on her federal government.
No one came.
Another river
On April 15, Hilary Maloney-Nevin was asserting Sipekne’katik First Nation sovereignty on the Tangier River. She was one of dozens of fishers who travel the hundred kilometres each evening from their home community to this non-Aboriginal eastern shore fishing village.
They line the banks of the Tangier River where it meets the Atlantic Ocean armed with dip nets and long cylindrical fyke nets.
“We’re proving to Canada we can self-govern our own people in the hopes that one day my child can fish without being harassed,” said Maloney-Nevin.
As the sun sets, the elvers are carried into the river on the rising tide.
They’ve had a long journey.
American eels are bewilderingly unique. They lurk among the tall grasses along the headwaters of rivers from the Caribbean up to Labrador. These mucus-covered water snakes grow to over a metre long.
Anywhere between the age of 10 and 30, something in the recesses of their genetic code speaks up. It drives them down to the Atlantic’s cold salt and then on to the calm warm gyre of the Sargasso Sea near the equator. Here they breed and die. Their hatched larvae grow as they are carried by ocean currents to waiting river mouths each spring to close the circle.
From time out of mind, the adults were on the menu of the Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik and Peskotomuhkatikuk tribes of eastern North America.
“You’d need a calm night and the water had to be clear,” Mi’kmaq elder Kerry Prosper told Postmedia of fishing adult eels in the springs of his youth. “The eel would wrap itself around your spear and you’d haul it aboard.”
In winter, he’d go to the ice of Nova Scotia’s Antigonish Harbour and cut holes through which he’d work his trident-like spear in growing concentric circles, searching for the eels that had burrowed into the fertile sediment.
“When our people got older and lost their appetite, they would crave eel stew,” said Prosper, who always keeps some eel in his freezer for those in his community who may need it.
“We would make that food for them. It brings them back to a warm place with a lot of memories. It brings them back to a time when they enjoyed life.”
Prosper saw Donald Marshall Jr. returning to that place after serving 11 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
The last thing Marshall wanted, explained Prosper, was to be back before the courts and media. He just wanted to fish and make a bit of money to survive.
In 1993, Marshall, a Mi’kmaq man whose father had been Grand Chief of the Mi’kmaq Nation, set a net in Pomquet Harbour, near Paq’tnkek.
He caught some eels and sold them.
His arrest kicked off a legal odyssey that would lead to the Supreme Court of Canada’s Marshall decisions, the coining of the term “moderate livelihood” and 26 years (and counting) of battles over what that means.
R vs. Marshall is at the heart of it all.
So, what has the Supreme Court of Canada said about Hilary Maloney-Nevin’s right to make a living off the fisheries? What role does the federal government have in managing and limiting that right?
Do Suzy Edwards and members of non-Aboriginal communities, who have long relied on the same resources, have their own claim?
And even if the courts give the federal government sovereignty over Atlantic Canada’s waters, does it have the will to enforce it?
Maloney-Nevin was recently approached by a federal fisheries officer while fishing eels under a license issued by her band but not by DFO. She handed him a letter to Mark Carney.
“Mr. Prime Minister, we ask that your fisheries officers from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans refrain from hindering and obstructing, taking of gear and equipment of the Mi’kmaq fishers of Sipekne’katik and respect our right to govern ourselves,” reads the letter.
“We also ask your fisheries officers and RCMP to uphold the rule of law and ensure the safety and protection of our fishers in carrying out our nation to nation based Aboriginal Treaty rights.”
He walked away.
What the treaties say
To understand
R vs. Marshall
, we have to walk back to the 18th century.
England was grasping for a foothold in the New World as it sought to pry what would become Atlantic Canada from the Mi’kmaq and their French allies. In 1726, the British signed a treaty with the Mi’kmaq to promote peace and harmony.
When the British founded Halifax in 1749, the Mi’kmaq viewed the settlement as a violation of that treaty and an infringement of their land.
A series of raids on what would become Dartmouth followed, culminating in a 1751 combined Mi’kmaq and Acadian attack that burned the town and killed 20 civilians.
Then-governor Edward Cornwallis responded by putting a bounty of 10 guineas on the heads of Mi’kmaq males — the same price the French at Fortress Louisbourg (in modern-day Cape Breton) had been paying the Mi’kmaq for English scalps.
The war was going badly for the English.
So, they tried cutting deals. They convinced Jean-Baptiste Cope, chief of a community of Mi’kmaq living along the banks of the Shubenacadie River, to sign a treaty in exchange for supplies.
“It is agreed that the said Tribe of Indians shall not be hindered from, but have free liberty of Hunting & Fishing as usual,” reads the Treaty of 1752, signed with Cope.
“… And that if they shall think a Truckhouse needful at the River Chibenaccadie or any other place of their resort, they shall have the same built and proper Merchandize lodged therein, to be Exchanged for what the Indians shall have to dispose of, and that in the mean time the said Indians shall have free liberty to bring for Sale to Halifax or any other Settlement within this Province, Skins, feathers, fowl, fish or any other thing they shall have to sell, where they shall have liberty to dispose thereof to the best Advantage.”
Of the three 18th-century Peace and Friendship treaties between a series of English governors and Mi’kmaq Chiefs, the Treaty of 1752 is most clear in its acknowledgment of the latter’s commercial right to catch and sell what they want.
That’s why it was initially relied upon by Donald Marshall Jr.’s lawyers, who claimed that as a grand chief, Cope signed the treaty of 1752 on behalf of all Mi’kmaq.
But by the time R vs. Marshall had made it to the Supreme Court of Canada, Marshall’s lawyers had dropped the Treaty of 1752.
That’s because, according to British documents from the time, a year after the signing of the Treaty of 1752, Cope’s son, Joseph Cope, arrived in Halifax, and informed the governor that his father had failed to convince chiefs in Cape Breton and Chignecto to sign-on.
Joseph Cope asked that a boat be sent to pick up the band’s provisions, according to British reports, supposedly so that they could settle near Halifax under the King’s protection. Though sent, the sloop never returned. The only member of the crew to make it home was the Acadian translator, Anthony Casteel.
In a deposition he gave upon returning to Halifax in July 1753, Casteel said the vessel had been captured and the crew killed by Mi’kmaq. His life was spared because he was Acadian (the Acadians were allied with the Mi’kmaq, though some of them worked against their own people for the British) and that while a prisoner of Cope’s in Shubenacadie, he saw the treaty burned.
Hostilities resumed, with the British and New England militias trading reprisals with the Acadians and Mi’kmaq. In 1756, the British governor formally renounced the Treaty of 1752.
So, when the case made it to the Supreme Court of Canada, Marshall’s lawyers switched to rely upon the much less clear treaty of 1760-61, which the British had signed with Paul Laurent, chief of a Mi’kmaq community in LaHave. The only reference to trade in this later treaty reads:
“I do further engage that we will not traffic, barter or Exchange any Commodities in any manner but with such persons or the managers of such Truck houses as shall be appointed or Established by His Majesty’s Governor at Lunenbourg or Elsewhere in Nova Scotia or Accadia.”
In the 1999 Marshall decision and subsequent clarification known as Marshall II, the Supreme Court of Canada interpreted this to mean that the Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik and Peskotomuhkatikuk have a right to make a “moderate livelihood” off traditionally harvested resources.
Donald Marshall Jr. was acquitted.
It didn’t define what a moderate livelihood is, leaving that to fisheries ministers to negotiate with First Nations chiefs.
But it was clear on sovereignty — that while First Nations have a right to be consulted on regulations affecting them, the buck stops with the federal fisheries minister.
And she has the authority to limit the moderate livelihood right.
“The paramount regulatory objective is conservation and responsibility for it is placed squarely on the minister responsible and not on the aboriginal or non-Aboriginal users of the resource,” reads the preamble to Marshall II.
“The regulatory authority extends to other compelling and substantial public objectives which may include economic and regional fairness, and recognition of the historical reliance upon, and participation in, the fishery by non-Aboriginal groups. Aboriginal people are entitled to be consulted about limitations on the exercise of treaty and aboriginal rights.”
The court directed the federal government to draft a regulatory regime that would allow First Nations to pursue their rights, consult in good faith with First Nations governments and, ultimately, implement it.
That hasn’t happened.
Cutting deals
Instead, the federal government has bought up commercial licenses and transferred them to First Nations along with vessels, gear, training and funding through a series of ad hoc agreements that state they are “without prejudice” to the moderate livelihood right.
Copies of the Marshall Response Initiative deals under which $630 million was spent obtained by Postmedia state that in exchange, First Nations agreed not to pursue their moderate livelihood fisheries for five years — pushing the matter past another election cycle, time and again.
Over the past seven years, the rate of transfer has dramatically increased, with at least another $755.5 million spent between 1999 and December 2024.
As of December, 2,217 commercial fishing licenses had been transferred to Atlantic Canada’s First Nations.
Beyond those licenses, seven Mi’kmaq First Nations bought Clearwater Seafoods’ vast commercial license holdings in 2020, in a billion-dollar deal with Premium Foods of B.C.
In 2024, DFO announced it was taking
50 per cent of the elver quota
from commercial license holders without compensation and transferring it to First Nations. Including a commercial license held by Cape Breton’s We’koma’Q, aboriginal governments now hold 62 per cent of Canada’s total allowable elver catch.
And yet, many First Nations members still don’t have the opportunity to fish.
While some First Nations, such as Pictou Landing, operate their own fleets and employ their band members fishing their quotas, many lease the licenses to non-Aboriginal commercial fishermen.
There have been interim understandings reached between the federal government and a handful of First Nations that have allowed small-scale moderate livelihood fisheries, but no such fishery agreement has been formally agreed upon between Sipekne’katik and DFO.
“(The Supreme Court of Canada’s clarification known as) Marshall II is the court beating the government over the head with the equivalent of a legal baseball bat, saying they can govern and they can govern fairly,” said Thomas Isaac, an aboriginal rights lawyer who has served as British Columbia’s chief treaty negotiator, assistant deputy minister responsible for establishing Nunavut and special representative to the minister of Indigenous and northern affairs.
“And that includes looking out for the interests of broader Canadian society, which, by the way, also includes aboriginal interests. Aboriginal interests make up public interests as well.”
Isaac contends the Supreme Court has repeatedly given the federal government a tool it refuses to use: Justifiable infringement. That means the federal government can infringe upon the right, after fair consultation, for “compelling and substantive public policy objectives.”
But to do that, the federal government would have to be willing to state what the right isn’t.
“My message to governments of all parties is you can run from this, but you can’t hide,” said Isaac. “Eventually, government will have to come to grips with the tool kits they have.”
Instead, in December, the federal government offered the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq Chiefs $259.4 million. Unlike previous initiatives where the federal government bought up licenses, this funding would go directly to chiefs and councils to do the buying.
The Assembly refused the offer.
“This proposal raises serious alarms,” said Chief Wilbert Marshall, assembly co-lead on fisheries, in press release.
“DFO’s approach reminded us of earlier initiatives from the 2000s, which failed to respect and uphold our inherent rights. Our treaty right to fish is not a commercial fishery.”
The position of First Nations is all that access that has been removed from rural fishing communities and transferred to them doesn’t count toward the Marshall right.
According to the Marshall Response Initiative agreements seen by Postmedia, they’re right — the agreements state the access was transferred “without prejudice” to the moderate livelihood right.
What constitutes a moderate livelihood, along with how and when those fisheries operate, remains to be resolved.
The federal government has refused to share with Postmedia the wording in the agreements under which it’s been transferring access lately. They contend their negotiations are considered “nation to nation” and so groups representing commercial fishing communities that have seen the wealth of access to adjacent resources transferred out don’t get a say.
At a December Nova Scotia Supreme Court hearing on Sipekne’katik and the federal government’s confidential fisheries negotiations, Justice John Keith asked the feds’ lawyer, “I’m probably stating the obvious, but in these negotiations, the Crown represents the interests of those non-Indigenous peoples as well, correct? Is that wrong?”
To which that lawyer, Gwen MacIsaac, responded, “I think it would be an overstatement to say that the Crown represents the interests of non-Indigenous groups.”
Sovereign nations
Jennifer Ford, a senior adviser for the DFO, shouldn’t have been surprised by the letter she got in March from the Chiefs of Sipekne’katik, Millbrook and Membertou First Nations.
Dated March 5,
the letter to the elver review director
stated that the federal government has no authority over their fishers and it could pose no limits on how much they fished, as they considered the American eel stock to be healthy. The chiefs claimed all of Nova Scotia as part of their sovereign territory and that they would prevent any fisheries officers from coming on their reserves to search holding facilities.
“We the Mi’kmaq of Millbrook have our own management plan that we have authorized under our Treaties and the authority of Mi’kmaw Law,” reads a copy of the letter signed by Millbrook Chief Bob Gloade and obtained by Postmedia.
“We are not regulated by your colonial commercial licensing schemes, nor do we accept your proposed management plan.”
The letter, which cited a series of Supreme Court of Canada decisions including R vs. Marshall and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) that Canada signed in 2020, went on to say that this position extends to all fisheries — including Nova Scotia’s billion-dollar lobster fishery.
It was the reaffirmation of a long-held position by the three First Nations.
Sipekne’katik has been openly running a large-scale commercial lobster fishery from the federal government wharf in Saulnierville, N.S., on the fertile nursery of St. Mary’s Bay, each summer for the past five years.
That’s despite the commercial season not opening there until November.
What was surprising
was the response to that letter
by Ford’s boss.
Also obtained by Postmedia, DFO Maritimes region director general Doug Wentzell rejected the chief’s interpretation of the Supreme Court decisions, claimed the federal government did have the authority to manage their fisheries and noted that interference with a fishery officer is a criminal offence.
“The courts have repeatedly upheld the Crown’s role in regulating the fishery, as well as the use of licensing as part of fisheries management, even when regulating the exercise of Aboriginal or Treaty rights,” reads Wentzell’s response, dated March 18.
“Your letter suggests that fishery officers acting in the course of their duties require permission to enter Sipekne’katik reserve lands. While the Department would always prefer to have fishery officers welcomed into your community, and is willing to establish mutually agreeable protocols where it is appropriate, if entry into reserve lands is necessary for fishery officers to exercise their legal duties and functions, they will do so in accordance with applicable laws and, again, with that overarching objective of fostering a safe, orderly and well-managed fishery for all.”
It was an explicit assertion of the sovereignty of the federal government over the management of all fisheries in Canadian waters.
And it came from Wentzell, who, according to Sipekne’katik’s lawyer Ron Pink, actually helped co-ordinate the First Nation’s unlicensed commercial fishery last summer on St. Mary’s Bay.
Pink told Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice John Keith during a
Dec. 14 hearing
into the progress of confidential negotiations between the band and DFO that Wentzell had been in weekly contact with Sipekne’katik to co-ordinate their moderate livelihood fishery — a fishery that was illegal, as it was being pursued without DFO-issued licenses outside of the local commercial season.
That co-ordination occurred as the RCMP were attributing organized crime involved in the movement of its illegal lobster to a rash of arsons and shootings in Southwest Nova Scotia.
“We believe they are profiting from this fishing activity that is going on,” Meteghan RCMP Staff-Sgt. Jeff LeBlanc
told Postmedia
in September.
“We have information to confirm that. With any organized crime group, they will seek any way they can to make funds, be it illegal means or elsewhere. If it’s drugs, or it’s illegal fish, anything they can get into.”
In the year leading up to LeBlanc’s comments, there had been shots fired into three homes, arsons involving five buildings and four vehicles, including an RCMP cruiser burned in Meteghan, and a loader had been used to destroy the camp of a commercial fisherman who had spoken out about illegal fishing.
While DFO brass was apparently co-ordinating the unlicensed fishery, its frontline fisheries officers were off the job.
Officers across the Maritimes submitted refusal-to-work letters under the Canada Labour Code in August, citing a
lack of support
from DFO brass and Diane Lebouthillier, then minister of fisheries, oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard.
“These have included physical acts of violence against officers,” reads a copy of one of the letters obtained by Postmedia that listed what fishery officers faced from unlicensed harvesters.
“Attempted assaults using vehicles and vessels. Harvesters attempting to disarm fishery officers from their side-arms. Utterances of violence and death threats towards officers and their families.”
The Nova Scotia Legislature passed a bipartisan motion last fall calling on the federal government to enforce the Fisheries Act, crack down on the illegal harvesters and support its own fishery officers.
Five days before Mark Carney announced a federal election in March, DFO’s regional director general wrote to the three chiefs, saying in a letter that was leaked to Postmedia that the federal government would enforce the Fisheries Act.
Despite Wentzell’s strongly worded letter, Sipekne’katik, Millbrook and Membertou went ahead and launched their self-regulated elver fisheries.
The dozens of First Nations members fishing by Highway 7 in Tangier each night in mid-April carried licenses issued by their bands.
The federal government hasn’t intervened.
Market in China
Nova Scotians don’t eat elvers.
And First Nations all have food, social and ceremonial licenses for their community members to catch lobster to eat.
There would be no large illegal fisheries without a market.
As tens of thousands of pounds of lobster were coming over the Saulnierville wharf last summer without DFO intervention, commercial fishermen hired two retired Mounties to follow it.
“I don’t think there’s any better evidence for how desperate the situation has become in southwest Nova Scotia and how clearly the government have turned their backs on the fishing community than that we’ve been forced to take this action ourselves,” Colin Sproul, president of the United Fisheries Conversation Alliance, which hired the investigators, told Postmedia in November.
“… What should outrage all Maritimers today is the fact that within a very short period of time, we could gather enough evidence to move forward with a lawsuit, but the federal and provincial governments have not been willing or able to in years.”
The $10-million suit, filed in Nova Scotia Supreme Court, alleges that the lobster caught at Saulnierville heads “by various means” to Independent Fisheries Ltd. in Sable River, N.S., from where it is exported.
Independent’s president,
Xaoming Mao
, is listed among the suit’s defendants, along with Sea Well Holdings Ltd., Jason Lamrock, Tyler Nickerson, Sandra Nickerson, Shawna Nickerson, David Nickerson and Wesley Nickerson.
No defence has been filed in the case and the allegations have not been tested in court, but the suit is still in the works.
The growth of the illegal seafood trade has coincided with large investments from China in Nova Scotia’s fish processing industry over the past decade.
Ten years ago, the He family, which owns seafood operations in China, made the first large investment, buying a fish plant in Newellton and rebranding it Atlantic Chican.
Xaoming Mao, who goes by Mark Mao, was tasked with running it.
Atlantic Chican quickly ran afoul of the law — it paid a $75,000 fine after fisheries officers found egg-bearing females (which are illegal to catch) at its facilities in 2017 and 2019.
The company also later pleaded guilty to importing 63,000 kilograms of Maine lobster and exporting it to China labelled as Canadian product to skirt Chinese tariffs on American seafood.
“(Illegally harvested elvers) are going from a company owned by a Mr. Mao, who exports this under a (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) banner,” then South Shore—St. Margarets MP Rick Perkins told the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans in February 2024, where he was protected from libel suits by parliamentary privilege.
“His brother-in-law is the manager of (Atlantic) Chican in my riding, which is owned by a Mr. He in China, who’s in jail in China for breaking Chinese law on importing illegal seafood. This is the money behind this operation.”
Postmedia has been unable to independently confirm the allegations made by Perkins.
Mao was fired from Atlantic Chican, according to court documents filed by the company in response to its charges. But he quickly reappeared — buying Independent Seafoods in 2020.
Mao started buying up other plants in Nova Scotia — provincial business records show him becoming director in 2023 of B.M.C. Seafoods, which owns a large plant in Meteghan, and president of Ocean Edge Seafoods, which owns a plant in Salmon River, last April.
Last May, one of Mao’s numbered companies became a co-owner of Lobster Boys LLC, which owns a plant in Dipper Harbour, N.B., through a bankruptcy sale.
Mao has not responded to multiple requests for comment by Postmedia.
As the commercial lobster season was about to open last November, Postmedia ran a story about Mao’s varied companies and the accusations in the UFCA lawsuit.
That day, commercial fishing harvesters began notifying companies named in the story that they were switching buyers.
That night, one of the buyers they were switching to
had shots fired through his house
.
Geoffrey Jobert, owner of Lobster Hub Inc. in Meteghan, found holes through his garage door, kitchen, dining room and living room walls with a round lodged in his hardwood rocking chair.
In an interview with Postmedia, Jobert said he’d been threatened before by a local crime family involved in the movement of illegal lobster when fishermen switched to him from Mao’s company, B. M. C Seafood.
“I said, ‘No, we’re not going to be intimidated,’” said Jobert. “… Other fishermen started selling to us because they didn’t want to sell to a business connected with the illegal fishery. We were sent videos of my home at night. I tried to not pay attention.”
No one has been charged with firing the shot through Jobert’s home.
“Nothing to do with me,” Cedric Boudreau, a director of B. M. C Seafoods, told Postmedia after the shooting, before hanging up the phone.
Poachers and traceability
Since January, Pat Keliher has been spending more time with his dogs.
“Not chasing elver poachers around anymore,” said Keliher, freshly retired from his position as commissioner of the Maine Department of Natural Resources.
But he hadn’t been doing much chasing of poachers for a while.
“I had 50 uniformed officers and they used to joke that I took all their fun away, that they liked when it was a Wild West and they were always tracking people down,” said Keliher.
With populations of Japanese and European eels severely depleted by habitat destruction and overfishing, China turned to the American eel for seedstock for its aquaculture facilities, sending the price for the elvers through the roof starting around 2010.
Poaching in Maine took off at the same time and Keliher, a longtime hunting and fishing guide, was brought in by the governor to get it under control.
They implemented a tight traceability system with each harvester carrying a swipe card associated with their quota — from the river to the buyer to export, the eels are weighed and weighed again.
When an exporter is ready to ship, two of Keliher’s officers would visit the holding facility, weigh the catch, verify its journey back to the rivers and seal it.
“Two strikes, you’re out,” said Keliher. “If you’re a license holder who gets caught in violation, you go through the process, catch is seized, there’s a fine, you lose your license for three to six years. Second time, it’s a permanent revocation of the license. If you’ve got no license at all, you’re taken directly to jail.”
Maine’s Legislature negotiated with the state’s four federally recognized aboriginal bands, which saw them get 22 per cent of the total allowable catch. Their designated fish harvesters are subject to the same laws and enforcement as everyone else.
It worked. From almost 300 violations a season during the early 2010s, Maine is down to “only a handful with hardly anyone fishing without a license.”
Last spring, citing violence, widespread poaching and dangers to her own officers, Canada’s federal fisheries minister didn’t open Canada’s elver season at all.
But according to Hong Kong Board of Trade Import Data, 7,892 kilograms of elvers were imported from Canada, labelled as product of Canada, last spring.
That’s nearly what Canada’s 9,860-kilogram total allowable catch would have been had there been a legal fishery here.
For this season, DFO has implemented a new traceability system based in part on Maine’s, that requires licenses for buyers and exporters, with assigned rivers for First Nations and commercial harvesters.
While 10 of Nova Scotia’s First Nations have signed on, Sipekne’katik, Millbrook and Membertou have not.
And their elvers are getting out of the country, somehow, under the noses of DFO, the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
“Government has this absurd idea that, ‘We don’t want to interfere with unauthorized fishers too much at the river,’” said Mitchell Feigenbaulm, president of commercial elver quota holder South Shore Trading Co.
“But that’s where the fish are all in one place. Fifty kilos taken off a river tonight can be in 10 suitcases, travel domestically by vehicle and plane, and be in 10 different places tomorrow. These are well-organized enterprises devoted 365 days a year that have the time and patience and resources to set up networks like this.”
China wins
There was a way out of this.
The nine commercial license holders all invested in the
creation of NovaEel
, a company that worked with Dalhousie University to create a feminisation drug that would allow eel aquaculture here to compete with China — where the androgynous elvers are treated with varied drugs to ensure they become the larger, faster-growing females.
The elvers could stay here, be raised to adulthood, have their value increase tenfold and then sold into the $400-million North American market for eels.
The American and Canadian federal governments both invested $1 million in NovaEel through varied grants. After a decade of work, NovaEel was on track to make application for approval of its drug to the United States Food and Drug Administration and Health Canada in April.
The company’s business plan is based around the license holders providing it with 360 kilograms annually for its first seven years. Quota holders wouldn’t get paid for their elvers until 18 months later, when they were ready for processing.
Told by DFO to work with First Nations, the quota holders met with New Brunswick’s Wolastoqiyik First Nations and offered to bring them into NovaEel.
The six chiefs sent a letter to then federal fisheries minister Jonathan Wilkinson in 2019 asking to involve NovaEel in consultations for quota sharing.
DFO didn’t do that. Instead, it negotiated a deal directly with the chiefs, didn’t include NovaEel and, as of last fall, had transferred 50 per cent of the quota from commercial license holders to First Nations.
“Without investment, access to (elvers), by taking quota from our shareholders, NovaEel loses its whole business plan,” Paul Smith, NovaEel’s chief executive officer, told Postmedia last fall.
“The only winner here is China … China has very lax regulations on the environment and, I would argue, known illegal processes going on with a horrible history of being caught using unregulated drugs.”
Europe cracked down on the poaching of its juvenile eels to feed Chinese aquaculture facilities by completely banning their export. European elvers can only be used to feed European aquaculture facilities.
Canada was on track to have its own domestic eel aquaculture industry.
But without NovaEel, China remains the only market.
Food or money?
Kerry Prosper, the Mi’kmaq elder, worries that in the rush to cash in, we’re all missing something important — the eels.
“I remember when you could cut one hole (in the harbour ice) and get 25 to 30 eels, but now you could cut 20 and get four,” said Prosper of fishing for adult American eels.
“I was out with an elder and we cut 30 holes and got three eels. He looked at me and said, ‘I guess that’s the end of my fishing.’”
The
A. Crassus parasite
has arrived in Nova Scotia. It evolved in Asia alongside the eels there, which have natural defences against it, due to their shared history.
With the Japanese eel in decline in their native range, they were brought to European aquaculture facilities for testing. The parasite travelled with them and spread into European rivers.
Testing there found the A. Crassus plugged the eels’ swim bladders and caused internal bleeding. In 1994, the parasite was discovered at an aquaculture facility in Texas, moved into the rivers, and has been spreading northward ever since.
Kenneth Oliveira, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has been studying the parasite’s impact on American eels for over 20 years.
“Habitat change, dams, hydro power, chemical contamination, fisheries — all those things combined and then you have the parasite on top of that,” Oliveira told Postmedia in 2024. “We know it’s not good, but we don’t know the level of negative impact.”
Elver returns have been strong over recent years. But DFO’s 2021 stock assessment of American eels found the abundance of adults to be low, bemoaned a lack of data and listed them as threatened.
Prosper worries that in the debate over who gets what, what really matters is being overlooked.
“Ever since the commodification of food and resources, people are no longer looking at filling their stomachs and being content with food and being healthy and the regular necessities of life,” said Prosper.
“Our quality of life is way beyond what the capacity of the resource can afford anymore. It’s hard. Human nature is hard to control sometimes.”
