After a secret ballot, global trade restrictions will not be placed on the species at the heart of Canada’s most lucrative fishery. But trade of American eels is also driving a massive, illegal economy — and advocates say the vote represents a failure to address this serious threat.

On Nov. 27, countries voted against listing the American eel and other eel species at the 20th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, in Uzbekistan. Canada was among the nations who voted against restrictions. At the meeting, the Canadian delegate said populations of American eel have remained stable for the last two decades, and that the proposal did not take into account advances in technology used to distinguish eel species. The vote was followed by an announcement this week that Canada will not list American eel under the Species At Risk Act, following more than a decade of deliberation.

The restrictions would have applied to the trade of 17 eel species, including American eel, which is the basis of a controversial fishery in Atlantic Canada. American eel are harvested as palm-size juveniles from Maritime rivers in the spring, and exported to Asia for rearing in aquaculture facilities. A kilogram of baby eels (called elvers) was fetching nearly $5,000 in 2023.

That price drives not only commercial and Indigenous fisheries, but also a large black-market fishery conducted by organized crime, experts say, making a coordinated response necessary. The Sustainable Eel group, a conservation group based in the U.K., says illegal eel sales are the “world’s greatest wildlife crime.” Despite its vote against the listing, experts say Canada, as a hub for the trade, has a particularly important role to play. 

“Canada could have played a role at this meeting, and actually led support for the proposal,” Katie Schleit, fisheries director at Oceans North says. “They’ve come out in all kinds of different arenas as being a champion to fight illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing, [but] … they aren’t taking responsibility for the role that Canada’s actually playing in the global illegal trade of eels right now.”

Illegal fishing, exports put pressure on American eel

Trade poses a significant threat to biodiversity, according to Sheldon Jordan, a wildlife crime consultant who formerly worked on wildlife enforcement at Environment and Climate Change Canada. “When [people] think of endangered species, they’re thinking of all the things in The Lion King, but the biggest threat is actually [to] the consumables. It’s the fish, it’s the wood, the things that we eat,” he says. With eel, “the demand is outstripping the supply. There is a conservation issue.” 

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which has been ratified by 185 parties, is meant to address this. Since 1975, the convention has worked to regulate the trade in wild plants and animals, to maximize their chances of survival.

This year, the European Union, with the support of Honduras and Panama, nominated 17 species of eel to be included under an appendix that regulates trade, but doesn’t prevent it. While the proposal noted Japanese and American eel are particularly at risk, the parties nominated over a dozen freshwater species, noting that eels are often impossible to tell apart, making enforcement a challenge.

European eel — which has declined by up to 95 per cent in rivers across Europe — shows why this is important, Jordan says. 

The export of European eels from the European Union has been banned since at least 2011 (with European eel listed under CITES in 2009), but the ban did not stop the export of juvenile eels to Asia. Jordan says his Environment Canada officers in Vancouver and Toronto intercepted containers of frozen eel meat from Asia as late as 2017, almost a decade after the CITES listing. The meat was labelled as American eel, but genetic testing revealed up to 50 per cent was European eel that had been falsely declared to evade controls.

 “In the end, our officers confiscated 186 tonnes of eel meat,” Jordan says. “That was six, seven times more than our previous record when it came to endangered species being seized.” 

Jordan says he warned colleagues at Fisheries and Oceans Canada that given the low supply and high price of European eel, it was only a matter of time before demand exploded for North American exports. “And unfortunately, that has come to pass.”

In Canada, the target is American eel, which is also found throughout the eastern United States, the Caribbean and at the northern edge of South America. American eel have a complex life cycle that starts in an area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. Larvae spend up to a year floating around in the ocean, before transparent juveniles swim up rivers in the spring.

The Canadian commercial quota for those elvers has been set at roughly 10,000 kilograms for decades, and in recent years, the fishery has been the subject of bitter conflict as high prices have increased fishing pressure. Meanwhile, as Jordan predicted, exports of elvers have soared; in 2022, imports of live elvers into East Asia from the Americas jumped to 157 tonnes, up from 53 tonnes in 2021, according to a paper published in Marine Policy.

Over the last five years, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has cancelled the elver season multiple times, citing illegal fishing and violence. Since then, the federal government has imposed new regulations to increase the traceability of the catch, including possession and export licences. 

At this year’s meeting of the endangered species trade convention, Canada’s delegate cited these regulations in its position against listing. The delegate also described recent advances in rapid genetic testing that they said addresses the lookalike problem, though an Environment and Climate Change Canada report from September notes these tests have a 20 per cent false positive rate, and an ideal operating range above 18 C, meaning they can’t be used on frozen meat.

Not everyone agrees on stability of American eel population

Whether harvested as part of the official commercial quota or not, Jordan says elvers are sent to Toronto, where the companies that prepare them to survive export are located. 

Jordan says this makes Toronto the intermediate destination for American eel from not just Canada, but also the Caribbean, including places like Haiti where political instability fuels poaching, and the Dominican Republic, which has been asking for help in controlling illegal trade. “Toronto is basically the hub of the legal and illegal elver trade in the Western Hemisphere, with almost all of the eels going through Canada on their way to Asia,” he says. 

Being a central hub for the eel trade across the Americas, Canada would have been “in a really strong place to play a positive, constructive role in regulating the international trade,” Jordan says. He thinks a stronger stance would have levelled the playing field for Canadian harvesters, who are currently held to a higher standard than in other countries. 

Yet Mitchell Feigenbaum, a commercial licence holder with a fishing business based in New Brunswick and member of an industry group, says while licence holders agree illegal trade is a problem, they were opposed to the listing.

Feigenbaum says initially, he saw a listing as just “more red tape.” But he became concerned when he saw the text of the proposal, which identified American and Japanese eel at serious risk of becoming endangered without regulation. He felt the push for the listing was an attempt by “environmentalists and scientists with a particular predisposition” to call into question the conservation status of eel. “It really just felt like it’s a slap in the face, or … a strategic move by opponents of the fishery to gain a political advantage.”

Feigenbaum suggested American eel are resilient and can recover when their population is depleted, pointing to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2015 decision not to list American eel as threatened. In its statement at the convention, the Canadian government referred to a 2025 Fisheries and Oceans scientific report indicating that populations were stable. 

Not everyone sees eel populations that way. 

Kerry Prosper, Mi’kmaw Elder and councillor for Paqtnkek First Nation, has been fishing and working with eels most of his life. In recent years, he’s noticed a significant decline in the population of adult eels that community members once fished for food. “It’s quite a contrast that we’re in, and it’s so sad.” 

Paqtnkek was offered a licence for the elver fishery by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, but turned it down, Prosper says. “We simply don’t have faith in their management plans.”

In 1990, a Supreme Court case known as Sparrow ruled that First Nations had the right to food, social and ceremonial fisheries, putting that right above commercial and recreational fisheries. Prosper says the ruling is being disregarded, and he worries the harvesting of baby eels harms the adult population, putting food security at risk.

Harvesting and exporting eels for commercial profit shouldn’t come “at the cost of the species itself and the Indigenous people who live near where it comes from,” he says. “It’s just total disregard and disrespect to the animal and to the people.”

Schleit, with Oceans North, points out that stability of the American eel population in recent decades comes after a period of steep decline. In its stock assessment, Fisheries and Oceans noted that the species has likely declined by more than 50 per cent since 1980 

Federal government announces American eel will not be added to species at risk

On Tuesday, the federal government announced they would not be listing American eel under Canada’s Species At Risk Act. In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada said it had determined that the Fisheries Act “is most effective for conserving the species while also providing the greatest overall socio-economic benefits to Canadians.”

Not classifying eel as a species at risk could be an acceptable decision from a sustainability perspective, Schleit says, but the government still needs to demonstrate how else they’re effectively managing the species. By not promoting a CITES listing, she says Canada missed a chance to show global leadership.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Barre Campbell confirmed that Canada voted against the listing, and said Canada “is committed to the sustainable and orderly management of fisheries for eel and elver.” He also said that the American eel did not meet criteria required for a CITES listing, which requires a 70 percent population decline, and that CITES regulations would create duplication for Canadian harvesters. 

Despite their opposition to the listing, many countries, including Canada, recognized the existence of an issue at CITES, and approved a non-binding resolution to work together to address illegal trade. Schleit says it’s possible to build on that momentum to continue to enact stronger protections for eels. In the meantime, she says, these enigmatic species remain at risk.

“European eel basically got traded to the point where it crashed,” she says. “We see a strong chance that that’s going to happen again with American eel.”

This story was updated on Dec. 5, 2025, at 11:05 ET to correct the units of measurement of Canada’s commercial quota for elvers.

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Just outside the town of Port Hawkesbury, N.S., the shoreline of the Strait of Canso is dotted with industry. “For Nova Scotia, this is one of the last outposts of industrial activity,” Amanda Mombourquette says, steering her SUV. Out one window, towering mounds of coal are piled outside the Point Tupper Generating Station, while tanks and pipelines from a former oil refinery carve up the slope. A short distance down the road, Nova Scotia’s last papermill standing stretches across the hill.

Although the area supports hundreds of jobs, there’s little traffic on a sunny October afternoon. Pulling her car to the side of Industrial Park Road, Mombourquette, who’s the deputy warden for the County of Richmond, and Brenda Chisholm-Beaton, mayor of neighbouring Port Hawkesbury, note that teenagers often use the road to learn how to drive. 

Yet Chisholm-Beaton and Mombourquette have become regular travellers on this road. For the last several years, they’ve been taking people on tours of the area, to pitch its involvement in a new type of industry: offshore wind.

“Our strong feeling is that if there are industries that are going to be located here and we’re going to ask our communities to engage and participate and to support these industries, there should also be a benefit to our communities,” Mombourquette says. 

They’re not alone in spying an opportunity. In Atlantic Canada, many are looking to offshore wind as a transformational force, providing renewable power in a province still heavily dependent on coal for electricity. Offshore wind could also provide a much-needed economic boost for coastal communities and the province. The impact might not stop there: in September, Nova Scotia’s pitch to export 60 gigawatts offshore wind to provide over a quarter of Canada’s electricity, dubbed Wind West Atlantic Energy, was included on a list of projects of potential national interest: it’s not quite developed enough to make the Liberals’ first two rounds of projects considered for fast-tracking, but it’s in their sightlines. 

Yet the rollout of nation-building renewable energy must also strike a delicate balance between the need for power and the effect that gigawatt-scale wind generation will have on an ecosystem that many Nova Scotians already rely on for their livelihoods, particularly fishers.

The industry is moving toward that, with the regulator now conducting the first round of public consultation that could lead to a licence for a project developer, though it’ll be years before the blades start spinning. Either way, few deny that offshore wind, whenever it unfurls, could be transformative — just not in a way that everyone welcomes. 

Optimal conditions for offshore wind offer economic promise for Nova Scotia communities

The phrase “world-class” gets bandied about a lot in Nova Scotia, in relation to everything from golf courses to Halifax’s convention centre, but when it comes to offshore wind, it’s demonstrably true. Far from land, wind speeds here average nine to 11 metres per second. This is comparable to Europe’s North Sea, which already has a thriving offshore wind industry.

Importantly, unlike Canada’s west coast, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are surrounded by broad continental shelves. The Scotian Shelf provides a wide swath of relatively shallow seabed on which to build turbines, making offshore wind appealing financially — though scientists say that’s also what makes it appealing to marine life, and therefore fishers.

In recent years, legislation has emerged to support the industry. Offshore energy on the east coast is jointly regulated by the federal government and the provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Historically this meant petroleum, but in 2024, the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board’s scope was expanded to include offshore wind (with Newfoundland’s regulator following suit in 2025). 

The province and federal government have also conducted a regional assessment, meant to assess the potential impacts of the industry on the environment, local communities and other ocean users, and to support the identification of potential locations. That assessment was released in January, and in July, Nova Scotia designated four wind energy areas, located at least 20 kilometres off the province’s eastern shore and the northeast edge of Cape Breton.

While offshore wind could have broad economic benefits — with the province eyeing a four per cent royalty from offshore production, as well as jobs for more than 5,000 workers in construction and associated supply chain industries — it has the potential to be particularly impactful for communities close to the sites.

This includes the Port Hawkesbury region, which has a deep, ice-free port that could be used to marshal offshore wind components like blades and turbines. The town also has a community college campus, where the province’s first wind turbine technician program is launching September 2026. 

Green industry is key to the region’s future, Mombourquette says. She also hopes it could bring more affordable electricity to her constituents, who regularly tell her they can’t pay their power bills. It could also ease the transition from the area’s industrial past — nearly 100 people currently work at the Point Tupper’s generating plant, for instance, which will have to stop burning coal by 2030. 

“What’s going to happen to those people and what kind of economic impact will that have on the town, and on the county?” Mombourquette says. “It’s a concern.”

The Municipality of the District of Guysborough, directly to the south of Port Hawkesbury, is also looking to wind for a more sustainable future.

Three of the proposed wind energy areas are off Guysborough County, where existing infrastructure could be used for the industry, including a former plant for offshore gas, where power generated by wind could be transmitted ashore via underwater cables. Paul Long, warden of the municipality hopes this infrastructure could attract development to support the area’s small and spread-out population, which is older and lower-income than the rest of the province. 

“We’re losing a lot of our young people,” he says. “We need development to ensure that our residents get all the services and infrastructure that they deserve like anybody else. If we had to rely on our residential tax rate, it would not be a pretty situation.”

Some people aren’t as convinced. 

Fishers worry about possible impacts to Nova Scotia’s seafood industry

Ninety minutes down the shore from Port Hawkesbury, at the end of a long peninsula jutting into the Atlantic, sits the community of Canso. This has been a settler fishing community since the 1600s and a site of Mi’kmaw fishing long before that, and from a small building on the edge of town, the Guysborough County Inshore Fishermen’s Association continues to support people fishing for lobster, halibut, snowcrab and tuna along the county’s long coastline. 

“We fish whatever we can because if we have a little bit from each, then you’re not putting too much effort on a single stock,” Ginny Boudreau, the association’s executive director and one of its three employees, says.

For the past two years, Boudreau says much the organization’s time, has been taken up with offshore wind, even though “We don’t have a stick in the water yet.”

Two of the designated areas overlap with places where her members fish, Boudreau says. The association has had to respond to new legislation and the regional assessment, as well as develop a system to track vessels through the areas designated for turbines, to get a comprehensive picture of where people are currently fishing.

That location data is important; the Scotian Shelf is heavily fished, with few areas unexploited. Many people have fished the same spots for decades — and as wind turbines move in, fishers fear they’ll be muscled out. 

In Cape Breton, Michael Barron fishes for lobster, crab and halibut in Sydney Bight, where a 1,300-square-kilometre area has been designated for potential offshore wind. Barron, the president of his own local fishing association, worries about people having to move because turbines are in their way or disrupting fish migration patterns. 

Barron points out that Nova Scotia’s seafood is its main export commodity, valued at $2.4 billion annually. The price of getting into the fishery is hefty: a lobster licence can cost upwards a million dollars and a fishing vessel at least half that. 

“Younger captains are taking on a lot of financial debt,” Barron says. “They need good catch rates. They need good weather. They need lots of fishing grounds to be able to explore … to generate the income to pay those debts that they incurred to become part of a historical tradition.”

Despite that, Barron says there’s been “next to no” consultation with his association from the provincial and federal governments. While he says he’s not against green energy, he wants to see more engagement with the people on the water.

Even without turbines, those fishers are already facing uncertainty — catches for snow crab in Cape Breton this year were “catastrophically bad,” Barron says, though he notes that can’t yet be attributed to climate change. 

Boudreau is worried about those shifts too. Her members know better than anyone that climate change is happening: they see it every day on the water. And for environmental reasons as much as economic ones, she thinks offshore wind is inevitable. 

Given that, she wants a clear plan for how wind and fisheries will co-exist — and a written commitment of who will be holding the bag if they can’t. She says the province promised a framework for compensation, though her association is still waiting to see it.

In an emailed response, Nova Scotia Department of Energy spokesperson Adele Poirier said that offshore wind is a “proven technology that’s used successfully in other parts of the world and co-exists with fisheries, among other users of the ocean.” The statement also noted that federal and provincial governments have been consulting on offshore wind for years, and have already addressed some concerns from fishers.

On compensation, the department pointed to a provincial roadmap, which said compensation would be considered if co-existence is not possible. 

Robert Lennox, an associate professor of biology at Dalhousie University, says research could assuage concerns about potential impacts.

Those include turbines’ impacts on winds and currents, which could affect water cycling and the distribution of larval fish and lobsters.

Lennox, who is scientific director of the Ocean Tracking Network, says tracking technology could figure out how animals are moving through wind energy areas and what happens after turbines are installed. 

“We haven’t been prioritizing tracking them at these locations,” he says.

The organization plans to use its own funds to deploy a network of receivers in the Sydney Bight area, to help nudge those questions towards an answer, Lennox says. These receivers pick up the acoustic signal of tagged animals, though only those tagged by other similar groups around the region. 

One scientist says there’s also a wealth of government data that could be used to inform where wind turbines should go.

Kenneth Frank, a former Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist who retired in 2019, says when he read the report from the regional assessment that informed the selection of areas for turbines, he was shocked by how it characterized the Scotian Shelf. 

The report made the shelf’s outer banks look like “biological deserts,” he says, rather than drawing on “a mountain of data” from existing surveys that show the ecosystem’s productivity. Frank was paid by the Seafood Producers Association of Nova Scotia to submit a comment on the report, though he says he probably would have done it without payment. 

“They’ve chosen the least desirable areas from a conservation perspective. They chose the shallowest areas on the shelf,” he says, speculating that this was for economic reasons. “There are areas that are far less productive but they happen to be in deeper water.”

The Department of Energy said in a statement that all feedback was considered in the designation of the four offshore wind energy areas, including Fisheries and Oceans feedback on biological considerations.

As climate change intensifies in Atlantic Canada, residents prepare for an uncertain future

These developments come amid a grim period for climate impacts in Nova Scotia. Over the summer, the province experienced multiple wildfires and a record-breaking drought.

Meanwhile, in the ocean, scientists reported a warming trend on the Scotian shelf, with a 3 C increase in bottom temperatures over a three decade period. 

It’s a reminder that with or without offshore wind, change is coming to the region. 

Driving along the Strait of Canso, Chisholm-Beaton and Mombourquette point out the ports that could receive components for offshore wind, musing about the other businesses that could benefit, like a local metal fabricator.

Those benefits could help the region chart a new path. For decades, many people in Nova Scotia, including Mombourquette’s husband, have had to leave the province for work. “It has a direct social impact on communities that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, having gone through the experience of raising two kids with a husband who works out west back and forth.” Building a local wind industry could break that cycle, Mombourquette says. 

From the back seat, Chisholm-Beaton chimes in: “Export wind and not people.”

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At the top of a squat hill overlooking the Shubenacadie River, Dorene Bernard swings her SUV around to face a building clad in blue plastic siding. It’s a nondescript factory for plastic packaging, but the space it occupies is distinct. “[It’s] sitting in the footprint of where the school was,” Dorene says.

Between 1929 and 1967, more than a thousand Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik children from around the Maritimes, as well as the Gaspé region in Quebec, were sent to this spot in Nova Scotia: the site of the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, the only federal residential school in the region. (The Maritimes includes New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Newfoundland and Labrador had its own residential schools, but these were not part of the federal system and only received an apology from Canada in 2017, nine years after the prime minister apologized to residential school students on behalf of the Government of Canada.)

In 1986, the school was demolished, and the plastics factory built in its place. Still, something of the school remains: in a semi-circle at the bottom of the school’s former driveway, three plaques lay out the history of the Shubenacadie residential school in English and French, as well as two orthographies each of Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey.

From 1828 to 1997, 140 federal residential schools operated across Canada. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its Calls to Action in 2015, recommendation 79 addressed incorporating reconciliation in heritage work — including developing a national plan and strategy for commemorating school sites. Since then, the federal government has designated a handful of former schools as national historic sites; Shubenacadie was one of the first, in 2020. This fall, a commemorative park will open a short distance from the school, culminating the work of memorialization. 

For survivors and their descendants, many of whom have worked for years to have sites officially recognized, the designations are a complex phenomenon: former schools remain profoundly painful places and some communities have fought to have schools demolished. But while the history of residential schools is indelible for many survivors, collective memory is slippery, and among survivor groups, a patient effort is underway to preserve something of that past — to ensure Canada doesn’t forget what happened in residential schools, and what it took to survive them. 

“We want our descendants, and the ones that are to come to have a place to come learn about who they are … what our ancestors came through, [and] honour that, so that they can take that strength,” Dorene says. “That’s what this work is all about.”

Survivors led process for Shubenacadie commemoration

Dorene’s family bookends the school’s existence. Her father started when it opened in 1929; she and her siblings were some of the last to leave. When Dorene recalls the years she spent there, her voice is quiet. She felt abandoned, she says. Her older sister tried to take care of her, but despite those efforts, Dorene witnessed and was subjected to beatings and other forms of physical abuse; in one particularly awful moment, she remembers a nun sitting her on a stack of phone books while a travelling dentist pulled eight of her teeth without medication, resulting in jaw pain that affects her to this day. 

After the remaining children left in 1967, the imposing brick building sat empty for nearly 20 years, growing increasingly derelict. In the 1980s, a fire tore through the school, and shortly thereafter, the structure was demolished. In her book Out of the Depths, survivor Isabelle Knockwood recalls survivors gathering for the demolition and cheering as the wrecking ball tore through the walls. “There was no sadness, no tears at seeing the building finally being punished and beaten for having robbed so many Indian children of the natural wonders and simple pleasures of growing up,” she wrote. 

The demolition, and the visits survivors made to the school in the days leading up to it, marked a beginning for survivors collectively unpacking their experiences. In 1995, a group of Shubenacadie survivors led by Nora Bernard filed the first class-action lawsuit against Canada for compensation to residential school survivors. The suit precipitated a flurry of additional lawsuits that eventually resulted in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007, which compensated tens of thousands of survivors. Another outcome of that agreement was the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Years later, when the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, an organization founded to preserve Mi’kmaw history and historic sites, began to work on the recommendations of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, survivors were once again clear what they wanted: “[They said] ‘We want to make sure Canada — the world — never forgets what has happened to us at this place. So, we want to see the school designated as a national historic site,’ ” Tim Bernard, executive director of the cultural centre, says.

Tim’s own experience is a testament to the importance of having a record. In 1998, an Elder showed him a photograph of residents obtained from the archive of the Sisters of Charity — the nuns who staffed the school — vowing she was going to track down the name of every child in it. When she came back, she pointed out two boys: Tim’s father and uncle.

Tim had had no idea they had been taken there — his father had passed away, after a struggle with alcoholism, having never discussed his experiences. “For me, it heightens my awareness around trauma, and the impacts of trauma,” he says. It also made work to have the school designated personal, though he emphasizes it’s been led by survivors. 

Guided by those survivors, Tim sent a request in 2019 for a designation to Parks Canada, and in 2020, the federal government declared the former school a national historic site. The plaques were unveiled on Truth and Reconciliation Day a year later. Dorene, who led engagement work for the centre, says survivors had a lot of input into the wording — and insisted that it state that survivors considered residential school policy to be genocide. 

Being a national historic site doesn’t come with a lot of resources, Tim says. Still, the designation is a testament to the fact that survivors’ stories are true. 

“Other than us putting the plaques up, you would never know that the school was there,” he says. “I think that was [survivors’] intention, to remind people that this is a dark part of our history.”

Indigenous communities vary in approaches to former school sites

The National Program of Historical Commemoration has existed for more than a century. For much of its existence, its tone was celebratory, but that’s changed in the last several decades, Dominique Foisy-Geoffroy, director of history and commemoration for Parks Canada, says.

“Commemoration was seen as something generally positive, something to celebrate. Now it’s a bit different.”

The program is driven almost entirely by public requests and there are two main sets of criteria: sites must have national historic significance and have existed for at least 40 years. The federal government also designated the residential school system an event of national significance in 2019.

Following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report, Foisy-Geoffroy says, Parks Canada began collaborating with Indigenous communities to determine what they wanted done with former schools. While some wanted a historic site designation, responses ranged, and others turned down federal commemoration: for some, demolishing buildings has been the more important step towards healing.

So far, five sites have been designated. Parks Canada focused its outreach on larger institutions where the main buildings are still standing, though Shubenacadie was prioritized as the only former site in the Maritimes. “It’s the history that is at the core of it, not [the buildings’] architectural value, of course. But the building is still important,” Foisy-Geoffroy says.

Since the 1960s, many school buildings have been torn down, though roughly 50 are still standing and in use — as gymnasiums, staff residencies and other outbuildings, including as schools. Others serve as offices, cultural centres or housing. At one — the former St. Eugene Mission School, on Ktunaxa territory near Cranbrook, B.C. — the Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council applied for a national historic site designation in 1996. That application was rejected after the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs intervened, arguing commemoration decisions should be delayed until after the release of the final report by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, according to an essay published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. So instead, the five bands who share the land turned the school into a golf course and resort owned by the Ktunaxa Nation.

At other sites, communities have set aside school buildings as testimony to the residential school era, including the Portage La Prairie Residential School in Manitoba, which operated from 1891 to 1975. It’s on the Treaty 1 territory of the reserve lands of Long Plain First Nation, for which Dennis Meeches served as chief for 20 years, starting in 1998. 

By the time Meeches entered politics, the federal government had transferred the 45-acre school site to the nation, as part of a treaty land entitlement claim. For a time, the building hosted Yellowquill College, Manitoba’s first Indigenous-owned and operated post-secondary institution. Then, in the early 2000s, a Knowledge Keeper told Meeches the building should be converted to a museum. 

“I thought that actually made really good sense, in terms of being able to provide some education and awareness to [not only] Indigenous people … but everybody in general,” he says. “It was a sacred project in my eyes.”

In 2003, Long Plain declared the former school a historic site and began amassing material for the collection of what it named the National Indigenous Residential School Museum. Seventeen years later, the federal government issued its own designation— a step Meeches says was important, given the federal government’s role in the residential school system. Ultimately, he hopes being a national historic site will serve to bolster the vision for the museum.

Watching the plaque unveiling this past August, Meeches thought of what it took for his parents and grandparents to survive the system. Survivors are aging and passing away, he says, even as denial about the reality of residential schools continues to circulate — making it important to preserve a record of that history.

Nonetheless, not every community has wanted schools preserved. For years, c̓išaaʔatḥ (Tseshaht First Nation) on Vancouver Island has been demolishing the buildings of the former Alberni Indian Residential School. Today, just the gymnasium and the main building, called Caldwell Hall, remain, with demolition of the hall set to happen within a year. 

Elected Chief Councillor Wahmeesh (Ken Watts) says the presence of Caldwell Hall is an open wound in the community. While the nation’s leadership has had discussions with Parks Canada about a designation, they haven’t made a formal decision about how to proceed. “We were a little bit worried about what that actually meant … does that restrict us?” he says. “Even internally we asked ourselves, ‘Why should we let somebody designate something a historic site they were a part of creating in the first place?’ ”

Watts says they haven’t closed the door on a designation eventually, but for now, they’re listening to the community — and the community has been clear they want the buildings gone. “More important than giving some place a designation is actually tearing down and rebuilding new so that our community can heal.”

Other existing schools, like Shingwauk Indian Residential School on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Ontario, accepted a designation but turned down a plaque; survivors opted to use the money to restore an existing monument instead. 

Federal funding allocated to supporting national historic site designations ended in March 2025, but Foisy-Geoffroy says Parks Canada is committed to continuing to work with interested communities, with several more designations in the works. 

“All this is part of who we are … so it’s a way for us to make sure people — non-Indigenous and Indigenous alike — better understand their own history, and eventually try to build a better future, she says.

Commemoration honours survivors, keeps history alive

When Elmer Lewis started at the Shubenacadie residential school, he was five years old. He was given a number — one — which also put him first in line for punishments like humiliation for wetting the bed. “It’s hard to ever forget anything,” he says. “It’ll always be with me.”

For three years, Elmer stayed at the school year-round. It wasn’t until he was eight that he was allowed to return home for the summer, via the “freedom road” — the school’s driveway, which Elmer still dreams about, decades later. 

In 2021, on June 21— the annual date children were allowed to leave for the summer — survivors and their descendants gathered on that driveway and walked the half-kilometre route children once took to the train station that would take them back home.

The march now takes place every year. Elmer’s daughter Tara Lewis, from Eskasoni First Nation, started the event to honour her father after he shared a dream about a march on freedom day. Tara grew up visiting the site with her dad, and now takes her own children there. She says it’s important to keep the history of residential schools alive, and seeing survivors and descendants travel the route from the school to the train station made that history real. 

“I was so moved, because I could just picture my dad as a little boy. And I could see my dad, you know, 75 years old, walking and marching, not with sadness but with pride because he’s resilient and he’s a survivor,” she says.

This fall, Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre is unveiling a commemorative park and monument to celebrate the resilience of survivors and descendants, close enough to the school to see the former site, but far away enough that people feel safe. Tim says when the centre asked survivors what they wanted out of a commemorative park, they talked about a place that centred not on the school, but on hope and reclamation and how despite “everything that’s happened to us, look at all the good news stories … that we’ve been able to achieve.”

For Dorene, the park is the culmination of a long journey: first as a survivor, then as someone who’s spent over a decade working on commemoration. “This has been a long process and I think maybe it had to be that way,” she says, watching heavy equipment prepare the park in early September. 

She says it’s hard that in the time it’s taken to get the designation and start commemoration projects, so many survivors of the school have passed. There are at most a few hundred left. But the monument will stand as a reminder for future generations of what their ancestors came through.

Back by the school site, Dorene puts down tobacco at a place set aside for ceremonies on the banks of the Shubenacadie River. The day before, she had drummed for a baby-and-me group. Watching children do the things residential school had once taken from her, Dorene says, was like seeing her prayers come to life in front of her. “That’s where we should be,” she says. “That’s the power of our people coming, and I don’t see that going away ever again.”

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In a dark basement room at Dalhousie University in Halifax, geneticist Paul Bentzen surveys the tanks containing the final descendants of an ancient genetic lineage with hope — and with trepidation. 

In each tank, dark shapes dart through the water, fins occasionally breaking the surface. From above, the fish have a soft blue sheen; their torpedo-shaped bodies taper to snub noses. “That is partly, I hate to say it, being in captivity — they are bumping more,” Bentzen said ruefully. “Being a fish adapted to swimming in open water, hard walls are not a natural thing for them.”

There’s a lot that’s not natural in this environment for these fish, a critically endangered species known as Atlantic whitefish. Scientists estimate it diverged from its closest relatives 14 million years ago, and it was once found throughout Nova Scotia. But over the course of geological epochs, and in the human-scale epoch since colonization, this whitefish’s range has shrunk to just three lakes on Nova Scotia’s south shore — and to these tanks at a research facility known as the Aquatron, where much of the remaining hope for the species swims in languid circles against the current. “I am certain with every fibre of my being that there are more whitefish [at Dalhousie] than anywhere else,” Bentzen said. 

Though polar bears and spotted owls get more attention, Atlantic whitefish are a special species in Canada, distinguished by both their tiny range and their ancient ancestry. “It’s crazy how old it is,” Bentzen said. “It’s unique in every meaningful way.” Whitefish are also uniquely endangered: there are roughly 200 adults in tanks at Dalhousie, and likely far fewer in the wild. 

A team of government scientists, academics and non-profits are working to save the remaining whitefish, and to expand their range by introducing them to new lakes. Yet their efforts have been stymied by ongoing degradation of the whitefish’s remaining habitat, and with funding that threatens to disappear — even as the state of the population grows more dire. In 2019 (an especially good year for the species) researchers found 251 larval fish for the captive breeding program. In 2024, they captured six. Environmental DNA sampling in the Petite Riviere watershed, near the town of Bridgewater, N.S., has only picked up whitefish presence once in the last few years. 

Still, the fight isn’t over — with the right resources, whitefish could make a comeback. “The metaphor I use sometimes is ‘on life support,’ ” Bentzen said. “It’s just like the patient that’s hooked up to machines; you’re keeping them alive, hoping that something will happen that they can get up and be better.” But it’s a race against time, and the clock is running out. 

What happened to Atlantic whitefish in the wild? 

Whitefish belong to a highly vulnerable group. All four of Canada’s endemic freshwater species — also including Vancouver lamprey, blackfin cisco and copper redhorse — are at risk, and they’re far from alone. Scientists estimate North American freshwater fish are going extinct 877 times faster than the typical extinction rate of species in our planet’s history. A quarter of all freshwater fauna worldwide are currently at risk of extinction.

For whitefish, it took a long time to get to this point. Over millions of years, as glaciers advanced and retreated over North America, whitefish would have travelled across the continent — moving south as ice set in, pushing north as it melted. But by the time Atlantic whitefish first appeared in fossil records, they existed in only two places: the Tusket River watershed, at Nova Scotia’s southern tip, and the Petite Riviere watershed. 

How whitefish had come to exist in just two watersheds, 200 kilometres apart, is — like so much else about this species — a mystery. One theory is colonization: whitefish are an anadromous species, meaning they navigate from saltwater to freshwater to spawn. As Europeans dammed Nova Scotia rivers from the 1700s onward for hydropower, agriculture and water storage, whitefish were barred from completing an important part of their lifecycle, and disappeared from the landscape. 

Acidification from rainwater and the introduction of chain pickerel and smallmouth bass — non-native fish favoured by anglers — further diminished the species’ range. By the 1980s, whitefish had disappeared from the Tusket, and are now only found in the wild in the lakes of the Petite Riviere watershed.

This trajectory made whitefish the first fish species to be declared endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, in 1984.

How whitefish got into Dalhousie University

Since then, there have been efforts to improve their odds of survival. Passage to the ocean was restored in 2018, after the dam owner and several  non-profits, including a local group called Coastal Action, added fish passages at dams along the Petite Riviere itself. This ended a century of whitefish being landlocked in the Petite Riviere lakes — though little whitefish activity has been detected at those structures.

But there have been as many drawbacks. In 2003, Coastal Action discovered smallmouth bass in the upper Petite Riviere watershed. Nine years later, they found chain pickerel. “It was quite disheartening, quite disheartening because pickerel are just such voracious predators,” Amy Russell, species at risk and biodiversity project coordinator at Coastal Action, told The Narwhal. “Chain pickerel and bass eat everything and anything that’s in the water.”

To preserve whitefish habitat in the Petite Riviere watershed, Coastal Action has been contracted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to conduct electrofishing — using an electric current to stun and remove fish — to reduce invasive predators. 

By the early 2000s, it was already clear whitefish weren’t going to survive without help, Paul Bentzen said. In response, Fisheries and Oceans Canada began breeding whitefish at a facility on Nova Scotia’s south shore, to boost numbers and resolve scientific questions about the species. “We can produce so many more fish than what survives in the wild. It’s just exponential the amount that we can release compared to what would survive on their own,” Russell said.

In this, there have been hurdles too. When the Harper government was making cuts to federal scientific funding in 2012, the program was shut down. The whitefish were put back in the Petite Riviere watershed, and in a lake near Halifax from which they promptly vanished — and the facility was destroyed. “They literally bulldozed it,” Bentzen said. 

Six years later, Fisheries and Oceans had collected dozens of juvenile whitefish from the Petite Riviere watershed, and seemed poised to start breeding again, to Bentzen’s relief. But that fall, he got a message from a local CBC reporter, saying he’d just heard from an official that the fish were to be put back in the lakes the following week. Bentzen was apoplectic, and on a call with the federal department, impulsively offered to take over the breeding program at Dalhousie. “Actually, I had no idea whether we could or not,” he admitted. “I had not spoken to a single person at Dalhousie.” 

Yet the offer was accepted — and whitefish have been swimming in Aquatron tanks ever since. 

Bringing a natural environment into a dark basement room

Captive breeding whitefish is a delicate operation. In the spring, two-centimetre long larvae are collected from the Petite Riviere lakes by Coastal Action and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. To reduce their stress and improve survival, Coastal Action has started a streamside facility — a 17-foot utility trailer — where babies snack on zooplankton and fish feed to get stronger before being sent to Dalhousie. “We’re not taking any chances with these ones,” Russell said. 

The whitefish are delivered to the Aquatron, the largest aquatic research facility in the country. When they’re mature, staff mimic conditions for spawning (which occurs in the winter) using light and temperature. These efforts don’t always go according to plan — “since this fish has no really close relatives, we have nothing to go by,” Bentzen said — but they have produced offspring. In February, a darkened room at Dalhousie was lined with racks of clear plastic containers, their bottoms dotted with transparent whitefish eggs. “If you take a close look, you can actually see their little eyes in the embryos,” Aquatron aquarist Emily Allen explained, shining a flashlight into the tubs. 

As they grow up, these captive bred fish are used for genetic work, which aims to assess the species’ genetic diversity and reduce the risk of inbreeding, and for resolving questions like whitefish’s preferred spawning habitat, which is currently a mystery. 

Some are implanted with acoustic tags and released back into the lakes to track whitefish movement in a way that isn’t possible with wild adult fish, as they’re almost impossible to find and too precious to risk capturing anyway. Over a hundred tagged fish were released last year, and data will be analyzed this spring.

Long term, scientists are looking beyond the Petite Riviere watershed. Between warming waters due to climate change and invasive species, the current habitat may not be viable in the future. This means finding another lake in Nova Scotia’s northern half to expand the fish’s range. “It is challenging because we really don’t know a lot about the species requirements,” Jeremy Broome, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada biologist, said. The department has been leading the range expansion work, which involved surveying a shortlist of options that might have the qualities researchers think whitefish need. The next step is consultations with the province, Indigenous groups and local communities.

The scientists hoped to introduce tagged fish into a new lake this year,  but the work is slow-going — apart from the scientific challenges, moving the fish has complex policy considerations. “In essence, we’re creating a new invasive species by moving it into a new environment,” Broome said. In Europe, introductions of whitefish’s distant relatives have crowded out native fish. Scientists don’t believe Atlantic whitefish would have the same effect, based on the role they play in the ecosystem, but they could run rampant too.

This is painstaking work, with risks — but Broome points out that endemic species are a particularly important part of Canada’s biodiversity. “These are species that are present in our own backyard and are our entire responsibility,” Broome said. “No one else is coming to save Atlantic whitefish.”

Habitat and funding loss still threaten Atlantic whitefish

That responsibility includes legislated requirements; whitefish were listed as endangered when Canada’s Species at Risk Act came into place in 2003, which brought legal protection for the species. This includes prohibitions against killing, capturing and harassing the fish, as well as restrictions on destruction of critical habitat. Yet scientists and advocates say the treatment of whitefish hasn’t always reflected the fish’s special status, or its vulnerability.

This past December, work began on the road for a quarry that the province’s Department of Environment and Climate Change had approved on private land in the Petite Riviere watershed — even though the road runs over public land that citizens had proposed protection for years before.

In 2022, a local citizens’ group — with the support of non-government organizations and local governments — applied for a wilderness area designation for the watershed to protect whitefish in the lakes, as well as more than a dozen at-risk birds, reptiles and lichens in the surrounding forest. The lakes are also the water supply for the town of Bridgewater. 

But their original request to the province, along with a 2024 follow-up request for expedited protection, is in limbo — having been acknowledged but not approved — and advocates say the province appears to be ignoring their request, which predates the quarry approval. 

“What that says is that the province is not taking this seriously,” George Buranyi, representative of the Bridgewater Watershed Protection Alliance, said.

Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change did not respond to requests for a response to the concerns that the quarry approval could threaten whitefish, or concerns that the request for protection is being ignored. 

Bentzen fears the presence of a road could affect water quality in whitefish habitat and questions why more care isn’t being taken: “Rock is not a rare resource [in Nova Scotia]. The Atlantic whitefish is an unimaginably rare and special resource.”

But the bigger issue may be the precarity of the work that supports the species’ future. 

For decades, whitefish recovery has been trapped in a money merry-go-round that’s delayed progress on core scientific questions: funding exists for a period and then disappears, forcing researchers to start again from the beginning. 

Now, that work is on a knife’s edge again; much of the project is supported by Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s nature fund for aquatic species at risk. Without it, Dalhousie biologist Robert Lennox said the work is “not even close to possible.” That funding will run for another year, but is not guaranteed past that point. Additional Fisheries and Oceans funding supports the captive breeding program, but government money for species at risk is limited, and the crises are many. Bentzen said the department has encouraged the whitefish team to look for alternate sources of support.

“My huge worry is that this is a very unstable situation,” Bentzen said. Cutting funding “is just not the right decision to make — these fish can be saved.” 

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans spokesperson Christine Lyons said, “protecting species at risk is a shared responsibility,” and the department remains committed to working with “Indigenous communities and organizations, provinces and territories, resource users, local groups, communities, industries and academia to help aquatic species at risk.” 

Hope for whitefish in the wild

While whitefish are few, each female produces thousands of eggs. That means reversing the fish’s trajectory is possible — but the declining state of the wild population makes this more challenging.

Whitefish suffers from its obscure status, too; many people in Nova Scotia, let alone in the rest of the country, are unaware of its existence. “That lack of awareness just kind of breaks my heart. I have to believe, if more people knew about this, that they would be behind it,” Lennox said of the researchers’ effort to ensure the survival of whitefish. “We need people to see the value in it, because it’s not an easy or an inexpensive thing to do, to save a species from extinction.”

In the basement of the Aquatron, Bentzen contemplates the shapes darting through the water. It’s urgent that the work is completed to find these fish a new home, Bentzen said — they won’t survive if left to their own devices in the Petite Riviere watershed. And after millions of years of darting through the waters of Nova Scotia, it’s sobering to think of them finishing their journey in these tanks. “It can’t end here. That would be terrible.”

Scientists working on whitefish compare them to a unicorn. It’s an unlikely comparison for a muted, snub-nose fish the length of one’s forearm. But it’s apt too — a thing so rare it’s almost mythical. Like the other species found only in Canada, they’re at risk of becoming legend altogether. Whether they stay in this world is up to us. 

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On a cloudy evening in early September, fisherman Darren Porter pulls an aluminum boat up to shore on Lake Pisiquid, a small body of water bordering the Nova Scotia community of Windsor. Two fish scientists aboard his boat hop out and begin dragging a seine net through the long grass poking out of the shallows, looking for juvenile fish.

For seven years, a monitoring team made up of the Mi’kmaw Conservation Group, Acadia University and Porter has been testing this site, along with others on the Avon and on an unobstructed tidal river across the bay, to establish the relative abundance of fish.

It’s a windless evening, and as the team brings the net to the beach to check its contents, the water mirrors the pastel sky above.

But Porter knows the situation on this lake is anything but calm.

“I got my car hit by a baseball bat a month ago, I got my truck keyed three weeks ago — it’s insane,” Porter says.

“This is very political now. It started out different.”

Lake Pisiquid is an artificial reservoir created by the construction of a causeway across the Avon River more than 50 years ago.

For much of its existence, the causeway — and the tidal gate, or aboiteau, built into the causeway to allow the Avon to flow out to the Bay of Fundy — has maintained the lake and protected land upstream. But because that protection has required the gate to be almost constantly closed, it’s come at the expense of the fish travelling upriver to spawn. 

In 2017, when the Nova Scotia government began the process to twin the highway running across the causeway, it convened an expert panel to find ways to improve fish passage at the aboiteau — work that included engaging Porter, the Mi’kmaw Conservation Group and Acadia University on monitoring. Then, in 2021, a ministerial order from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) ordered the lake be drained and the aboiteau opened so fish could pass through.

Yet seven years later, fish passage remains obstructed, while the lake has been maintained by a provincial emergency order for over a year. Politically, the situation is at a stalemate, while the continued existence of the lake divides residents, places governments at a standoff and overrides the objections of the Mi’kmaq, who say their Treaty Rights are being violated.

At the centre of all of this is an ecosystem and a community that have been thrown out of balance. And both have reached a breaking point. 

Avon River becomes political wedge between lake community and environmental advocates

The Avon is one of the rivers flowing into the Bay of Fundy, an ecosystem that pulses with the rhythm of the world’s highest tides, sending saltwater and nutrients upriver and creating a shifting coastline downstream. 

For millennia, the tidal ecosystem sustained fish such as Atlantic sturgeon, Atlantic salmon and gaspereau (a kind of river herring), as well as Mi’kmaq communities who travelled the river and established settlements along its banks. In the 1600s, Windsor — an area originally known as Pesaquid or Pisiquid, a Mi’kmaq name meaning “junction of the waters” — was settled by Europeans. Two centuries later, a causeway was built across the mouth of the Avon to protect the community and surrounding agricultural lands from coastal flooding.

Work on the causeway began in 1968; even before it was finished, there were changes to the ecosystem. Sediment began accumulating on the seaward side, forming what is now an extensive saltmarsh that continues to expand. “We haven’t reached a new balance — the system is still adjusting,” Tony Bowron, CEO of a wetland restoration firm that has done work in the area, says. The Windsor saltmarsh is incredibly productive, Bowron says, but on the upstream side, saltmarshes disappeared as the river transitioned to a freshwater ecosystem. “What was one of our major tidal rivers is now essentially an impoundment,” he says.

Over time, different groups came to depend on that impoundment, including farmers, a ski hill, a canoe club and property owners and developers in Windsor and upstream.

Yet by 2017, it was clear something had to change. The highway had become dangerous and needed to be twinned, and the aboiteau had reached the end of its useful life, especially given climate change projections. But for the causeway highway project to proceed with federal funding, it had to have Fisheries Act authorization. Following Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s recommendation, the province put together a group of provincial and federal officials, fishers and Mi’kmaq to develop ideas for how to meet Fisheries Act requirements. The group members proposed an option that would have restored tidal flow, improving fish passage and flood protection, though with lower lake levels. 

But at a municipal council meeting for the area on Sept. 27, 2017, provincial officials explained the community had pushed back against the idea of changing lake levels and introduced a new option — option D — which would maintain the status quo but add additional fishways (structures to help fish navigate an obstacle). 

Paul LaFleche, who at the time was the deputy minister of transportation and infrastructure renewal (now the department of public works), told those gathered that the option could mean a future constitutional challenge. While LaFleche didn’t specify who that challenge might come from, constitutional challenges have been used by the Mi’kmaq to address violations of Treaty Rights.

Still, LaFleche said for his department, there were only two options at the time: option D, or leaving the aboiteau in place. 

For Porter, this marked the moment the process became political. 

“It’s simple: they were told what to do, then they had this meeting on the 27 of September, and they reversed it,” Porter says.

Mi’kmaq say Treaty Right to fish is being violated: ‘That, to me, is not reconciliation’

On the banks of the Avon River, on the opposite side of Lake Pisiquid from Windsor, two small buildings sit amid the marsh grass and the gravel of the stalled highway project.

In 2020, Nikki-Marie Lloyd, a member of Annapolis Valley First Nation, and other Mi’kmaq water protectors built a protest camp at this site. Llloyd called the site Treaty Truck House #2, a reference to the names used for trading posts between Europeans and Mi’kmaq that evokes the historic Mi’kmaq use of the river. “We wanted to bring a little bit of that back here.”

For months, Lloyd stayed at the site in protest of the aboiteau. On hot days, when there was very little water left on the downstream side of the barrier, she says she watched as thousands of migrating gaspereau struggled and died in the muddy water.

Even when the gates are open, passage is limited. And when they’re closed — as they are for more than 23 hours a day and for months at a time in the summer — the effects are clear. “It’s quite noticeable when the gate is not open,” Trevor Avery, a professor at Acadia University who’s working on the monitoring project, says. “The fish do not make it through.”

Meanwhile, at low tide, the water below the barrier is too warm and low in oxygen for fish to survive. Correspondence between Fisheries and Oceans Canada staff in June 2023 observed “large numbers of fish” dying as a result.

It’s too early to say whether there are any population level-effects for those species, as there are other rivers in the area where fish can spawn; that’s why long-term monitoring is important, Avery says. Yet the obstruction of one river can still have consequences for biodiversity. Research suggests some species of fish found in the river, like gaspereau, largely return to their birthplace to spawn, giving each river a unique genetic signature. If that site is lost, those genetics are lost too. 

Avery is wary of wading into politics — it’s not science, he notes — and the fate of the Avon has become very political. But on a personal level, he thinks the obstruction of the river is the wrong decision. “There’s just good advice that’s being ignored, in this case.” 

For Lloyd, the situation was especially infuriating; without fish being able to pass the barrier, there was no meaningful exercise of the Treaty Right to fish. “We hear a lot of talk about reconciliation, but then when you come here and you see everything that’s going on, especially politically, and you realize that a lake and a gated structure currently are trumping our rights — that, to me, is not reconciliation.”

Then, in March 2021, after Mi’kmaq groups raised concerns — and, according to a briefing note, after Mi’kmaq chiefs passed a resolution to pursue legal action if Fisheries and Oceans didn’t act — the department issued a ministerial order requiring the gate be opened for fish passage (which the department then renewed every two weeks). The lake quickly became a dry, and then dusty, plain.

For many Windsor residents, the resulting dust storms were miserable. To mitigate the problem, a coalition of environmental groups, government officials and the Mi’kmaq planted vegetation on the dry lake bed. For a minute, everyone was working together, Lloyd says. The saltmarsh began regenerating, and fish not seen in the river for decades appeared. Travelling the river on a bright green pool floaty in August 2021, seeing the diversity of fish and the marsh grass “was my all-time favorite moment,” Lloyd says.

In March 2023, West Hants municipal council — which encompasses the community of Windsor — wrote a letter to the federal fisheries minister acknowledging the lake may not return and expressing interest in reimagining the Windsor waterfront and surrounding area to realign with the new operating scenario of the aboiteau.

Then wildfire season started.

Minister claims lake necessary for fighting wildfire, but fire chief says that’s ‘ridiculous’

In May 2023, wildfires tore across Nova Scotia, including one that burned 23,525 hectares, the largest in the province’s history.

On June 1, 2023, the province declared a state of emergency for the area around Windsor. The only action associated with the state of emergency was to order the gates at the aboiteau closed, overriding the federal order that had opened them. The provincial order came just two weeks after Premier Tim Houston released a video with area MLA Melissa Sheehy-Richard describing the dry lake as “appalling” and calling for it to be refilled. 

The provincial minister responsible for the emergency management office, whose deputy was LaFleche, formerly of the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, said in a statement that the dry lake posed a “significant risk during this wildfire season.” (The province did not respond to a question about what role LaFleche, or staff from his former department, played in the decision to issue the emergency order.)

In an interview with CBC, the provincial minister responsible for the office of emergency management , John Lohr, said the request had come at the request of local fire chiefs.

Others have disputed that statement. 

In response to the state of emergency, Porter launched a lawsuit, attempting to stay the order and reopen the gate. In an affidavit provided for that lawsuit, Windsor fire chief Jamie Juteau said neither he nor anyone he was aware of in the department had made “any request to Minister Lohr or his department or anyone else for water resources in Lake Pisiquid or to ‘reinstate’ Lake Pisiquid.”

Since then, the province has renewed the emergency order every 30 days, even after historic rain and flooding, including in Windsor.

Brett Tetanish is the fire chief for Brooklyn, another community in the same municipality as Windsor. He says fire suppression appeared to be an excuse to close the gates.

“I just thought how ridiculous that was,” he says. “There’s actually no need.”

Tetanish is an experienced wildland firefighter, and when parts of Nova Scotia were burning in 2023, his department was dispatched to those fires.

If there were a need for water, Tetanish points out there are many other sources a helicopter could draw from. What’s more, because the presence of the causeway has caused silt to built up, much of the lake is only a little more than a meter deep — too shallow for fixed wing aircraft to use, Tetanish says. 

The existence of alternatives was also outlined in a July 2023 report by the municipality’s emergency management office. The report noted if lake levels dropped again, the Windsor fire department would go back to its previous plan for water, and that the department “is confident operating in both scenarios.”

“[The minister] is using the fire service to get what they want,” Tetanish says. “It’s very disheartening that the government would do that.”

Advocates say the existence of alternatives for fire safety suggests the preservation of the lake serves interests beyond fire safety. 

‘LEAVE LAKE ALONE’: Rift in community grows deeper as mayor pleads for unity

Developer Mitch Brison, brother of former Liberal MP Scott Brison, has a house on the lake, and his company, Brison Developments, has residential projects in Windsor and the surrounding area. He wants the lake full.

“Is the town better off to have a body of water in front of your town, or is the town better off to have something that smells and has no water — I prefer the water,” Brison says. “I don’t see the benefit of taking it out, I really don’t.”

Brison says the municipal council now supports the lake, “so we got that reversed.” (Abraham Zebian, the mayor of West Hants, says the council has no official position on the lake.) And while he acknowledges there was movement toward reconciliation, he and most people he knows are tired “with the stuff that’s going on and the money that’s being thrown around in that direction.” 

“It’s time for us all to live and cooperate.”

Ultimately, he says resolving the situation will take a change in the federal government. 

Zebian says his personal position is that the lake is an asset for recreation, firefighting and community well-being. 

Yet he’s acknowledged has divided the town, including last July, when bristol board signs appeared in the community reading “F*CK DARREN PORTER,”and “LEAVE LAKE ALONE.” 

In the aftermath, Zebian took to Facebook to make an impassioned plea for unity. “I’m so disappointed in our community for the things that are being said in regards to the Avon River and Lake Pisiquid,” he wrote. “United we can do anything. Divided we all lose. WEST HANTS… I KNOW YOU ARE BETTER! NOW LET ME SEE IT!”

Over a year later, Zebian says it’s unfortunate the town is still caught in the middle of a fight between the province and the federal government.

Avon River situation at a standstill, as provincial and federal governments fail to find a solution

Documents shed light on the dynamics in the standoff over that fight. At issue is which directive takes precedence — the federal order to open the gate, or the provincial emergency order to keep the gate closed and the lake full — and at whose feet blame for the delay in a resolution can be laid.

The federal department has a legal mandate to protect fish and fish habitat, but it has yet to reissue the ministerial order, which it let lapse after the provincial state of emergency was declared. Documents obtained through access to information requests suggest the department has struggled to get information from the province. 

In an email sent on Aug. 31, 2023, Fisheries and Oceans Canada officials said they were still waiting to receive results of a Nova Scotia emergency management office assessment supporting the emergency order. 

Two months later, in an email regarding a Mi’kmaq proposal to address fire safety while improving fish passage, Fisheries and Oceans Canada regional director general Doug Wentzell wrote, “Bottom line is that this letter presents what seems to [be]reasonable solutions to be able to draw water from the Avon river to support emergency response — which was the stated objective of the province in issuing their continued states of emergency. The key piece of the puzzle for our purposes will be to obtain the province’s assessment around whether these, or other options, have been considered.”

The following spring, an April 2024 letter from Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier to provincial ministers asked the province to take measures to ensure proper fish passage, and to communicate with her ministry about efforts to reconcile that with fire safety. 

In response to a question from The Narwhal about the information it provided to the federal government, Nova Scotia’s department of public works said information requested by the federal government was submitted in January 2024, and that this was “one of a series of requests we have responded to from [Fisheries and Oceans Canada] over several years.”

But an August letter to Public Works from Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s department of Ecosystem Management (which Porter provided), shows that in January, what the province proposed was to maintain the lake — a proposal that, as the letter noted, the province had already been told would not pass fish (or the Fisheries Act) — and that the information included with the application was ‘incomplete or inadequate.”

In other words, the situation is gridlocked, with the province proposing an option Fisheries and Oceans Canada can’t approve. 

For Porter, these documents raise questions of why Fisheries and Oceans Canada is hesitating to enforce its own legislation, in the meantime. 

In a 2023 internal presentation, a slide describes Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s intention to continue reissuing ministerial orders until the aboiteau is replaced, but the department let the last order expire after the state of emergency was declared in June 2023.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Christine Lyons did not directly answer a question about whether the emergency order takes precedence, instead saying questions about the order and its duration should be directed to the province. Gary Andrea, spokesperson for the department of public works, said the state of emergency will be renewed as long as it is needed for public safety. 

Fisheries and Oceans Canada said it’s working proactively with the Nova Scotia department of public works on the proposed aboiteau, and that it remains committed to consultation with the Mi’kmaq. After the emergency order was first issued, the Assembly of Mi’kmaq chiefs sent a letter to the province, stating the lake contravened Mi’kmaq rights and title. (The Assembly of Mi’kmaq chiefs did not respond to a request for an interview.)

The department also said the province has a legal requirement to operate the aboiteau to allow the passage of fish, and that voluntary compliance is the expected and preferred approach. 

To advocates, this looks like the federal department is avoiding a fight in advance of an election. 

“They don’t want to give the province a wedge issue,” Porter says. “So they backed off, and nature suffers, the fish suffer, there’s a whole bunch of things that suffer because of those decisions — and they’re simply political.”

Emergency order remains in place, with no clear path forward for resolution

In September, members of the monitoring team on Lake Pisiquid finish noting the fish they’ve caught in gill nets and minnow traps— one striped bass, a couple of tomcod — and then head back upriver, to turn in for the night.

For now, the situation is at a stalemate. While Porter has a court date in November for his lawsuit against the emergency order, he’s not optimistic that it will bring any change. 

With a municipal election approaching on Oct. 19, current mayor Zebian said the uncertainty around the causeway continues to pit “neighbor against neighbor and family member against family member, and I think unfairly so, for my community.” The project was supposed to be completed in 2022, he notes; two years later, there’s no clear indication of a way forward.

Yet in other contexts, communities have found solutions. 

Three hundred kilometres from the Avon, water flows under a bridge over the tidal Petitcodiac River in New Brunswick. In 2021, the bridge was completed to replace a causeway built in 1968, despite the opposition of some homeowners, and biologists are already reporting greater numbers of fish. 

To the south, Peskotomuhkati Nation was instrumental in removing an aging hydroelectric dam on the St Croix/Skutik River this year, which runs between Maine and New Brunswick, and restoring fish passage. 

By comparison, advocates say the current situation with the Avon River aboiteau is a missed opportunity, where new infrastructure is needed anyway, to fix a problem.

That problem is a system out of balance — and not just on the Avon. For 400 years, people have been building structures to hold back the Bay of Fundy’s tides. Asking people to imagine a different relationship with this system is challenging. Yet in the 21st century, the costs of drawing hard lines across the landscape have become clear, severing ties between animals, people and the environment in which they all live. 

Whether work on the Avon will ever restore those links is far from clear. But for better or for worse in this dynamic, shifting ecosystem, there’s no going back to the past.

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Months before releasing a stark scientific assessment of the impact of fish farms on Atlantic salmon, federal officials grappled with how they would share the conclusions with industry and provincial regulators, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Narwhal.

The March 2024 report was the first to formally assess the threat of interactions between wild salmon and escapees from the fish farms that dot the coastline in Atlantic Canada.

According to internal correspondence, Fisheries and Oceans Canada originally aimed to publish the science advisory report in December 2023, following a June 2023 national review meeting of federal scientists, foreign government scientists and non-governmental organizations. There was no indication of the reason for the delay in the documents, but advocates say it is not unusual. 

The assessment summarizes scientific evidence of ongoing risks of interbreeding between farmed and wild salmon populations, as provincial and federal regulators contemplate an expansion of aquaculture in Atlantic Canada. But a few months before its release, senior officials with Fisheries and Oceans noted the task ahead of engaging with industry and the provinces about the findings.

“There is a hard conversation in here about management decisions for the population of salmon as a whole,” the regional manager, aquaculture management wrote in an October 2023 email to the regional director, released through access to information legislation.

A month later, the regional director of aquatic ecosystems, Newfoundland and Labrador region, wrote to the regional director for science in that region to ask about plans for the assessment’s publication. “I am anxious to ensure that there is sufficient lead to ensure engagement with key partners, in advance of publication, particularly the provincial government and industry association,” she wrote. “We have invested considerable time to strengthen dialogue and relations, and if we do not provide sufficient time and space to engage appropriately in advance, it could be very damaging. Done well, it could provide a valuable opportunity to build trust, dialogue and identify common ground.”

The warnings in the emails highlight internal divisions within the federal department, where some see their role as protecting wild fish, and others have devoted their careers to developing the aquaculture industry, according to an advocacy group that promotes the restoration and conservation of Atlantic salmon.

“I don’t think it’s surprising that there would be some trepidation from those quarters of the department,” Neville Crabbe, executive director of communications at the Atlantic Salmon Federation, told The Narwhal in an interview.

The internal emails suggest there was concern over the potential impacts of the report, despite the fact the assessment did not take into account one area of crossbreeding that could further exacerbate the poor state of wild salmon: the use of foreign strains in aquaculture. Though it was out of the scope of this specific assessment, documents reviewed by The Narwhal show federal officials have grown increasingly concerned with this risk in recent years.

Nonetheless, Crabbe says he’s “very confident that what’s contained in that risk assessment will weigh heavily on future decisions about expansion.”

“I think the positive, if there is one, is that they did conduct a risk assessment, and they did publish it,” Crabbe added.

When what happens on the salmon farm doesn’t stay on the salmon farm

While farmed and wild salmon in Atlantic Canada are the same species, they’re separated by a gulf of domestication. 

Farmed salmon — which primarily come from a strain that originates in the Wolastoq or Saint John River — have been bred to grow faster, and are more aggressive. When these fish interbreed with the region’s wild salmon, their offspring are less likely to survive and are less able to adapt to climate change or other pressures.

The new risk assessment, which examined the likelihood of interbreeding and the consequences for wild populations, suggests a high risk for salmon in areas where there’s a concentration of salmon farms, including in the Bay of Fundy in southeastern New Brunswick and along Newfoundland’s southwest coast.

“Where we have lots of salmon in cages, that’s where we have elevated risk of these sorts of interactions,” says Ian Bradbury, research scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada and one of the authors of the risk assessment (speaking as a scientist, not as a representative of the department).

In a response to questions about industry reaction to the risk assessment, Jamie Baker, executive director of the Newfoundland Aquaculture Industry Association, said in an email that it is well established that salmon populations have been declining since before salmon farming started. He said salmon producers have responded to the potential risk to wild fish “by practically eliminating fish escapes through investments in technologies and training that effectively and safely contain their salmon.”

But risks go beyond escapees from domestic strains of salmon. 

Introduction of European genes put Atlantic salmon at greater risk

Fisheries and Oceans’ science advisory report did not explicitly consider the additional impact of farmed fish that originate in Europe, but Bradbury says European genes elevate the risk. 

European Atlantic salmon have evolved separately from North American Atlantic salmon for thousands of years, producing genetic differences associated with processes like immunity or navigation. 

Fertile European salmon are not authorized for use in aquaculture in Atlantic Canada and have never been approved. Yet European genes have been detected in wild and farmed populations in the Atlantic for years. Internal documents suggest the presence of these genes has sparked suspicion.

A 2013 Fisheries and Oceans Canada report released through access to information legislation mentions requests from two aquaculture companies to import “alternative Atlantic salmon bloodlines that could potentially increase Canadian aquaculture industry competitiveness.” These were Norwegian-origin salmon, which documents noted were sought for their improved performance over domestic fish. 

Those requests were denied. 

Yet in response to a 2021 analysis by Fisheries and Oceans Canada that showed the presence of European genes in both aquaculture salmon and in wild fish, a memo for the minister noted that “results suggest either the recent importation or the maintenance of European-origin salmon by the aquaculture industry.”

Department scientists’ further analysis of farmed salmon and escapees in Newfoundland found European genetic ancestry as high as 40 per cent; in one instance, scientists captured two fish with 100 per cent European ancestry as part of a recovery effort following an escape event.

While the risk of European genetics are not mentioned in the published risk assessment, a slide in a 2023 draft internal presentation on the assessment stated that “some salmon farmed in Atlantic Canada have been significantly and continuously interbred with European salmon,” with “implications for non-compliance by the industry.” 

European ancestry has also been found in recent escapees, including fish intercepted at the Magaguadavic fishway, near the Maine-New Brunswick border. In late 2023, 63 escapees were detected at the fishway.

Samples of those fish have been tested at Bradbury’s lab in Halifax. Results indicate continued and potentially elevated presence of European genes, compared to what scientists have observed previously, Bradbury said.

As officials struggle to respond to the impacts of existing farms and interbreeding, they also face industry attempts to bring new sources of genetic material to the region. 

Fish farm escape puts Bay of Fundy wild salmon in jeopardy

In 2023, Fisheries and Oceans Canada officials circulated an email on a “significant” request from Cooke Aquaculture, one of the major aquaculture companies in the region. To make up for a shortfall of eight million domestic-origin eggs, the company proposed importing sterile Norwegian-strain eggs (also known as triploid eggs), as well as fertile eggs from Tasmania, with an eye toward incorporating the latter into long-term production. 

Federal scientists’ advice was that the potential importation of Tasmanian eggs (from a strain believed to originate in a river in Nova Scotia, but which has been domesticated in Tasmania for decades) was “directly analogous” to past requests for fertile European eggs, where scientists had identified a risk to wild populations and recommended against the introduction.

Documents describe Cooke’s intention to place salmon born of those Tasmanian eggs in pens in Spring 2024.

When contacted by The Narwhal to ask whether this request had been approved, and for a response to the risk assessment, Cooke Aquaculture spokesperson Joel Richardson declined to comment.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada did not respond to a question about whether or not the request for Tasmanian eggs had been approved. In a statement, a spokesperson said the department works with other federal departments and federal regulators on decisions of mutual interest, such as the importation of salmon eggs, and that in 2023, a licence was issued to Cooke Aquaculture for triploid European-origin eggs for anticipated use in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. 

Managing the risk to Atlantic wild salmon after fish farm assessment

Regardless of the origin of farmed fish, scientists and advocates say the risk assessment highlights the need for additional mitigation measures to protect the genetics of wild populations. This could include improvements to net pen systems, and requirements for industry to use sterile eggs.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientists have also developed a test to detect European ancestry, which has been available for more than a year.

In an emailed statement, Fisheries and Oceans said the report provides an improved understanding of the risks of interbreeding between wild and farmed salmon, which will help inform advice to provinces considering new or expanded aquaculture sites.

The statement also said the Atlantic provinces are responsible for overseeing the containment of farmed salmon and preventing escapes, and referred those questions to provincial governments.

When asked for comment on the apparent trepidation about the release of the risk assessment reflected in internal emails, the department provided a statement reading that it “fully respects the authority of Atlantic provinces in their management of aquaculture.” 

In the meantime, Crabbe says the growing evidence of the effects of interbreeding underscores the risk of industry expansion, including on Nova Scotia’s south shore and on southern Newfoundland, where two companies are planning to add millions of salmon to sites along a mostly undeveloped stretch of coastline. 

“We frequently hear from provincial leaders, even the federal minister, that this industry and wild fish can coexist,” says Crabbe. “This assessment is a heavy weight on the already tilted scale that says they cannot.”

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In the summer of 2000, Mi’kmaw fishers from Esgenoôpetitj, or Burnt Church First Nation, took to the waters of Miramichi Bay, in New Brunswick, each small boat carrying a cache of lobster traps. The community was elated. A national court decision made the previous summer had affirmed their rights as Mi’kmaq to support themselves through fishing. Although the weather was calm, the situation quickly deteriorated.

Federal fisheries officers in powerful enforcement vessels surrounded the fishers, several times swamping the smaller boats and sending the occupants into the water. As tensions grew, non-Indigenous commercial fishers demanded that Fisheries and Oceans Canada, also known as DFO, pull Indigenous fishers’ traps, or threatened to do so themselves. For several nights in a row, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people reported being shot at from boats on the other side of a divide that would prove to be about much more than fish.

Atlantic Canada is home to the country’s most lucrative fisheries, including lobster — with an export value of $3.2-billion in 2021 — and young American eels, or elvers, which can sell for $5,000 per kilogram. But in 1999, the Supreme Court decision changed who could take a slice of this profitable pie.

The court ruled in the case of Donald Marshall Jr. from Membertou First Nation in Nova Scotia. Marshall had been arrested in 1993 for catching and selling adult eels without a license and for harvesting outside the commercial fishing season. When the Supreme Court acquitted Marshall, six years later, the decision hinged on his Treaty Rights as an Indigenous person. Beyond acquitting him, the ruling — known as the Marshall decision — legally affirmed the rights of individuals belonging to 35 Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqey and Peskotomuhkati First Nations to earn a living by fishing.

The violence that followed in Miramichi Bay lasted into the early 2000s. The Lobster Wars, as the conflict became known, were the first sign that implementing the Marshall decision would not go smoothly. But in the decades since, tensions have flared again and again, including in late 2020, when lobster fishers from Sipekne’katik First Nation faced similar violence in southwest Nova Scotia. In April 2023, Fisheries and Oceans Canada closed the elver fishery early after a series of altercations, including one person allegedly hitting a fisher with a metal pipe. Then, in August, four people allegedly stole a crate of lobster from a wharf in southwest Nova Scotia, dumped the contents and threw the empty crate at its owner, a fisher from Sipekne’katik.

Responding to the ongoing conflict, a committee of Canadian senators released a report in 2022 titled “Peace on the Water.” The report found that since the Marshall decision, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has failed to ensure that the 35 First Nations can fish according to their Treaty Rights. And this failure, the report notes, has set the stage for violence.

The conflict started with fish, but it ultimately reaches to the heart of how Canada recognizes First Nations’ rights and sovereignty. The underlying issues are complex, tied to the history of treaty relations, the region’s ecology and economics, and ongoing racism toward Indigenous people. These pose challenges that are not easily resolved. But the federal government’s approach is not working. Almost 25 years after the Marshall decision, why are Indigenous communities still waiting for their fishing rights to be implemented? To help answer the question, we need to understand the obstacles.

What is a moderate livelihood, anyway?

With the Marshall decision, a central devil has always been in the details. In 1760 and 1761, the British signed written agreements with Indigenous nations in what are now known as the Canadian Maritimes and the northeastern United States. The Peace and Friendship Treaties secured First Nations’ hunting, fishing, and land-use rights and, crucially, guaranteed that Indigenous people could trade for “necessaries.”

For centuries, colonial governments largely ignored, overlooked or deliberately suppressed these rights. In the Marshall decision, the Supreme Court interpreted the treaties to mean that Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqey and Peskotomuhkati people today have the right to earn a “moderate livelihood” from fishing. This means fishers can make enough money to cover things such as clothing, food, housing and other amenities but can’t amass unlimited wealth. (When Indigenous people exercise this Treaty Right to fish, these activities are sometimes known as “rights-based” fisheries or, in reference to the wording of the Marshall decision, “moderate livelihood” fisheries.)

According to the court’s ruling, members of the nations that signed the 1760–61 treaties can fish year round and sell what they catch. But what level of income counts as “moderate” — and how people should be able to earn it — has never been fully defined. That lack of clarity has plagued negotiations and poisoned relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous fishers ever since.

Chris Milley, a resource management expert and former director at Mi’kmaw organizations in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, says Fisheries and Oceans Canada has been reluctant to assign “moderate” a number — either in monetary value or fishery quota.

Indigenous fishers say that pegging the right to a specific income is problematic, given that operating costs, such as the cost of boat fuel, and sales revenue for commodities like lobster can fluctuate. Additionally, what covers someone’s basic needs depends on their circumstances, says Shelley Denny, a senior adviser for the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

So far, though, “the focus has been … on the ‘moderate’ of the moderate livelihood,” Denny says, “meaning limiting Indigenous peoples, ensuring they don’t make money like a [non-Indigenous] commercial fisher.”

On the West Coast of Canada, First Nations have also seen their right to make money from fishing curtailed. In 2018, British Columbia’s Supreme Court ruled that five Nuu-chah-nulth nations — who never signed treaties with the Crown — have the right to sell fish, based on their long history of harvesting and trading seafood before Europeans showed up. But the court limited Nuu-chah-nulth fishers to using smaller boats than other commercial harvesters. The B.C. Court of Appeal revoked those limitations in 2021. Across Canada, though, the protracted fight to sell fish — and the prosecution of Indigenous fishers who do so — has amplified tensions around First Nations’ fisheries.

Uneasy relations over Atlantic fishery

If there’s one word that sums up the moderate livelihood issue in Atlantic Canada, it’s mistrust. “It’s the water we’re swimming in right now,” says Rick Williams, a policy consultant, Nova Scotia’s former deputy minister of policy and priorities, and co-editor of a 2022 book on First Nations’ fisheries.

For decades, Indigenous fishers have exercised their Treaty Right to fish outside commercial fishing seasons, licenses and quota. (This is what Donald Marshall Jr. was doing when he went fishing for eels in 1993.) But the consequences have, at times, been severe. Since the 2020 conflict around the Sipekne’katik lobster fishery, Fisheries and Oceans Canada enforcement officers have continued to seize traps and charge harvesters for fishing without authorization. Because Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqey and Peskotomuhkati people have the legal right to fish, each of these run-ins fuels mistrust. In early 2023, a Nova Scotia judge dismissed charges that Fisheries and Oceans had levied against three Sipekne’katik fishers. And in July, the Sipekne’katik Nation sued Fisheries and Oceans Canada for confiscating lobster traps from the community’s moderate livelihood fishery. Since then, the department has seized hundreds more traps from the nation’s members.

“The same group that is on the water, hauling our nets, arresting our people, that’s the government department that we’re supposed to sit down with and negotiate our rights,” says George Ginnish, chief of Natoaganeg First Nation and cochair of Mi’gmawe’l Tplu’taqnn, a non-profit organization representing Mi’kmaw nations in New Brunswick.

Since the Marshall decision, Fisheries and Oceans has tried multiple times to carve out space for moderate livelihood fishing by encouraging First Nations to enter the existing commercial system. Very few Indigenous people were allowed to fish commercially before the Supreme Court decision; getting to participate is a huge financial opportunity for cash-strapped communities. (However, Fisheries and Oceans retains ultimate decision-making power over the commercial industry. What nations want is to manage their own fisheries, independent of the Canadian government. More on that below.)

In the 2000s, for instance, Fisheries and Oceans spent more than $550-million subsidizing nations with licenses, as well as commercial fishing gear and the training to use it. This approach was pitched as a temporary way to get First Nations fishing while the government figured out a permanent solution to implementing Treaty Rights. Over 20 years later, though, Fisheries and Oceans “is trying to say, ‘Well, maybe this is an implementation of the rights,’ ” says Ken Paul, lead fisheries negotiator for the Wolastoqey Nation in New Brunswick. Meanwhile, communities continue to struggle with high rates of poverty and unemployment, Paul says, which erodes their faith in the process and raises doubts about the government’s commitment to Indigenous rights.

In 2017, Fisheries and Oceans Canada began signing Rights Reconciliation Agreements with individual nations. These agreements also provide commercial licenses and fishing quota, but sweeten the deal by offering First Nations the opportunity to weigh in on the department’s management decisions. In return, though, Indigenous leaders say, the agreements require nations to cease moderate livelihood fishing and fish only during the commercial season — a prospect that has deterred many communities from signing. For those who have signed, such as Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation in Quebec, the agreement also specifies that the nation will not take the government to court over treaty fishing rights for five years.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada negotiator Jim Jones told media in 2019 that Rights Reconciliation Agreements recognize that First Nations have the right to fish in pursuit of a moderate livelihood but avoid getting into how that right is defined. The intent, Jones said at the time, is to increase First Nations’ access to fish. In a separate statement, the department said that the agreements “aim to outline how we can work together to collaboratively manage fisheries to ensure stability and predictability, for the benefit of everyone.”

Since 2021, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has reached a new kind of arrangement with 15 First Nations to deal with moderate livelihood fishing. These understandings allow communities to create harvesting plans and fish without fear of interference from the federal department — as long as they do so during the commercial season with departmental authorization. So far, this strategy appears to have reduced tensions with non-Indigenous lobster fishers in many parts of the region — though not in the country’s most lucrative lobster fishing area, LFA 34.

In August, two members of Canadian parliament from Nova Scotia called on Fisheries and Oceans Canada to crack down on lobster “poaching” in LFA 34, where members of Sipekne’katik were fishing. The commercial lobster season opens there in November.

Meanwhile, the province of Nova Scotia recently announced that it will increase the fine for buying lobster caught outside the commercial season from $100,000 to $1 million — a penalty that will further stymy Mi’kmaw fishers’ ability to sell their catch.

Overall, the federal government’s approach — making agreements and issuing fishing licenses community by community — has fostered inequality between First Nations. The divisive tactic has affected how strongly each community can negotiate and the financial investment that each has received, even though they all hold the same rights under the Peace and Friendship Treaties. “They basically undermined the [First Nations’] collective efforts,” says Ginnish. “If they really want peace on the water, there has to be equity.”

Commercial fishers are frustrated, too

Hanging over tensions between First Nations and government is the influence of the fishing industry. Commercial fishing associations have publicly expressed support for the Marshall decision and reconciliation, but these groups generally want Indigenous fishers moved into the commercial fishery. Attempts to fish outside that system are often decried as unfair.

“Everybody wants to move things forward in a peaceful way that’s going to protect the fishery and build relationships that are robust and sustainable and friendly,” says Milley, the former director of several Mi’kmaw organizations. But in trying to make everyone happy, including non-Indigenous commercial fishers (many of whom have also been fishing for generations), the result is that no one is satisfied, he says.

Over the past two decades, the Canadian government has purchased licenses from non-Indigenous fishers who want to sell and has given them to First Nations communities—an approach known as “willing buyer–willing seller.” But there have been unintended consequences. For one, “the Marshall decision bumped up fisheries license costs hugely,” says Susanna Fuller, vice president of conservation and projects with Oceans North, a marine conservation organization. The cost of a lobster license has reportedly climbed as high as $1.8-million—an increase for which the government’s buy-back program is only partially responsible. That exorbitant price tag has made it more difficult for young Maritimers who are not Indigenous to enter the fishery. But it also means that the commercial fishing industry is making money off the government’s current approach for negotiating with First Nations. “That’s not a good use of funds, if we’re really working on reconciliation,” says Fuller.

In 2022 and 2023, Fisheries and Oceans Canada took a different tack, commandeering 14 percent of the elver quota from non-Indigenous fishers without compensation and giving it to First Nations. The department claimed the license holders were asking too much; license holders were furious. Fearful that the government might do the same in other fisheries, non-Indigenous fishers asked the federal court in March 2023 to determine whether the minister’s decisions to redistribute quota were reasonable. In August, the court upheld Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s decision for the 2022 season, but the legal process for 2023 is ongoing.

Whatever the court decides, Fuller says the situation shows the limitations of trying to implement the Marshall decision through the commercial industry. The Canadian government can’t address moderate livelihood fishing with just money, licenses, or fishing quota, Fuller says.

Indigenous rights go well beyond a lobster or a baby eel; instead, the fundamental concern is sovereignty.

Who has the power to make decisions over Atlantic fishery?

Under Canada’s Fisheries Act, Fisheries and Oceans has authority over managing fisheries. But the Supreme Court based the Marshall decision on Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution. Section 35 enshrines Indigenous peoples’ right to self-government, which includes authority over the use of natural resources.

Denny, with the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources, says that while the definitional questions around the Marshall decision have posed challenges, it’s the question of governance authority that has always been more foundational.

“The bigger issue is really about legitimacy,” says Denny. “For the Mi’kmaq, they don’t consider the federal way of regulating fisheries as legitimate for Indigenous fishers. And vice versa, the federal government and the provincial governments don’t consider a self-governing fishery that appears to be unregulated as legitimate for them.”

In her 2022 doctoral thesis, Denny proposed a few possible frameworks for Mi’kmaw fisheries governance, one of which is Indigenous communities making joint decisions with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. To move forward, communities may need to work with the department, in spite of their differences. “I think there’s that understanding that if we want to improve fisheries management, [the federal government] better start thinking of doing things differently and sharing that power,” Denny says.

According to Paul, negotiator for the Wolastoqey Nation, any real implementation of treaty rights will require recognition of First Nations’ management authority. This authority includes developing commercial harvesting plans, monitoring fishing activities and fish populations, and providing enforcement. So far, negotiations have been unsuccessful, in part, Indigenous advocates say, because Indigenous governance is not within Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s mandate. That’s why, in July 2022, the Senate gave Fisheries and Oceans one year to transfer negotiations over moderate livelihood fisheries to Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.

In a response to the Senate report, however, Joyce Murray, who was then the minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, rejected the suggestion, saying the department’s “regulation of rights-based fisheries is consistent with my statutory powers, duties, and functions under the Fisheries Act.” Diane Lebouthillier replaced Murray as minister in late July; she has not yet waded into the moderate livelihood issue publicly.

In a statement, the Senate committee expressed disappointment in Murray’s response and wrote, “the government’s stubborn insistence on the status quo is disrespectful to First Nations still trying to assert their rights almost a quarter century after Canada’s highest court affirmed them.”

Are there enough fish to go around?

There’s another wrinkle here, one that limits how much everyone can fish. In 1999, just two months after ruling in the Marshall decision, Canada’s Supreme Court issued a rare clarification. Colonial governments do have the power to limit treaty rights, the court decided, but only for conservation or other “substantial public objectives,” such as maintaining economic fairness or recognizing the historical reliance on the fishery by non-Indigenous groups.

Legally speaking, protecting the health of fish populations takes priority. Once that’s ensured, fish can be allocated to Indigenous fisheries, then to fishing by non-Indigenous people.

As a result, implementing the Marshall decision requires stepping out of the courtrooms and fishing boats and into the ecosystem to make sure that Atlantic Canada’s coveted marine populations, including lobster and eels, can sustain the harvest.

During the most recent conflicts, both Fisheries and Oceans Canada and commercial fishers used conservation to justify opposing Indigenous fishing. When Sipekne’katik launched their moderate livelihood fishery for lobster in 2020, for example, many non-Indigenous commercial harvesters objected to fishing outside the commercial season and quota, citing concerns for the lobster population. But those concerns were unfounded, according to multiple scientists. The department’s most recent assessment of the lobster populations in Atlantic Canada also found that all are healthy.

For elvers, the situation is more complicated. American eels are in steep decline throughout their range, which stretches from Greenland to South America, including in rivers in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Elvers can be caught easily from the riverbank with a simple net and the catch is extremely valuable—both increase the risks of overfishing. But Fisheries and Oceans Canada doesn’t monitor eel populations in every river where they’re fished. Instead, the department uses data from a single “index” river in Nova Scotia to estimate the health of elvers across the region. Most concerning, though, is that eels take 10 to 25 years to mature, meaning that the impacts of current fishing levels won’t be clear for decades.

Ultimately, Fisheries and Oceans Canada appears determined to continue to manage fishing with commercial licenses. In a statement, the department said: “Conservation is our highest priority and we are working with First Nations to advance their Supreme Court–affirmed treaty right to fish.” The statement continued that the “willing buyer–willing seller [approach] creates predictability in the fishery and allows all harvesters to adequately plan and prepare for fishing seasons, and ensures conservation by not increasing fishing effort.”

But Indigenous leaders say allowing First Nations to be more actively involved in governance would lead to fisheries decisions that are guided by Indigenous value systems and ecosystem health, rather than the current focus on catching as many fish as possible.

Denny says this could be accomplished by changing federal policies to allow First Nations to govern their own fisheries alongside those administered by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, a kind of coexistence that harkens back to the original treaty relationship.

“There needs to be discussion, there needs to be sharing, there needs to be responsibility,” she says. “And these things are well within the Mi’kmaw value system.”

Respecting First Nations’ sovereignty will require more difficult conversations about who gets access to the region’s rich resources—and how those decisions are made. But Indigenous advocates say the process can’t take another 25 years.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

As autumn sets in in Atlantic Canada, Atlantic salmon in eastern Canadian rivers are setting themselves up for spawning: the females resting, the males competing for the chance to mate.

But ahead of this year’s fall spawning, scientists found a troubling presence in a river off the Bay of Fundy.

In early August, staff with the Atlantic Salmon Federation began detecting escaped aquaculture salmon at a fishway on the Magaguadavic River in southwest New Brunswick — a significant concern in the region, since farmed salmon can mate with wild fish, threatening the health of populations.

“It has very serious consequences, especially at this time of year,” says Jonathan Carr, vice-president of research and environment for the Atlantic Salmon Federation.

As of Oct. 11, the number of escaped salmon detected at the Magaguadavic fishway stood at 63. In a region where wild populations of Atlantic salmon are clinging to survival, scientists say even small escapes can pose a threat.

But advocates say the province has yet to respond to the incident, and that it highlights the weaknesses in provincial and federal oversight of an industry that may be putting local endangered populations of wild salmon closer to the brink.

“It just seems to keep happening,” says Matt Abbott, with the Conservation Council of New Brunswick. “And it doesn’t ever seem to trigger the next step of government finding a way to rein this in.”

NGO detects escaped salmon before government or company

On Aug. 1, the first escapee arrived at the Magaguadavic fishway, a short drive from the Maine-New Brunswick border, where the Atlantic Salmon Federation has been monitoring since 1992. 

As salmon pass through the fishway, they’re intercepted by federation staff, who remove the fish and collect genetic and other biological information, before the carcasses are sent to the freezer to await further study. 

Even at a glance, farmed fish are easy to identify, Carr says; they’re larger than wild salmon, and have characteristics associated with growing in cages, like ragged, eroded fins. Though there have been no wild salmon in the river for decades — a decline Carr blames in part on interbreeding — the federation has continued monitoring here, as a window into what’s happening in salmon-bearing rivers across the region.

The federation says it’s the only group monitoring escapes in this part of southwest New Brunswick, the centre of aquaculture in the province; Fisheries and Oceans Canada conducts monitoring at the Mactaquac biodiversity facility near Fredericton. The province did not offer any details about its own monitoring activities. 

What the federation’s monitoring on the Magaguadavic River showed this year was a stream of escapees, peaking in late August and early September.

Three weeks after escapes were first detected by the Atlantic Salmon Federation, Kelly Cove Salmon Ltd., the salmon farming subsidiary of Cooke Aquaculture, reported to the province that three of their pens in the Bay of Fundy were breached due to damage from seals on Aug. 24. This breach would account for the fish picked up in late August and early September, but leaves the source of the earlier escapees unknown. 

The other aquaculture company operating in the Bay of Fundy, Mowi, reported that it had not discovered a breach, when contacted by the federation. 

In an emailed statement provided in response to an interview request, Joel Richardson, Cooke’s vice-president of public relations, said as required by regulations, the company provided its report to New Brunswick’s Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries on Aug. 25. Richardson said the company also voluntarily shared the report with the Atlantic Salmon Federation, after the federation contacted Richardson on Sept. 1 to inform him of escapees at the fishway — since neither the company or department had notified the federation that the escapes had already been reported. 

But beyond that report — which the province has not made public, and would not confirm to The Narwhal — advocates say no action has been taken. 

“That escape is reported, it goes to the registrar of New Brunswick aquaculture … and nothing else happens,” says Neville Crabbe, executive director of communications with the Atlantic Salmon Federation. “It’s intentionally obtuse and secretive.”

New Brunswick’s Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries did not respond to questions about when it received the report of an escape, how many escapees were reported or whether there are sanctions for the company. It also did not respond to a question about recapture activities by the department or the company — recapture plans are not required, but must be approved by Fisheries and Oceans Canada when they are made. The federation said it’s not aware of any industry recapture efforts in this case.

Richardson did not respond to a question about the number of escapees it had reported, but said the company took “corrective actions” after the breach. He did not offer details about what those correction actions were.

Impact of New Brunswick farmed salmon escape on wild population of particular concern

On Nova Scotia’s side of the Bay of Fundy, where aquaculture escapes have happened in the past, companies are required to report breaches; a spokesperson for Nova Scotia’s Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture said the department also reviews farm inventory levels to determine the extent of breaches.

Escapes are a particular concern in the region because of the precarious state of the wild populations, including the Inner Bay of Fundy salmon, which have been classed as endangered under the Species at Risk Act since 2003, and Outer Bay of Fundy salmon, which the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada assessed as endangered in 2010. The population of Inner Bay of Fundy salmon has declined by 95 per cent since the 1980s.

Data gathered by Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientists and others shows that there’s been hybridization and introgression — meaning genetic mixing in the population — between escapees and wild salmon in the Bay of Fundy for decades.

In New Brunswick, all aquaculture salmon are bred from a strain that originates in the Wolastoq or Saint John River (though Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientists have detected hybridization in the Bay of Fundy with farmed salmon of European origin, despite the fact nonsterile European salmon have never been approved in Canada). 

Even with a local strain, the intermingling of salmon adapted to rivers over thousands of years with domesticated fish poses a threat, though the exact relationship with population decline is complex. “When they integrate with wild populations, the offspring don’t do as well. So you get an immediate hit to the numbers,” Ian Bradbury, a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada said in an interview (in which he was speaking as a scientist, not as a representative of the federal department).

In addition to producing offspring that simply don’t survive in the short-term, there are also long-term consequences, as future generations become less adapted to the wild environment — and less resilient to climate change and other stressors. “We’re really compromising the population both in terms of numbers, and in terms of their evolutionary capacity to survive.”

This can be true even when the number of escapees is low, as small populations lack a buffer against the impact of hybridization.

Monitoring and urgency around aquaculture breaches is lacking: Atlantic Salmon Federation

Joel Richardson, of Cooke Aquaculture, called the idea that farmed salmon are a high-level threat to wild counterparts “disinformation” and said there are many threats to wild salmon including growing seal populations, commercial fishing on migratory routes and dams.  

Susan Farquharson, CEO of the Atlantic Canada Fish Farmers Association, an industry advocacy group, says escapes are rare compared to the past, and that farms are required to abide by New Brunswick’s Code of Containment, which includes guidelines for mooring systems and net structures, as well as reporting requirements. The code requires companies to do surface inspections weekly and monthly subsurface inspections, and use divers and remotely operated vehicles to inspect damage once a tear is suspected.

“No farmer wants to lose a fish, so they’re always closely monitoring,” Farquharson says. Once a breach has been reported, she says it’s up to regulators to carry on the process, as well as the Atlantic Salmon Federation.

But the federation said the work of monitoring and recapture shouldn’t be left to a non-government organization.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada has responsibility for the protection of wild fish, but Crabbe says the department is failing to protect salmon from the threat posed by aquaculture. 

The Atlantic Salmon Federation has called on the federal department to perform an audit of the industry, so the government can trace fish back to the site from which they escaped. 

Fisheries and Oceans is working on a quick, cost-effective genetic tool to identify escapees in the Maritimes region, though it wouldn’t necessarily trace them back to a specific farm.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada didn’t answer a question on auditing the aquaculture industry, but said in an emailed statement that they are aware of reports of recent escapes. The department “takes the conservation of wild Atlantic salmon and their natural environment seriously,” the statement continued.

The statement also said the department convened a national advisory meeting this past summer on the risks interactions with farmed salmon pose to wild salmon populations, though it said the containment and prevention escapes are a provincial responsibility in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and referred questions about details of the recent escape to the provincial government.

Other jurisdictions where aquaculture escapes are an issue offer an example of how they can be managed to help protect wild species. In Norway, where there’s an extensive publically funded monitoring program, and where the aquaculture industry is responsible for financing mitigation measures in rivers, snorkellers travel rivers documenting and removing farmed salmon. 

But in Canada such measures are not required of industry, and there is no comprehensive monitoring program in the Atlantic region to detect escapes.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada told The Narwhal it was considering some mitigation measures to contain breaches. The federal department said these would include options for river monitoring and the recapture of fish escaping from farms. The department added that any proposed options to monitor or recapture fish would consider the potential impacts on wild fish and fish habitat.

In the meantime, advocates say rapid reporting and containment of escapes would reduce their impact on wild populations — but provincial and federal government responses are failing to match that urgency.

“That’s the big issue here,” Carr says. “Nothing is being done.”

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In the early morning dark of April 12, 2023, violence erupted along a Nova Scotia riverbank after a man engaged a woman and a youth in a heated argument. Soon after, seven people arrived. One allegedly assaulted the man with a pipe while another stood nearby wielding a knife and a taser. When the RCMP later arrested two members of the group a short distance away, the officers found two shotguns and a taser.

The altercation is just one of a series of violent disputes that broke out along rivers across the province in March and April, with people reporting being threatened at gunpoint or with knives. In one instance, a young person was hit in the head. In another, a man was shot in the leg.

At the center of this fighting is a lucrative bounty: translucent, toothpick-sized young American eels, known as elvers. Elvers currently sell for roughly $5,000 per kilogram, the most valuable commercial fish in Canada by weight. The fishery is worth nearly $50 million, and the pressure to maximize profit during the brief 10-week harvest contributes to tensions among fishers.

Citing threats to public safety and to the eel population, Fisheries and Oceans Canada stepped in on April 15 to close the fishery for 45 days.

Conflict around elvers is not new, nor is it the only fishery in Atlantic Canada that’s seen so much turmoil. In 2021, a group of men armed with a hatchet and piece of rebar threatened and kidnapped two elver fishers in order to steal their catch. In 2020, Fisheries and Oceans Canada also shut the elver fishery down early, after confrontations broke out between Mi’kmaw fishers and federal fisheries officers. Later that same year, non-Indigenous lobster fishers torched a fishing boat, a truck and a building to protest the Sipekne’katik First Nation opening a small lobster fishery. As part of the same dispute, a mob surrounded a lobster holding facility in West Pubnico, N.S., trapping two Mi’kmaw fishers and four non-Indigenous workers inside.

A common point of contention underlies many of these violent conflicts. First Nations spokespeople, commercial fishers and legal experts agree that Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s decades-long refusal to uphold Indigenous peoples’ right to fish for a moderate livelihood has led to altercations in one fishery after another.

“When there isn’t a resolution to rights issues for Indigenous peoples, it doesn’t go away,” says Rosalie Francis, a Mi’kmaw lawyer from Sipekne’katik First Nation. “The issue was never resolved, so now we see it in another resource area.”

Indigenous nations say Treaty Rights mean control over fisheries

In 1760 and 1761, three Indigenous nations — the Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik and Peskotomuhkati — signed treaties with the British Crown. Known as the Peace and Friendship Treaties, the agreements upheld Indigenous peoples’ right to hunt, fish and trade. For centuries, that right was disregarded by colonial governments.

In 1999, however, Canada’s Supreme Court reaffirmed that right in R. v. Marshall. The defendant in the case was Donald Marshall Jr., a Mi’kmaw man from Membertou First Nation in Nova Scotia. Six years earlier, he had been arrested for fishing for adult eels without a license and selling his catch. The high court’s verdict upheld Marshall’s treaty right to fish year round, including outside commercial seasons, and to earn a “moderate livelihood” — enough income to cover basic necessities but not to “accumulate wealth.”

The ruling, known as the Marshall Decision, applied to members of 34 Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik and Peskotomuhkati communities in Quebec, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Legally, the nations’ Treaty Rights to fish have priority over commercial fishing, though the Supreme Court later clarified that Fisheries and Oceans Canada can curtail First Nations fishing to protect fish populations. What the court did not do, however, was detail how moderate livelihood fishing would work in practice. Instead, it tasked Fisheries and Oceans Canada with developing regulations with the First Nations.

Yet when Indigenous fishers set out to exercise their newly reaffirmed right, Fisheries and Oceans Canada enforcement officers and non-Indigenous commercial harvesters stopped them.

“Once we had got our rights, nobody wanted to share quotas or share the fish,” says Kerry Prosper, an Elder and councillor for Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation in Nova Scotia. “[Fisheries and Oceans Canada] and everybody said [fisheries were] fully subscribed, meaning there’s no room for you.”

The years that followed the Supreme Court ruling earned a heavy moniker: the lobster wars. People rammed each other’s boats, fired guns on the water, cut lobster traps and set vehicles ablaze. The renewed violence decades later suggests that anger has not abated.

In the 24 years since the Marshall Decision, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has tried a handful of approaches to tackle the moderate livelihood question. It spent hundreds of millions on gear and commercial licenses for Mi’kmaw communities. More recently, the department and some First Nations signed controversial Rights Reconciliation Agreements. But those efforts have largely tried to funnel First Nations fishers into existing commercial fisheries. In 2022 and 2023, the federal government took a similar tack: it expropriated 14 per cent of the commercial harvesters’ elver quota and redistributed it to Indigenous communities.

The move angered many.

Unsurprisingly, commercial license holders were not happy with suddenly losing $6 million worth of quota. Michel Samson, a lawyer representing commercial harvesters in a judicial review of the reallocations, says his clients support increasing First Nations access to the fishery. They were prepared to relinquish quota for a fee — the willing buyer–willing seller approach that Fisheries and Oceans Canada has used in multiple fisheries since the Marshall Decision — but their offers were rejected.

“[Fisheries and Oceans Canada] turned around and decided we’ll just take your quota instead,” Samson says. “If you’re going to have a proper reconciliation and new entry into a fishery, you need to compensate those who are in who are prepared to get out.”

But Fisheries and Oceans Canada says that license holders wanted more than market value for the quota. A decision on the judicial review could be issued as soon as this month.

Ken Paul, lead fisheries negotiator and research co-ordinator for the Wolastoqey Nation in New Brunswick, says that from an Indigenous Rights perspective Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s reallocation scheme also doesn’t address the underlying issue: that moderate livelihood fishing is a separate right that has legal priority over the privilege granted to commercial license holders.

“Our position,” says Paul, “is that these fishing licenses are not an accommodation of our rights. These are temporary access.”

Beyond that, Paul notes, the reallocated quota is much less than what a non-Indigenous commercial license holder would have. In 2022, Paul says, the 12,000 members of the Wolastoqey Nation received 200 kilograms of elver quota. “Our members fished that out in five days,” he says.

But if Wolastoqey members choose to fish beyond those 200 kilograms of commercial quota — exercising their treaty right to fish — they encounter other barriers. Because moderate livelihood fisheries are not authorized by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, fisheries officers can fine anyone who buys the catch, including wholesalers and resellers, who can also have their licenses suspended. (The same applies to anyone caught buying from poachers.) The legal risk means that Indigenous fishers often earn a fraction of the high prices that commercial fishers get for elvers and other species.

Ultimately, Paul says, the Wolastoqey Nation wants control over management of fisheries on their territories, including support from Fisheries and Oceans Canada for the nation to conduct scientific work on elvers.

Lack of clarity from Fisheries and Oceans Canada makes confrontation more likely

Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s inconsistent approach to addressing Indigenous treaty rights is not solely a high-level legal dispute. The lack of clarity, says Michael McDonald, a Mi’kmaw lawyer and treaty fisheries manager on contract for Sipekne’katik First Nation, means Indigenous fishers are currently operating in a void that’s made confrontation more likely — including with Fisheries and Oceans Canada officers.

Time and again, says McDonald, Indigenous community members asserting their right to fish have been charged by Fisheries and Oceans Canada enforcement officers. The charges are not for fishing, though. “They get them arguing, and then they charge them with obstruction [of a fisheries officer],” the lawyer says.

Indigenous lobster fishers have had similar run-ins with enforcement. In one 2018 incident, three of McDonald’s clients were fishing lobster for a moderate livelihood when a Fisheries and Oceans Canada officer charged them with fisheries violations and seized their traps. This past January, a Nova Scotia provincial court judge dismissed the charges, saying there was no evidence the fishers had violated Canada’s Fisheries Act.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Lauren Sankey says the government is committed to advancing First Nations’ right to fish. But by not clarifying the difference between commercial licenses and Indigenous Rights, Paul says, the government has created a situation where people feel justified opposing Indigenous access. “Our members are afraid to go out there because they’re being persecuted by [Fisheries and Oceans Canada], persecuted by non-native people who feel like First Nations are a threat to their livelihoods.”

Without a plan to implement the Indigenous fishing rights that have been affirmed by Canada’s Supreme Court, we likely haven’t seen the last of this conflict, says Francis. Whether it’s around elvers, lobsters or something else, “this will continue to play out, and play out, and play out, until the government deals with the issues on the table.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.