When I ask Ricky Hicks about his business, he tells me about fishing. When I ask him about fishing, he says it’s so much bigger than business.

“Fishing is life,” he says.

Hicks’s business is a mobile tackle shop that he drags from the Northumberland Strait, which separates Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, to the Bay of Fundy.

“Wherever the fish are running,” Hicks says. “That’s where I’ll be.”

One of the fish he follows is the striped bass, a once-threatened species that has made a dramatic comeback in Atlantic Canada. From collapsing salmon runs to dwindling smelt populations, the limits of the ecosystem are being tested, and some say the big fish are among the stressors. Federal regulators have reopened commercial access to striped bass — and a conservation triumph has become a flashpoint for the region’s ecological and economic future.

Hicks says he’s usually on the Shubenacadie River, north of Halifax, in the spring for the spawning season. Then he heads to the Bay of Fundy for the summer and back to the Shubenacadie before the fish migrate into the lakes for the winter.

He makes a business of knowing where the fish are because he is supported by a network of striped bass anglers.

“I sell them all the stuff that they need to be successful,” Hicks says. He teaches them what he learned through years of observation.

“Bass are very temperature-temperamental. If it’s too cold they’re not moving. If it’s too warm they move offshore to cooler waters,” he says. 

Hicks sells bait to fishermen from as far away as Quebec and Maine, all travelling to Nova Scotia to catch striped bass.

Federal moves on striped bass divide commercial and recreational fishermen

The salmon fishery on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick has lured recreational anglers since at least the 19th century. The population on the river suffered as time went on, part of a trend Fisheries and Oceans Canada has tracked since the 1970s. Atlantic salmon populations declined by 68 per cent from 2003 to 2019 on the Miramichi, according to a research document prepared for the federal Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada in 2023.Factors affecting Atlantic salmon include high water temperatures, predators and other ecosystem changes caused by climate change and other human-induced pressures, the federal department told The Narwhal in an email.

Martin Mallet, the executive director of the Maritime Fishermen’s Union, says among those pressures is the explosion of striped bass. Salmon fishermen aren’t among his members, but he says the massive predator species is affecting other commercial catches, including lobster, herring, mackerel, gaspereau and smelts.

Mallet says it’s not just a question of predation. Striped bass get tangled in fishing gear and damage equipment and it’s “creating havoc for our fishermen,” he says.

In June, the Maritime Fishermen’s Union made an emergency request to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, asking the federal department to reopen the striped bass fishery for commercial bycatch — unwanted fish and marine creatures caught during commercial fishing for a different species — for the first time since 1996. The department complied: the order requires gaspereau harvesters to keep the first 500 striped bass caught each day between 50 and 65 centimetres and return the rest. 

At the same time, the department took other measures to manage striped bass stock. It reopened a section of the Northwest Miramichi River where striped bass spawn and raised the recreational limit on the Gulf of St. Lawrence from three to four fish per day. Fisheries and Oceans Canada also increased the Indigenous allocation of striped bass by 125,000 fish in July, an amount to be shared among First Nations in the gulf region, in addition to the 50,000 granted to Natoaganeg First Nation in 2018.

Mallet says his union didn’t request an emergency bycatch measure to protect salmon, but to protect commercial fishermen and their livelihood. He says early in the season, fishermen were catching so many striped bass they had to throw back their whole catch, losing days of work. 

“These are expenses for our fishermen,” he says. “Direct losses to their business. So, by enabling our fishermen to keep a portion of the bycatch … our guys can sell those and recuperate their costs.” Striped bass are an enormous potential resource, he says, especially since bycatch fish released from lobster traps often die anyway. 

Mallet says the new regulations were a step in the right direction. “We still think we need to go a little bit further,” he says, adding that while the union wants a healthy fishery, he’s not out to “destroy the striped bass population.” 

“There’s a balance there that needs to be met. We did not have this predation five to 10 years ago,” he says. 

Mike Brideau, a fishing guide on the Miramichi, disagrees. Posting on Facebook about the federal order, he echoed the fears of striped bass anglers in New Brunswick.

“Enjoy the fishery. It’s not going to be around forever,” Brideau wrote, warning the changes could crash the striped bass population.

Striped bass made a big comeback. But are they safe?

Brideau guides all over the province, living out of a tent to target different species for his clients, a nomadic lifestyle that is “part of the fun of the game.” He says he can adapt if bass stocks fail, but he thinks Fisheries and Oceans Canada doesn’t have any understanding of what fishermen remove from the water.

“Anecdotally, I can already say I feel the bass are past their peak in growth [in population] due to our shift in regulations,” he told The Narwhal in an email. “There’s no way the population can withstand taking upwards of a third of itself year over year.”

Tommi Linnansaari, the Atlantic salmon research chair at the University of New Brunswick, supports the re-opening of the commercial striped bass fishery as a pro-salmon move. 

“The predatory pressure could become large enough that the recovery of the salmon population is no longer possible,” he says. 

But he also says it’s unclear how much the striped bass population can shrink before triggering a catastrophic collapse like the one seen in the 1990s. He says the recreational fishery is a large “grey box,” since it is unlicensed and unmonitored and the impact of the increased First Nations quota and renewed commercial fishing won’t show up for at least a few years, as fishermen change their operations to accommodate new species. 

For now, “I do support the striped bass harvest levels,” Linnansaari says. “I don’t know yet whether it could withstand a larger harvest but I do think that we should see how this plays out.”Trevor Avery is the head of the striped bass research team at Acadia University. He says the success of the species should be received with cautious optimism, especially since numbers are trending downward since the population peaked.

“There’s a lot of them, but they only spawn in two places,” Avery says. “That level of threat is increased if their spawning area is impacted by humans or industry.”

Striped bass may be threatened by overfishing, pollution and water flow changes that affect habitat, according to a Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada report from 2004.

Better monitoring needed to identify true threats to Atlantic salmon

Avery says it’s easier for federal and local management efforts to affect striped bass because it is a coastal species, while salmon are targeted by offshore industrial fishing operations across the globe.

“Salmon go on these long treks, you know, up to Greenland or across to the U.K., and then they get vacuumed up in commercial fishing there,” he says. Fisheries and Oceans agrees, telling The Narwhal declining Atlantic salmon isn’t just a Miramichi River issue. Rivers throughout the eastern provinces, Quebec and Europe have seen substantial declines as well.

That’s one reason Avery says he isn’t convinced striped bass is the problem. 

“In a lot of these rivers we don’t find striped bass,” Avery says. “So, this smoking gun, direct effect of saying striped bass are eating all the salmon on the Miramichi … may not be the full picture.”

He adds that there were high populations of both salmon and striped bass in the past. “All that data is quite clearly there over the last 100 years,” he says. “It’s only recently that we have this mismatch in things where we have lots more striped bass and fewer salmon.” 

Linnansaari and Avery both want better monitoring of Atlantic fish, including measuring environmental and industrial impacts. With proper management, Avery says he believes the populations can co-exist.

“We don’t sacrifice one species for another. That’s not a conservation measure that has ever had any lasting good effects.”

Across much of the eastern seaboard, striped bass conservation has become a rallying cry. In the United States, the fish is managed under the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission through the Interstate Fishery Management Plan, supported by the federal Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act. When stocks decline, managers call emergency meetings, implement catch reductions and seasonal closures and tighten recreational and commercial rules. 

By contrast, in Atlantic Canada the recovery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence stock occurred under federal control, with limited public engagement and little regional coordination, the scientists say.

In Brideau’s opinion, Fisheries and Oceans Canada should close the salmon fishery on the Miramichi, instead of “trying to say we need to critically intervene in nature through killing native species.” He says the major threats to salmon are clear: increasing water temperatures due to climate change, commercial angling, forestry — which can degrade salmon habitats by altering waterflow, nutrients and sediment — and aquaculture, which can spread pathogens such as sea lice from farmed salmon to wild populations.

Every year, Brideau purchases a Crown reserve spot — a special fishing parcel in an area owned by the federal government, managed to control pressure on the fish population. He uses it to count the few salmon that remain, without catching any.

“I have no interest in harassing a species that’s on life support,” he says.

A house divided

Linnansaari sees the current move to reduce the predatory species as just one of two potential solutions. The other is to supplement the prey. “We should actually increase the salmon population,” he says.

This would encourage working together across fishing interests, and could be a more fertile approach, says Linnansaari.

But that approach, too, is debated. The North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization has said supplementing salmon can compromise the fitness of wild populations through interbreeding and pathogens. It also won’t help commercial fishing that targets other species, like those the Maritime Fishermen’s Union focuses on. 

Avery agrees that progress depends on co-operation.

“I think if we sit in two different camps, we’re going to stall,” Avery says. 

Hicks manages his own business amid the politics. Today there are more than 35,000 members in the Nova Scotia Striped Bass Facebook group and 29,000 in the NB Striped Bass Sports Fishing group, all of them looking to join the exclusive 40-inch club by snagging a lunker.

“I see a lot of new faces every year,” he says. “I do help them catch fish. I don’t just sell them fishing gear.”

The idea is to get them hooked.

“Some people are in it for life.”

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Onstage, Jeremy Dutcher sings in a deep, yearning tenor. On the phone, he giggles as he attempts to choose his favourite of Canada’s natural sites, considering options around the country before giving up. 

“I’m very, very fortunate as a musician. We get to see a lot of the country that I don’t think a lot of people always get to,” Dutcher says. “There’s a lot of beautiful places out there.” 

But the pianist’s heart will always be in Wolastokuk, or Fredericton, N.B., where he grew up as a member of Tobique First Nation. For centuries, it’s been the home of the Wolastoqiyik, or “people of the beautiful river:” both the land and the community are named for the Wolastoq, or Saint John River, that winds up from the Bay of Fundy. 

Honouring the language is central to Dutcher’s work. His 2018 debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, integrated century-old wax cylinder recordings of traditional songs, while 2023’s Motewolonuwok featured new songs in both English and Wolastoqey. Both won the Polaris Prize. Dutcher says there are fewer than 100 people left who are fluent in Wolastoqey, also known as Maliseet-Passamaquoddy. 

“Our Elders say ‘the language is the land, and the land is the language,’ ” he says. “There are certain words in our language that are really an onomatopoeia for what we’re hearing. For example, the word for bird or birds is ‘sipsisok.’ You can kind of hear the flutter of their wings.”

Along with working on a horror movie score, Dutcher has performances coming up in Canada and beyond. After playing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on June 21, the Two-Spirit musician will head to Norway for a Pride gig, before summer festivals in Elora, Ont., and Dawson City, Yukon. Next, some stops in Japan, followed by concerts in Prince George, Vernon and Oliver, B.C., this fall. 

Each trip is a chance to witness even more of the world’s natural beauty. When we connected with Dutcher, he told us what he’s seen so far. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity — all opinions are the subject’s own.

What is the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. what people call Canada? 

To just pick one is to do a disservice to the rest. I was just in Iqaluit, Nvt., for the first time, at -40 C. The land is really inspiring, but it’s the people everywhere that really light me up. Last summer, I was in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and that was another place that took my breath away. 

For me, to be around mountains is awe inspiring. I just got back from the Banff Centre for the Arts, which is nestled within the mountains. It’s dry as hell. My lips and my skin were in a riot. But it was so beautiful, it’s just really stunning.

Sorry, I couldn’t pick one. 

What is the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve seen outside of Canada?

Last summer, I played an Indigenous music festival among the Sami people, the Indigenous people of Scandinavia. This concert was in northern Norway. To get to fly into the fjords and then take a bus all throughout the mountains — the way that water meets rock, I’ll remember that for a long time. It’s really stunning up there. We got to go out on the water in these see-through kayaks, so we’re able to really watch what’s above and below. That was a really special time. 

Think of three iconic Canadian animals and choose one each to kiss, marry and kill. 

It’s probably gonna be kill moose. They’re so nice and fuzzy but like, kill a salmon, you feed your family, kill a moose, you feed your community for a month. Sorry, moose. 

Beavers are not so friendly. But I feel like I could get him on my side. Marry him and work on him. 

I’ve already kissed the cod, so why not do it again? 

Name a person or group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.

This is going to be a bit of a sideways answer, but hear me out. It is a climate solution, but it’s also something that’s really near and dear to my heart. About three years ago, my mother, Lisa Perley-Dutcher, and some members of our community started the first language immersion school for the Wolastoqey language, Kehkimin. It’s on this beautiful lake. The whole philosophy is that our language can’t really be learned in a classroom like a European language. You need to go out and experience the land and have a relationship in order for the language to come. 

They go out and walk with Elders every day. It’s this beautiful reframing of educational space, environmentalism and how it’s really connected with language. These young people are having a deepened relationship with place and space through language and through community connectivity. For me, this is the most beautiful and grassroots way of enabling our land defenders. 

Name a person who could significantly help mitigate the climate crisis if they really wanted to. 

My quick and flippant answer is Mark fucking Carney. 

My other answer is me. I mean that like the royal me — wait, it’s the royal ‘we,’ isn’t it? All of us could be doing better.  

But also Mark Carney. Our leadership, who have been democratically elected, are not moving with what the majority of the country would like — which is not to see our beautiful lands put in danger with pipeline projects. It’s really out of step with the direction a lot of us know we need to be going. This is what the land has been telling us.

Listen to the ones that are speaking from a place of knowledge and that are in relationship with this place in a way that we’re not. I saw the movie Yintah a couple weeks ago. It’s about the Wet’suwet’en land disputes. It’s really a cool insight on us being strong in who we are as sovereign Indigenous people and speaking for this place, how that can actually have a tangible impact on these resource projects. We can say no. And when we do say no, it’s been affirmed in the courts again and again and again, from Delgamu’ukw to the Marshall decisions. We have a right to say what happens in our unceded territories and — how did I get on this trip? 

Oh, Mark Carney. I don’t know that he has that good intention. The ways in which I’ve heard him speak have been like ‘drill, baby, drill.’ That feels regressive to me.

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is? 

We’re so sick, we’re so gender sick. The same functions and institutions that seek to suppress our women and girls are a detriment to all. That weight sits heavy on all. 

The aggression and extractive mentalities that are so much of what we’re seeing in masculine presentation today — I don’t think they’re actually a fundamental part of a healthy masculinity, but I do think this state we find ourselves in, there’s a violence to it. It’s not surprising to me that it bears out in research. 

There is a mentality which values accumulation, whether that’s of resources or of capital. In order to accumulate vast capital, you need to do something to the land. There’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of men doing this — which is not to say that there aren’t female CEOs and oil executives that are doing bad by the globe. Any group that thinks that it can take, take, take, without offering and replanting and re-sowing: if we let our societies be run by this particular kind of person, we find ourselves in this place, which is our Earth crying out for something else. And I think a lot of people are too. 

The province that I come from, New Brunswick, for the last eight years we had an Irving oil executive as our premier, but now we have a Liberal woman in and I wonder if that might change the nature of how we think about land and space and place, rematriate our society. I think this is also a climate solution, to encourage our strong women into leadership. 

The logics and philosophies that got us into this place — extractive mentalities and patriarchy and all of these heavy things — they’re not going to be the same methodology that get us out of it. We need to fundamentally rethink the spaces of power and who gets to speak. 

Outdoor cats, yes or no?

Outdoor everything. Yes.

Tell us about a time you changed your mind about something, environmental or otherwise. 

I have a bad habit of smoking and I used to be a little careless with the butts. And a friend said ‘hey, dogs eat those up sometimes and it makes them quite sick. My dog got sick that way.’

What might feel like a small form of littering, when we think about our size and the size of those around us, we should try to walk lightly all the time. This is such a small, stupid example, but I try to take a little thing to put my butts in so I can dispose of them.

Tell us about a time you tried to change someone else’s mind about something.

For me, it’s less about trying to change anybody’s mind, but about being a little more vocal about what’s in my mind. Trying to let that shine towards people and offer them solutions, too.

I was talking about the school earlier, with my mother. After Canadians started to have a lot of conversations about residential schools and survivors, people wanted to help. They want to be part of the solution, to make our society more equitable. But it feels intangible, because for so long, they haven’t had relationships with Indigenous people. What I’ve realized telling people about this school is they want to put their energy, their good, their spirit, towards something that can help heal. 

I really feel like that’s the work we need to be doing right now, rather than giving anybody advice.

Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes? 

Sometimes in the fall my friend Melody McIver, this amazing Anishinaabe violist and Earth-worker, they gather this beautiful food called manoomin, what in English people call wild rice. It’s harvested in the Great Lakes, it actually grows right on that lake water. You go in your canoe and you have these sticks and you hit those grains of rice into your boat. It’s a real process, but it’s a beautiful one. I haven’t been in a couple years to go up and rice with my friend Melody, but that’s such a strong memory for me. 

So I have to stick with the Great Lakes. They’re beautiful. They feed us, both in our spirit and literally, with the rice in our bodies, too. 

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?

Probably my hand drum. It was passed down to me, so it’s been around for a really long time. Old things, whether it’s objects or people or ideas, we need to be careful with them and we need to protect them and we need to go slow and we need to listen. Old things always remind me to be mindful. 

If you could dip a toe off of Canada’s coastline, what ocean would you pick?

It has to be the Atlantic. I’m an East Coast person, through and through and through. Not many places feel like home other than the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. I long for that place all the time, but I live in Montreal for now.

Who in your life has had the greatest impact on your connection to nature? 

It’s my oldest brother, Shane Perly-Dutcher. He’s a beautiful artist and metalsmith. We are 14 years apart. He was very much taking me around as a young person and showing me how to work with the land, harvesting red willow roots and stripping bark. We’d go around and harvest and pick fiddleheads. That helped me to not just think about the land as abstract, that only a national park is a sacred place. No, it’s all sacred. The side of the road over there is sacred too. This is all beautiful land. He showed me that. 

Smoked salmon or maple syrup? 

There’s a restaurant in Vancouver called Salmon n’ Bannock, and they have a salmon sampler. You can try salmon done in like six different ways and it is insanity. One of them is a maple salmon situation. Ever since then, I’m like, why choose? We can do both. 

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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.

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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.”

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Matt Miller grew up alongside many of the trees on his parents’ woodlots in rural Nova Scotia. But while most of the trees survived “Hurricane Matt” — his rambunctious childhood and some early, clumsy lessons in forestry from his father — many didn’t survive Hurricane Fiona.

“It definitely feels like we lost some friends back there,” he explains, referring to the damage that happened to his family’s two woodlots in September, during the worst storm to ever hit eastern Canada. 

Located in Greenhill and Earlton, the family’s forests are home to a variety of tree species and make up around 500 acres.

“There’s the loss associated with the big trees, those charismatic, solid trees that you can wrap your arms around and stare up into the canopy, but I think some of the hardest losses are those younger trees that I saw grow up before my eyes,” Miller said.

The family harvests sawlogs, which are sold to a local mill, as well as firewood for selling and personal use. But for them, income is secondary to the real value of the trees. Miller’s grandfather’s ashes are buried in the lot they live on and the healthy forest is his legacy.

Hurricane Fiona made landfall as a post-tropical storm near Whitehead, N.S., on Sept. 24. After two days of heavy rain and wind gusts that reached 179 km/h at their peak, as reported by Environment Canada, the aftermath was three deaths in eastern Canada and severe damage to homes and infrastructure across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Fiona also ripped into the infrastructure of natural habitats, flattening forests, toppling trees and damaging generational woodlots like Miller’s. Wind disturbance is part of nature, but climate change is expected to increase the intensity of storms hitting Atlantic Canada.

Two decades before Fiona came Hurricane Juan in 2003, which reached wind speeds of 160 km/h and damaged over 600,000 hectares of trees. In 2019, Hurricane Dorian hit Sambro Creek with wind speeds of 155 km/h and caused an estimated $105 million in insured damage, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

The increased intensity of these storms is prompting many to wonder what climate resiliency looks like in a region shaped by lumber markets — not ecosystem health — for the past 100 years.

“As climate change intensifies, we’re going to experience these impacts more and more,” said Daimen Hardie, executive director of New Brunswick-based non-profit Community Forests International.

“We’ve really set ourselves up for this risky situation,” he said. “Whenever something like this happens, it’s a reckoning for everybody.”

The Wabanaki-Acadian forest covers much of the Maritimes and parts of the northeastern United States. The border between boreal forest to the north and temperate species to the south, the Wabanaki-Acadian forest is home to a rich mixture of native species that should promote high biodiversity.

But the Maritime forest has changed a great deal since the time that the members of the Wabanaki Confederacy — including the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and Abenaki — were stewarding it. Old-growth forests have been cleared for agriculture and heavily logged: according to the Nova Scotia Nature Trust, only 0.6 per cent of the province’s forest is over 100 years old. And replanting has usually meant focusing on a less diverse collection of species and ages than was here originally. 

That youth and homogeneity puts the region at greater risk during natural disasters. After Hurricane Juan, University of New Brunswick forest management professor Anthony Taylor led an extensive study looking at how forests are impacted by extreme winds.

Published in 2019, the study used aerial photography and satellites to analyze how wind damage varied based on topography, weather, soil and forest structure. It found that having a greater amount of hardwood species and pine reduced the effect of wind damage to a lot or forest. Tall stands were most vulnerable, especially those dominated by shallow-rooted spruce and balsam fir. 

Unfortunately, the two most vulnerable species are also overrepresented in the region, as a result of their value for softwood lumber and pulp and paper.

“Over the last century, we’ve been carrying out forest management practices that promote more spruce and fir,” said Taylor. “So by default in the forest, it’s already been a bit more vulnerable to blowdown, because we have much more of the spruce and fir.”

Taylor’s study found that while forests dominated by a single species that had been replanted after a clearcut were hurt by wind, so were areas in mixed forests that were more selectively thinned. Both harvesting methods created vulnerabilities.

“I don’t know if anyone has a solution yet, but it’s definitely on a lot of minds. If you believe the science and the projections of climate change, then we’re going to be in for more wind and it’s going to impact our forests,” Taylor said. “If we know that our spruce and fir forests tend to be more susceptible to wind, but we really depend on them for our economy here, then what do we do?”

He also pointed out a caveat from the study — which suggested that regardless of species or topography, 10 minutes of sustained winds of 100 km/h can topple most trees.

“At a certain threshold it doesn’t matter what your forest is made of — likely a lot of it is going to blow down,” he said.

Recovery from Fiona won’t happen quickly. Several woodlot associations have called on provincial governments to help fund recovery operations. Nova Scotia has created a $3.5 million recovery fund for private woodlot owners, while Prince Edward Island announced an Emergency Forestry Task Force on Oct. 28 to assist woodlot owners.

Community Forests International is encouraging land owners to consider making recovery decisions with biodiversity in mind. Hardie said he’s concerned that some woodlot owners will be tempted to clearcut or overharvest sections with heavy losses to avoid losing money on damaged trees.

But even before Fiona, his team was working with a large number of private woodlot owners trying to make forestry more resilient, attempting to balance profits with ecological goals through careful harvesting and planting. The organization works with members to share the latest forest science, providing advice on how to care for trees and replant damaged areas while also coordinating carbon offsets that pay landowners for keeping trees intact.

The storm was hard for those woodlots owners emotionally, as well as financially. 

“There’s a lot of mourning going on right now. It’s people who’ve taken more of a sustainable or ecological approach. They’ve put a lot of care into restoring the forest and then to see that work rolled back is definitely hard for a lot of reasons,” said Hardie. 

Taylor’s findings from 2019 are reflected in Miller’s observation of the forest floor, as he surveyed the damage after Fiona, looking for patterns. 

“I think diversity is important. To my eye those sort of mixed species — mixed multi-age stands — seem to be the ones that have held up the best,” he said.

Miller is a member of the North Nova Forest Owner’s Co-op, so he’s not entirely on his own in dealing with the aftermath of the storm. Staff from the co-op showed up with dedicated contractors to help Miller handle the devastation on one of his family’s 250-acre woodlots.

As he considers the damage, he’s also focused on the future — balancing the need for financial recovery with ensuring that enough light and nutrients are left to allow a diverse forest to regrow. 

“For us as family forest owners wanting to manage for the long term, it becomes a question of salvaging what you can in a way that doesn’t compromise your longer term or ecological goals,” he said.

For woodlot owners choosing to carry on the mission of restoring the biodiversity of the Wabanaki-Acandian forest, that can mean leaving some windblown trees on the forest floor to provide nutrients and habitat.

It will also mean prioritizing a mix of ages and species, putting in white pine and temperate hardwoods like birch and maple that are more likely to survive heavy wind and succeed in a warming climate. As climate change continues, cold-hardy boreal species like spruce and balsam fir — once encouraged for their industrial value — will be less naturally successful.

“Nothing is over for the forest. We tend to feel this loss and like it’s the end of something — I suppose it is the end of something — but at the same time, it’s just the start of something new,” Miller said. 

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.

This story is part of Carbon Cache, an ongoing series about nature-based climate solutions.

It’s a brilliant spring day in the flat, big-sky country near Iron Springs, Alta., an hour north of Lethbridge, where John Kolk farms 4,000 acres with his wife, son, two daughters and a small staff.

“The ducks and geese are making a racket and everyone is excited for spring,” he tells me when I call him to talk about new federal funding for farmers tackling climate change.

Spring is a busy time of year, and Kolk is making plans for the rest of the season. He’s got two quarter sections — about 320 acres — of corn planned this year, and it’ll be out of the field by August. He has a decision to make: does he plant a cover crop for the fall?

Cover cropping involves the planting of a secondary crop for the off-season instead of leaving a field bare. It’s what Kolk calls leaving “a bit of a jacket on the field through the winter.”

The practice has numerous advantages: preventing erosion, retaining soil moisture and acting as a carbon sink. 

A 2019 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found sequestering carbon dioxide from the air will form a significant part of the world’s efforts to mitigate the climate crisis, and noted agricultural lands can play a sizable role. 

“When you’ve got live roots,” Kolk explains, “you’re taking carbon out of the air.”

But seeding a cover crop is not without its challenges. To really be effective in the region, the new crop has to be seeded before the old one dies off. Kolk has planted cover crops before, on four quarter sections of beans. “You don’t want to go drive on good beans in order to put a cover crop in,” he says. So farmers turn to aerial solutions.

His corn crop will grow to nine feet tall but won’t be gone until November, when new seeds would no longer germinate. Planting new seeds on two quarter sections covered in nine-foot corn stalks requires hiring a helicopter that needs to be equipped with expensive specialized equipment. 

New federal funding announced in Monday’s budget could mean Kolk and other farmers will  have the access to the funds to move forward with cover cropping and other carbon-reduction practices.

“If I know I’m going to get partly funded for that I will [seed that cover crop] this August,” he says. 

“Of course I won’t be the only one,” he adds. “So then all of a sudden, there’ll be a demand for that service. And then the opportunity for more people to use cover crops.”

That’s the plan according to this week’s federal budget, which includes $200 million in new funding for increasing the adoption of climate-friendly practices like cover cropping, nitrogen management and rotational grazing. It also allocates $10 million over two years to facilitate a transition to clean energy from diesel-fueled farm equipment and earmarks another $60 million for the preservation of existing wetlands and trees on farmlands.

It’s what Farmers for Climate Solutions, a coalition of farming organizations across Canada, described as “unprecedented” funding.

“This is one of the largest investments we’ve ever seen for agriculture in the federal budget,” Karen Ross, the director of Farmers for Climate Solutions, tells The Narwhal. “I was thrilled.” 

For agriculture advocates, the budget signifies the government is recognizing the industry’s potential to combat the climate crisis using already-accepted farming practices.

“Agriculture can play, and is playing, a big role in climate change mitigation,” Chris van den Heuvel, a vice president with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, says by phone.

“Agriculture needs to be recognized … as one of the sectors that can help in the solutions for climate change,” he added.

Making climate-friendly decisions economically viable for farmers in Canada

Four thousand kilometres across the country, Cedric MacLeod has 120 head of cattle — “beating hearts” as he calls them — on his 400-acre farm near Centreville, N.B.

Included on that farm is a wetland formed from an old dugout that he’s been considering filling in for more grazing land. The other, more expensive, option would be to leave it and allow a wetland habitat to flourish.

“Those are the kind of decisions a lot of producers are facing,” he says by phone from Fredericton, where, he tells me, the sun has finally come out on a cool spring day. 

Expanding the wetland and allowing native milkweed to grow, he says, could help create habitat for monarch butterflies, along with local songbirds, migratory birds and amphibians. Wetlands also act as a carbon sink. A 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that the preservation of ecosystems like wetlands, forests and grasslands could add up to more than one-third of the emissions reductions needed under the Paris Agreement.

But preserving wetlands on a farm can be an economic decision — one that can be difficult in a sector already facing tight margins.

Areas like the Lomond Grazing Association lease in southern Alberta preserve untilled native prairie and wetlands. The recent federal budget earmarked funding for farmers and ranchers to preserve existing wetlands, as well as trees, which are well-known carbon sinks. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The new federal funding for agricultural climate solutions could make those decisions a little easier.

The allocation of $60 million of federal funding over the next two years for protection of wetlands and trees on farms could potentially help make his decision an economic one as well as a climate-friendly one, MacLeod says. 

Helping farmers square good climate decisions financially is something people working in agriculture say is the best way forward when it comes to reducing the climate impact of the industry.

It’s “the first time that there’s been a deliberate attempt to incent good agronomic practices that will help to capture carbon,” Kolk says. “So we know a lot about it, we’ve heard a lot about it, [now we’re] putting the whole piece together.” 

“I think that when you start incentivizing it, it’ll start to happen.”

‘Agriculture is 10 per cent of the problem and 20 per cent of the solution’

The agriculture industry has long been lambasted as a significant contributor to Canada’s carbon pollution — it produces between eight and 10 per cent of the country’s total carbon emissions —  but this year’s budget aimed to turn that idea on its head. “Farmers are major players in Canada’s fight against climate change,” it reads.

And that recognition is welcome news to those in the farming community. 

Farming advocates like Ross, herself a vegetable farmer in Ontario, acknowledges that agriculture is responsible for a large chunk of national emissions. “We only have nine growing seasons left [until the 2030 Paris Agreement goals],” she says. “And for farmers to be part of the solution we of course need to meaningfully reduce these emissions.” 

“But the thing is, in order to shift our practices to ones that reduce emissions, there are often high upfront costs,” she added. That’s where Farmers for Climate Solutions has been advocating for federal funding.

With “public support to help us kind of manage those upfront costs, or share those upfront costs,” she says, the government is acknowledging the “role of farmers to be part of our climate solution.”

Macleod, the beef farmer in New Brunswick, agrees.

“We’ve always maintained that agriculture is 10 per cent of the problem and 20 per cent of the solution,” he says.

Agriculture has long been lambasted a significant contributor to Canada’s carbon pollution but the industry — and the federal government — is adamant agriculture is poised to be a leader in reducing emissions, particularly with public support in place in the form of financial incentives. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Fertilizer waste isn’t just bad for the climate, ‘it’s just wasted money’

Among the other climate-friendly farming practices highlighted in the recent budget is nitrogen fertilizer management.

Fertilizer has been pegged as a significant contributor to the climate impact of agriculture. Some 70 per cent of crop farms apply fertilizer, according to Statistics Canada. 

When fertilizer is applied in the wrong quantity or wrong location, it can end up as runoff.

When nitrogen fertilizer is lost as runoff, it ends up as a greenhouse gas. It has been estimated that as much as 20 per cent of nitrogen fertilizer is lost as runoff, which can end up being a significant contributor to carbon pollution.

“Nitrogen waste is bad for the environment, but it’s also bad for the farmer,” Ross tells me. “It’s just wasted money.”

Federal funding aims to help farmers reduce nitrogen runoff. One of the key ways farmers can pinpoint ways to reduce waste is to hire an agronomist who can come up with a tailored, specific plan for when, how and what rate fertilizer is applied, based on crop needs and soil conditions. But that costs money.

And for many farmers, these sorts of decisions will come down to what’s “good for the bottom line,” Paul Thoroughgood, who farms 2,000 acres of canola, green lentils, flax, spring wheat and winter wheat just south of Moose Jaw, Sask., says.

“Fertilizers are our largest expenses on the farm,” he says. “We recognize that there is a greenhouse gas implication to that. So by making the most efficient use of that fertilizer, it’s a double win.”

New federal funding to help reduce nitrogen fertilizer runoff could enable farmers to hire agronomists who can help identify the proper timing, rate and location of fertilizer application. It’s been estimated that as much as 20 per cent of nitrogen fertilizer is lost as runoff, which means increased carbon pollution. Photo: Shutterstock

Decarbonizing farm machinery has a ‘longer timeframe’

Part of the recent budget includes earmarking $10 million for programs that will move toward “powering farms with clean energy and moving off diesel.”

That’s a big task.

According to a diesel industry group, diesel powers more than two-thirds of all farm equipment and is used to transport 90 percent of farm products in the United States. 

“Right now, the number of diesel engines that we have running on a daily basis is very high,” Thoroughgood says, noting “a combine is awfully high horsepower, and it runs for an awfully long day, day after day.”

Decarbonizing such heavy machinery is challenging, he says.

But, he adds, “you never want to say never because, gosh, the advancements we’ve seen in my farming career are phenomenal.”

Thoroughgood points to recent moves from long-haul trucking companies to move toward electric or hydrogen fuel cell systems. If long-haul trucks can move to clean fuel, he says, farm machinery may well be on that path too — eventually.

Paul Thoroughgood’s farm in Saskatchewan relies heavily on diesel-powered machinery, as is the norm in North American agriculture. He doesn’t foresee that being phased out across the board in the immediate future, but is watching the adoption of clean technology in other carbon-intensive sectors, like long-haul trucking. Photo: Sara Hylton / The Narwhal

“That’s probably going to take a little bit longer timeframe,” van den Heuvel says of a large-scale move away from diesel. “But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.”

He points to opportunities for farmers to use biodiesel in tractors or to switch to clean-powered grain dryers.

But, he adds, “the technology and the infrastructure has to be there in place and and ensure that whatever happens in the end ultimately doesn’t end up costing us too much.” 

As many farmers are quick to point out, they compete in international markets on prices and feel they have little ability to pass additional costs down to consumers.

As part of the federal budget, the government has moved to address one longstanding concern of many in the agriculture industry: what they see as the financial punishment of carbon pricing. 

The budget acknowledges that farmers require natural gas and other fuels affected by carbon pricing in their operations, and announces that the government intends to return a portion of funds brought in through carbon pricing directly to farmers, to the tune of an estimated $100 million next year. The return of carbon price proceeds will only apply to jurisdictions without their own carbon-price schemes, including the Prairie provinces and Ontario.

‘Culture change’ needed across all Canadian farm types and sizes

Like all government plans, van den Heuvel of the Canadian Agriculture Federation says, “the devil is in the details.”

Thoroughgood compares the recent budget announcements to other government programs created to incentivize what are known as beneficial management practices through grants. 

Those grants, he says, “generally appealed to small farms, and didn’t do a great job of appealing to the larger firms, because their spending cap was so low that it was almost a rounding error for many people’s balance sheet.”

He wonders how the government will allocate the tens of millions of dollars it has earmarked to climate-friendly farming incentives.

“I hope that the government … looks at how they can make those funding programs relevant to a 30,000-acre farm, or a 50,000-acre farm — you know, something that’s really at scale that will really make a difference on the landscape,” he says.

“Figuring out how to make those programs attractive so that all farms find them interesting — not just the ones that are smaller scale — I think is absolutely critical if Canada wants to make a real impact on the agricultural landscape.”

Farmers and advocates say that the details of how new federal funding is allocated matter, and can’t be targeted to one specific size or type of farm operation. Photo: Sara Hylton / The Narwhal

Van den Heuvel agrees.

“There’s a depth and range of firm sizes, from very small operations, that might only be an acre or two in size, up to those firms that are tens of thousands of acres in size and larger,” he says from outside a barn on his fourth-generation dairy farm in Cape Breton, N.S.

“We just have to make sure that whatever [the government does] put in place is representative of the entire sector.”

Kolk is leery of targeting funding to one size farm or another, noting both approaches would come with potential pitfalls. Farmers, he says, will be responsive if there’s an incentive regardless of the size of their operation.

“If you drag a $20 bill through the gutter in Picture Butte, you watch how many farmers will grab it,” he says with a chuckle.

But at the end of the day, he believes what the government is aiming to do is about more than any one climate-friendly practice adopted by an individual farm. 

“This is a culture change,” he says. “And culture is everybody, from running the three-acre market garden to the 50,000-acre Hutterite colony.”

The Carbon Cache series is funded by Metcalf Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input into the articles.

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.

This is the seventh part of Carbon Cache, an ongoing series about nature-based climate solutions.

SUSSEX, N.B. — Melissa Labrador leans against an ancient red oak tree reaching onto the Wildcat River in southern Nova Scotia. It’s unusually dry due to a mid-August drought, but she can still smell the fresh herbal scent of wild blueberries, wintergreen and sun-warmed pine needles.

The red oak is her ancestor tree, a grandparent of the forest that holds old knowledge of her people, Mi’kmaq of the Gokqwes or Wildcat community, who have lived here for millennia.

“I like to think he was just barely growing when my people were going to the ocean, along this river in the birch bark canoes, picking medicines along the way,” Labrador says.

The oak is part of a tiny remnant of the endangered Acadian forest, also known as the Wabanaki Forest, one of the most diverse temperate forests in the world that is uniquely carbon dense and naturally fire resistant. It’s also the traditional home of Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik, the First Peoples of the land.

Prior to colonization, giant hemlock, skyscraper eastern white pine, willowy yellow birch and red spruce enveloped the Maritime provinces, a transition zone made up of 32 species of evergreens and leafy trees. Now, less than one per cent of the original Acadian forest remains, pockets and stands reminiscent of mother nature’s great work of art.

To Labrador, the Acadian forest offers knowledge: traditional medicine, materials for building birch bark canoes and a place to connect with her ancestors. In the forest behind her bungalow and vegetable garden, she tells me that in Mi’kmaq culture, the large old-growth trees like this ancient red oak are healing trees.

Just as Labrador’s mother, father and grandfather taught her about how to conscientiously use what’s in the forest to survive, Labrador is passing that knowledge on to her nine-year-old twins, Nakuset and Tepkunaset: “If my people didn’t understand the medicines, we wouldn’t be here.”

Knowledge keeper Melissa Labrador on the Wildcat River in front of a centuries-old oak tree that she considers a healing tree. The endangered Acadian forest, also known as the Wabanaki Forest, is the traditional home of Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik, the First Peoples of the land. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

Melissa Labrador, right, with one of her twins, Nakuset, harvests medicinal plants in the Wildcat community of Acadia First Nation in Nova Scotia. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

Melissa Labrador, right, laughs while watching Nakuset, one of her twins, running through the grass on the edge of the forest along the Wildcat River. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

The Acadian forest could also be much-needed medicine for the Earth’s warming climate. A 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that nature-based climate solutions could provide more than one-third of the emissions reductions needed to stabilize global temperature increases below 2 C by 2030 under the Paris Accord.

As home to almost nine per cent of the Earth’s forests, Canada has a vital role to play in the global fight against climate change. One New Brunswick-based charity that works to save forests says restoring the Acadian forest has the potential to make a huge impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“We could store 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years,” says Daimen Hardie, executive director of Community Forests International. “That’s three times more than the country produces every year.”

Could saving the Acadian forest be a panacea for climate change?

‘Whaelghinbran Forest is the living proof of what’s possible’ 

Warm sunlight filters through a stand of century-old hemlocks and towering large tooth aspens on the upper reaches of the east valley of Whaelghinbran Forest. Here in South Branch, near the town of Sussex, N.B., these trees provide one of the few last glimpses of what the Acadian forest would have looked like prior to European contact.

Hardie and forest ecologist Megan de Graaf have hiked with me here to show me what their forest restoration charity has saved from a certain clear-cut death. It smells at once ancient and fresh, shaded yet sunbaked with standing deadwood (a critical part of a healthy forest, according to de Graaf) and a canopy that radiates infinite shades of green. The only reason it survived logging is because of its location: a steep slope that made it practically impossible to access except by foot.

The extent of the Acadian forest. Map: Alicia Carvalho / The Narwhal

The vast majority of forests in Canada are on Crown or Indigenous lands, but forestry ownership in the East is unique, with 45 per cent of forest land in the Maritimes belonging to private woodlot owners. It’s not unusual for rural families, which make up roughly half the population, to have a back 40 — an acreage of forest where they chop their own firewood, hunt and walk in the woods.

There are about 80,000 small family forest owners across Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and each has on average 80 hectares — the equivalent of about 98 Canadian football fields per property owner. Due to an aging population and young people leaving, these families increasingly have no one to pass the land onto and are faced with the decision to clear cut or delay retirement.

Daimen Hardie, co-founder of Community Forests International, leans on an aspen tree in the Acadian forest at Whaelghinbran Farm near Sussex, N.B. The forest could store 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years, Hardie says. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

This was the conundrum Clark Phillips and Susan Tyler found themselves in about a decade ago. The New Brunswick couple ran a certified organic farm and restored their more than 400 hectares of Acadian forest at Whaelghinbran over their 40 years on the land. The two urged the forest back to its natural Acadian state, harvesting mature pioneer trees and selling them to the local mill, and this let more light into the forest. Their careful tending sped up the natural succession of the forest by 50 years.

“The Acadian forest is such a teacher and such a gift,” Tyler, 81, says. “If you respect it and don’t consider everything that isn’t a product a weed, then you get back everything.”

The couple needed to retire for health reasons and revenue to do so but they didn’t want to lose their beloved forest to an industry that would destroy their legacy.

“We didn’t want it clear cut,” Tyler says. “The Irving practice was usually to go into a piece of Crown land that had all these different species and clear cut it and then try to change what grew there into a farm crop and we didn’t want to see that happen to this beautiful piece of land.”

When Hardie and de Graaf heard about the couple’s predicament, they wanted to help but Community Forests International didn’t have the cash to buy the forest on its own. So they created a forest carbon project — the first in the Maritimes. They measured and quantified carbon storage on the forest land, had it certified by third-party standards and then sold the carbon offsets to the Toronto-based architecture and engineering firm DIALOG. A conservation easement was put on the land that ensures the forest stands forever. In the end, the organization raised enough money from selling the carbon offsets to buy the land for $400,000 and today, it is continuing to restore and protect Whaelghinbran.

A privately owned Acadian forest woodlot in Douglas Harbour, N.B. There are more than 80,000 family woodlot owners in the Maritimes. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

The mixed-wood canopy of aspen, red maple and hemlock trees in the Acadian forest. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

Hardie looks at hemlock tree needles in the mixed-wood Acadian forest. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

However, while the carbon forest project was underway, the couple was forced to sell off portions of the forest to survive — 46 hectares that has been clear cut (but was recently bought back by Community Forests International), and 66 hectares sold to individual citizens with easements to prevent clear-cutting.

Tyler says her and Clark’s legacy shows that we can live on a planet without destroying it. “We need to learn to live not as an invasive species. Live with the forest. I think that’s what we tried to do and that’s what we need to do,” she says, adding that ideally she’d like to see Whaelghinbran operate again as a farm someday.

To date, Community Forests International has stored more than 38,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in three unique Wabanaki-Acadian forest preserves in southern New Brunswick, including 285 hectares at Whaelghinbran, one in Cambridge-Narrows and another in Waterford, totalling more than 1,200 hectares. The amount of carbon dioxide saved equals the greenhouse gas emissions of 8,229 passenger vehicles driven for a year.

“Whaelghinbran Forest is the living proof of what’s possible,” Hardie says, adding that if 80,000 family forest owners across the Maritimes did something similar, it would make a globally significant contribution to slowing climate change. “That would be what the Maritimes could offer the world.”

The carbon beneath our feet

Forests store carbon dioxide by pulling it out of the atmosphere and pumping it into the ground, where it’s transformed into biomass — an ecological dumpster for nature’s garbage. Many people think about planting trees as a way to suck carbon out of the atmosphere without realizing how much carbon is stored in the soils, says forest ecologist de Graaf.

“That system underneath our feet actually stores as much, if not more, carbon than what is above us, the trees,” she says, adding that its role in stabilizing the climate is “huge.”

Megan de Graaf, forest program director with Community Forests International, says the soil beneath the forest stores as much — if not more — carbon than the trees themselves. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

The temperate forest of the northeastern United States has been calculated to offset 40 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions of that same region, according to a 2011 University of Nebraska-Lincoln paper. “Keeping it in there, in the forest, is probably one of the key aspects in terms of carbon balance in the country,” says University of New Brunswick forest ecologist Loïc D’Orangeville.

Carbon offsetting is one way to reduce greenhouse gas levels through continuous storing of carbon in nature to compensate for emissions created elsewhere. It’s a popular climate change mitigation tool but it has also taken heat. Some international carbon offset programs have been found to be scams. They’ve also been criticized as “get out of jail free cards” for big polluters and likened to Catholic sins, a way for the guilty to pay for absolution rather than changing behaviour. Hardie says that outlook is counterproductive. “They’re meant to be a tool for transition to help people realize the greater value of our forests and ecosystems so that we can protect them better,” he says.

Loïc D’Orangeville, a forest ecologist at the University of New Brunswick, poses on a felled hemlock tree in Odell Park in Fredericton, N.B. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

‘The forest that you know today is not the forest that was’

When Europeans started living on unceded land in the Maritimes in the 18th century, logging focused almost exclusively on white pine to build masts for British sailing ships. By 1850, spruce, especially red spruce, became an important logging species. Logging focused on large trees in well-drained stands near rivers and streams for log driving. Hemlock was especially popular and was nearly wiped out because of the leather industry using its bark for tannins. From the 20th century onward, clear cuts, fire suppression and spruce budworm insecticide spraying, which has increased balsam fir abundance, have changed the makeup of many forests in the Maritimes to a monoculture of softwoods, money-makers in the pulp and paper industry.

Atlantic Canadian forests are a valuable natural resource in the region, particularly for the many rural communities where forest-related jobs are the main source of employment, according to the federal government. The Maritimes has some of the highest rates of clear cuts in the country, with New Brunswick removing forests from the landscape faster than they can be replaced, according to the Conference Board of Canada. New Brunswick also has the largest forestry industry in the country relative to the size of its gross domestic product — forestry, worth $1.29 billion in 2018, makes up 4.5 per cent of the provincial gross domestic product, according to Statistics Canada. In Nova Scotia, the forest sector contributes $328.8 million to the real gross domestic product, while on Prince Edward Island it contributes $34 million.

A logging truck carrying a load of wood is seen near a clearcut surrounded by the Acadian forest near Sussex, N.B. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

A typical industrial forest is cut every 40 to 70 years, breaking the natural process of succession and preventing the development of a diversity of species and ages that are characteristic of the Acadian forest. While human life is measured by lifespan and generations, the natural forest is wholly different. We live over decades. Trees live over centuries. Because of that, D’Orangeville says, we’ve lost touch with what a real natural Acadian forest should look like.

“The forest that you know today is not the forest that was,” says D’Orangeville, 38, who often takes his two young children to Fredericton’s Odell Park to show them the stand of 560-year-old hemlocks. “We always have a new normal. And that normal is shifting towards these younger, simpler forests with just one layer of trees, and not a multi-layered forest of young trees and old trees that is home to thousands of different species.”

Loïc D’Orangeville, second from left, searches for mushrooms with his children Elise, left, and Lucas in Odell Park in Fredericton, N.B. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

Red maple tree foliage in the Acadian forest at Whaelghinbran Farm near Sussex, N.B. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

Hemlock needles form a shadow on a mushroom cap that D’Orangeville picks in Odell Park in Fredericton. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

This new normal for forests in the Maritimes is such that many, including me, have fostered little to no appreciation for the Acadian forest.

“People don’t miss what they don’t remember,” Hardie says.

Species like hemlock and black ash are already disappearing and so may the red spruce, the flagship of the Acadian forest.

Global changes have led to new invasive insects. There’s one moving up from the United States that is gradually killing off the remaining hemlocks, which are expected to be gone in a decade, D’Orangeville says. And a wood-boring beetle native to East Asia is currently wiping out black ash, used by Mi’kmaw to make baskets.

“People don’t miss what they don’t remember.”

While restoring Acadian forests can help mitigate climate change, at the same time, climate change is also threatening the forest. The shift to a warmer climate means more temperate hardwoods like oaks and maples are growing in greater abundance and there are fewer boreal species. Now, D’Orangeville says, the shift is happening faster than ever before.

“We have on pretty good evidence that the boreal species are going to retract and the more temperate species are going to take over,” he says.

Elise D’Orangeville explores a naturally hollowed-out hemlock tree in Odell Park in Fredericton, N.B. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

Some studies show the capacity of trees to produce seeds for migration and continue the growth cycle is 10 times slower than climate change. The risk to the Acadian forest is that some species won’t be able to track the speed of climate change outside of their current distribution range. Red spruce will migrate northward as the climate in the south becomes too warm and the northern climate becomes more suitable.

“Trees just don’t have the capacity to migrate as fast as climate is warming,” D’Orangeville writes in an email.

Family woodlot owners struggle to access carbon markets

Mitigating the climate crisis is about two things: drastically reducing fossil fuel emissions as soon as possible and restoring natural ecosystems. In 2015, Canada and 194 other countries adopted the Paris Agreement, which aims to hold the global average temperature rise to below 2 C above pre-industrial levels to prevent catastrophic environmental consequences. At the time, Canada committed to reducing its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.

Right now, the carbon market is relatively small and voluntary but that may soon change. The value of the global market for carbon emissions could soar from $600 million now to $200 billion by 2050, said the German bank Berenberg, as countries hit the limits of decarbonization and need to rely on offsetting projects to meet national and corporate targets, wrote S&P Global.

The lack of a carbon market in Atlantic Canada currently is the biggest barrier to Community Forests International’s vision to restore the Acadian forest through carbon offsets. The charity not only needs woodlot owners willing to take part in their carbon offsetting program, but customers to buy those carbon offsets. But Hardie and de Graaf have reason to be hopeful. The federal Liberal government has implemented a price on carbon pollution and is currently developing rules for greenhouse gas emissions offset systems, which Hardie says will include forests — just one avenue for storing carbon.

In another hopeful sign, a 2011 New Brunswick survey of non-industrial forest owners showed money isn’t always the top priority for family woodlot owners. Many value the forest for walking and wildlife and want to leave it for future generations.

Ed Murray, 79, is one of them. He spent his working life in forestry and trucking in southern New Brunswick before leaving the business to his son Rick. Still, Murray has a sentimental attachment to the 607 hectares of forest he still owns and wants to leave a legacy for his 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Ed Murray, a family forest owner in New Brunswick, wants to leave a legacy for his children and grandchildren. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

On the back porch of his home in Penobsquis, N.B., wind chimes tinkle and tractor trailers rumble in the distance as he tells me how the industry has waxed and waned since he started working for his father in 1963.

“Small woodlot owners were the backbone of rural New Brunswick for years and years and years. The rural people — the farmers and the woods people and the fishermen — they’re the reason that cities are there,” he says. “At one time, I was a clear-cutter. I’m getting further away from that all the time.”

Murray walks past a pile of maple trees cut for firewood on his property. “At one time, I was a clear-cutter. I’m getting further away from that all the time,” he says. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

Recently, Murray volunteered to have the carbon measured in 242 hectares of his forest, which, over the years, he’d been cutting selectively and restoring to a natural Acadian forest. He wanted to preserve it for the next generation but when he discovered that his property wouldn’t meet the base level required to start earning carbon offsets for another three years he was upset and disappointed. “I said ‘I want to do as I please with my property.’ ”

Then there’s Kevin Veinotte, 51, whose family has been managing 161 hectares of forest for seven generations. His footprint on the forest has been much lighter. When harvesting in the forest in West Northfield in southern Nova Scotia, Veinotte uses lightweight equipment — a farm tractor, chainsaws and horses until recent years — to avoid disturbing the ground, and he only does so in winter and early spring months to leave the owls, red tail hawks and a northern harrier alone during nesting season.

“We have a rich diversity of wildlife and I really enjoy that,” Veinotte says. “It gives me a lot of pride in being able to earn a living doing this and not wreaking havoc on everything around us. We’ve got beautiful clean streams running through our farm. I want to keep it that way.”

He also owns 25 acres of Christmas trees, an abattoir and 40 hectares of agricultural land for cattle, sheep, free range chickens and turkeys. He manages his forest in such a way that it spreads income over his life.

“It’s the way we’ve always managed our woodlot,” says Veinotte, who is teaching his sons, who are in their 20s, how to carry on the legacy. “It’s the reason that I have wood to cut today is that’s how my father managed it.”

The wood Veinotte cuts from big trees is sold for home-building or projects that preserve the carbon for a long time, as opposed to toilet paper and paper. He says he’s interested in selling carbon credits if the opportunity comes up. “It’s a nice fit,” Veinotte says. “Where we’re growing large, long-lived trees that will grow a long time, it has the opportunity to lock down a lot of carbon.”

For Hardie of Community Forests International, that’s good news. He hopes people like Veinotte and Murray, lifelong woodlot owners, will be part of a movement among the tens of thousands of people who own forest in the Maritimes.

“There’s some pretty big economic and social things that need to shift, but if we do it, we can make this globally significant contribution — stabilize our climate — which is pretty much the most important thing we could be doing right now,” Hardie says. “If we do it in a way that also creates new economic opportunity, especially for our rural economies, it just makes it a little easier for people to forgo clear-cutting.”

Hardie says saving the Acadian forest can make a “globally significant contribution” in the fight against climate change. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

‘Being in the forest is the medicine’

Back at the Wildcat River in southern Nova Scotia, Melissa Labrador tells me she sometimes feels like she is in a race against forestry and land clearing. She spends much of her time educating people, teaching workshops and taking scientists out into the forest to explain the importance of the Acadian forest for her people.

Labrador is teaching her children about the medicinal plants in the Acadian forest. “If my people didn’t understand the medicines, we wouldn’t be here,” she says. Photo: Darren Calabrese / The Narwhal

In the cool, dry forest near her home, she picks a frond of sweet fern, which is used to heal blisters from poison ivy and acts as an immune system booster. She also shows me bracken fern, used as a nerve tonic. She tells me about the beech tree leaves, which are used to dry up the lungs, and gold thread, an anti-inflammatory used to treat jaundice and mouth sores. Her daughter, Nakuset, trails us, taking notes while her son, Tepkunaset, plays on the shallow edge of the river. For a treat, Labrador digs up a small white tuber she calls Indian cucumber and we break off quarters, enjoying its remarkable crisp sweet cucumber flavour.

“It’s not just the medicine here,” Labrador says as the birch leaves swish and the river swirls. “It’s the act of being in the forest, breathing in all the compounds from the trees and everything around us. Picking the medicine is a treat. Being in the forest is the medicine.”

The Carbon Cache series is funded by Metcalf Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input into the articles.

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There are no buildings left on the road to Darlings Island, a low-lying strip of asphalt that curves gently along the Hammond River in southern New Brunswick. The demolition crews may have knocked them down, but it was the floods that did them in.

In the aftermath of another spring of extreme flooding in Atlantic Canada, few places have been as physically changed as this roadway in Nauwigewauk, a rural community on the front lines of Canada’s changing climate.

“It looks like a nuclear blast site,” Paul Thompson, a retired firefighter who was one of the residents who lost their homes, told The Narwhal.

Where his house once stood, there’s a pile of gravel, surrounded by debris left behind when the water receded. His neighbours’ homes are gone, too. Most notably, the volunteer fire hall across the road and the Nauwigewauk Community Centre ⁠— a local social hub that had hosted countless kindergarten classes, dances, variety shows, Halloween parties, Beaver Scouts meetings and strawberry-shortcake socials since 1948 ⁠— have also been demolished.

A Nauwigewauk Community Club building underwater during flooding in 2018 in New Brunswick. Photo: Nauwigewauk Community Club

After back-to-back historic floods along the St. John River watershed, this community and others like it in New Brunswick are being redrawn by backhoes, demolition equipment and government officials — who are now enforcing flood-plain building restrictions that went ignored for decades.

In Thompson’s case, the province bought his house, which he’d spent years building up to withstand floods, and sold it to the highest bidder for $5,000 — provided they moved it to higher ground. In its place, there are plans for a new road that would be raised 1.5 metres above the existing road.

People in the province are talking about climate change in a way they never would have a few years ago. For the second straight year, hundreds of homes were evacuated and long stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway were underwater. Even officials who manage flood response seemed surprised at the level of destruction this spring.

Many in the province say New Brunswick needs to start making hard choices about how to adapt.

‘Not even peaked yet’

“The world is changing. I see it every year,” Taya Wallace, president of the Nauwigewauk Community Club, told The Narwhal. “You see how it’s affecting things. It’s right in front of us here.”

In May, Wallace and her neighbours watched as heavy equipment knocked down their community centre. It was an emotional moment for some, including Wallace, who had her wedding reception and many family reunions there.

The Nauwigewauk Community Club hall was demolished in May 2019 after back-to-back historic floods. Photo: Catherine White / Oak Lawn Images

The decision to demolish the hall was made prior to this spring’s flooding that once again left the building half-submerged — something that only confirmed it was the right choice.

“It was devastating,” she said. “But we didn’t really have a choice.”

The building’s fate was sealed the previous spring, when Wallace watched as the river rose higher and higher over the covered bridge by her house. That wooden span, the postcard-esque entryway to Darlings Island since 1914, has long been a measuring stick for the annual spring thaw.

The last time the river was that swollen, Pierre Trudeau was in his second term as prime minister. Residents had to strap the historic bridge down to keep it from floating away. More than 45 years later, Trudeau’s son was calling that kind of extreme weather “the new reality.”

Residents on Darlings Island have grown used to becoming stranded from the mainland for days, their road vanishing under flood waters. When Wallace’s husband arrived by boat to report the community centre was also under water, she sensed that something serious — and unprecedented — was happening to her community.

“I remember Brent coming home and saying, ‘The flood, it’s in the hall, and it’s not even peaked yet,’ ” she said. “I just had this overwhelming feeling that we were up against something we’d never dealt with before.”

Average temperatures could increase by five degrees by 2100

New Brunswick, with its sprawling network of rivers, wetlands and low-lying communities, is grappling with an increasingly expensive flooding problem. The Insurance Bureau of Canada says flood claims paid out by insurance companies in New Brunswick grew from $59 million in 1996 to $144.3 million in 2015. That’s larger than the average annual flood payout for all of Canada between 1990 and the early 2000s.

For people who live in the province’s flood-prone communities, climate change has sparked a debate over costly mitigation projects, such as diverting water channels, building dikes or raising highways. Premier Blaine Higgs, a vocal opponent of the federal carbon tax, believes permanent fixes are needed — fixes like changes to building patterns and regulations around how close people can build to rivers.

Some argue the federal government should require homeowners move out of areas with repeated floods if they want to receive disaster relief funding. Critics say New Brunswick needs to become more proactive when it comes to climate change, instead of reacting once disasters hit.

Nauwigewauk flooding in 2018, New Brunswick. Photo: Nauwigewauk Community Club

The floods are only expected to get worse. The province’s legislative committee on climate change has computer models that predict New Brunswick’s average annual temperature could increase by as much as five degrees within 80 years. That means more intense rain and snowfalls, exacerbating the spring runoff.

Some residents are choosing to adjust the way they live, raising their homes up above high water marks. Others are simply leaving. In some rural communities, volunteer fire departments are offering to torch flood-ravaged properties to save on demolition costs.

Thompson believes homeowners should be allowed to build in flood plains, as long as they’re prepared for recurring flood waters. He believes the government’s response to chronic flooding, by expanding restrictions on building near water, is an over-reaction.

“Common sense has to prevail,” he said. “Look at Vancouver. They have houses on piers. Down in Louisiana, they have houses on piers. Our house was built on concrete, with blocks all around it. We felt we were protected.”

‘We’ve had water pretty much every year’

Nauwigewauk has always existed on a floodplain, but the severity and frequency of the flooding here is literally reshaping the community. Flooding that used to happen every few decades has become an annual event. That concern, for future floods, was a big factor in the decision to demolish the community hall.

“We moved here in 1974, and for 30 years we never had a problem. The last ten years, we’ve had water pretty much every year,” Nancy Thorpe, a Darlings Island resident and longtime volunteer with the community club, told The Narwhal.

“There were quite a few people who thought we could save the hall, and continue. But there was so much we had to mitigate and do to handle the next flood. Here was two years in a row,” Thorpe said.

“Whatever we would have done last year, we would have to do again this year.”

Thorpe points out life was already changing in Nauwigewauk long before the flooding. It’s been harder and harder to get volunteers for community events, and the club’s directors were already pondering a future without their landmark hall. But the flooding forced their hand.

In a province where one out of every six homes is built in a flood-prone area, thousands of homes and businesses have been affected.

As the waters receded from the recent floods, the New Brunswick Emergency Measures Organization warned cleanup efforts could be hampered by contaminated water that posed serious health risks. From plunging property values to depleted disaster-relief programs, the economic impact is significant.

“I feel bad for people who can’t sell their homes because of all the flooding,” Catherine White, who has lived on Darlings Island for 48 years, told The Narwhal.

“It’s just one of the things with where we live… When the flooding starts, you have to decide if you’re going to stock up on groceries and stay, or you find somewhere to live off the island for a while.”

Climate change increases risk of flooding, scientists say

Chronic flooding has people paying more attention to sudden flips in the weather here, such as some wild swings seen last April when the temperature soared from snowstorms to 26 C in a matter of days.

The rising waters can’t entirely be blamed on climate change, but climatologists say higher seasonal temperatures and precipitation certainly increase the risk of flooding. In Nauwigewauk, Darlings Island and many other New Brunswick communities, people say life is already changing, and fast.

“In 2018, everyone said it’s a once-in-a-century flood. It’ll never happen again. And sure enough, it did happen again. The very next spring,” White said.

“If you don’t think global warming is happening now, you’ve got your head buried in the sand.”

*Updated June 18 at 8 a.m.: Nauwigewauk was originally incorrectly spelled as Nauwidgewauk. 

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A Canadian National (CN) Rail freight train carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire Tuesday night near the northwest New Brunswick town of Plaster Rock. No injuries have been reported.

The Transportation Safety Board ((TSB) reports that 17 cars are believed to have derailed, eight carrying dangerous goods and one a locomotive.  According to CN Rail President and CEO Claude Monganu five of the derailed cars were carrying crude oil, and the other four propane.

The 122-car train was heading to the Irving Oil Refinery in St. John from central Canada. The derailment occurred just after 7 pm about five km from Plaster Rock, in Wapske.

Dan Holbrook with the TSB told the CBC the incident was cause by a mechanical failure affecting the train's breaking system. A ruptured airline connecting the cars caused an emergency break application, he said. 

"Trains have a continuous pipe running throughout the train that supplies air to the brake system on every car," he said.

"If that brake pipe comes apart, that causes the brakes throughout the train to go into emergency…and that means the train will stop as fast as it can."

The incident comes just over a week after an accident in North Dakota caused several oil train cars to burst into flames and explode. The North Dakota accident is just one among many high-profile oil train accidents to occur within the last six months, including Lac-Mégantic where 47 people perished as the result of a tanker train derailment.

The TSB has deployed a team of investigators to the scene, where the fires still burn. The site is under the control of authorities with the local fire department.

Premier David Alward attended a news conference this morning to express gratitude there were no injuries and said there appeard to be no serious impact to the environment. 

"Every day we have the movement of goods and services across our country by many different modes of transportation," said Alward. "Every mode of transportation is not without risk.

"What is important to realize is how we are able to respond to situations when they happen really determines how we are able to manage as we go forward."

The TSB will further investigate the site when they determine it is safe to do so.

"The team will evaluate the accident and document the derailment site, inspect the equipment and track infrastructure and identify any items that may require closer inspection. They will examine the maintenance history of the train, operation of the equipment and operation policies, meteorological conditions, and review any human factors," states a TSB press release.

First responders were forced to stay a safe distance from the fire, which was large enough to be seen from a "significant" distance away, reports CBC. A 2km radius including 45 households has been evacuated, said Feeny, director of public and government affairs for CN Rail.

Plaster Rock mayor Alexis Fenner reportedly said all roads were blocked and shut down by the police after the derailment.

"On our balcony, we can just see flames. Every now and then, there's a huge fireball, as if there was an explosion," Plaster Rock resident Carol Jervis told Global News.

Another resident said her husband went to the area and "could see flames shooting in the air from quite far away. He could see it very clearly. It was about 50 to 60 feet he told me he could see."

J.D. Saddler, a resident of Wapske, told CBC that he was driving back there from Plaster Rock when the derailment occurred, and he saw "a great big cloud of orange smoke and the flames were really high in the air, the smoke was really high in the air."

At the time, there was no given time frame for when crews could move in. Feeny said CN Rail senior managers and hazardous materials experts were en route from Moncton, Montreal and Toronto.

An evacuation centre was set up at Plaster Rock, with the Canadian Red Cross dispatching volunteers with supplies to assist local authorities at the centre. Bill Lawlor, Canadian Red Cross director of disaster management for New Brunswick, said that this was a precautionary measure, as the area is sparsely populated and the small numbers impacted by the evacuation would probably stay with friends or family.

Lawlor added that the volunteers were ready with blankets and cots should any residents require shelter, or if circumstances should change.

According to the CBC, another derailment that occurred at Plaster Rock was one of two incidents that led the TSB to issue a summons in 2006, requiring CN Rail to turn in all its records.

The CBC's investigation discovered that CN Rail did not report more than 1,800 derailments and accidents over a six-year period, including 44 derailments and one collision on "key arterial rail tracks."

The derailment comes days after a joint task force announced by BC and Alberta premiers Christy Clark and Alison Redford handed in a report exploring the feasibility of transporting oil by rail as a backup in case pipeline projects fall through.

Image Credit: Andrew Jenkins / Facebook

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The RCMP responded to a First Nation’s protest against shale gas fracking in New Brunswick with arrests and pepper spray this morning. Reports from the clash show images of a highly-militarized police response to the blockade along Route 134 near Rexton, N.B. in front of a compound belonging to SWN Resources, a Houston-based company that recently performed seismic testing, a precursor to fracking, in the area.

The Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq First Nation has been protesting the development of the region’s shale gas resources for months. In June, the RCMP responded to the lighting of a sacred fire with arrests. Today, a reported 75 officers responded to the peaceful blockade to enforce an injunction, sending 10 officers in military fatigues with sniper rifles. Watch a video of the morning's events on this feed.

Elsipogtog councilor Robert Levi reported that “dozens” of people have been targeted with pepper spray. “The chief was manhandled a little bit and all hell broke loose,” he said.

Chief Arren Sock, pictured below, was apparently in custody, but according to Postmedia News, RCMP Const. Julie Rogers-Marsh could not confirm if any arrests have been made. *Update: Postmedia News is reporting that at least 40 arrests have been made.

#Elsipogtog Chief & council getting arrested along with protesters #cdnpoli #IdleNoMore pic.twitter.com/NOOXyWbMrw

— Lionel Levi (@lionelwade1980) October 17, 2013

In this video below, numerous heavily armed officers appear on the scene and a woman behind the camera asks a man in fatigues not to point his gun at her mother.

It appears numerous police vehicles were set on fire, with twitter reports claiming up to 14 cars are burning.

Police cars on fire at NB blockade #Elsipogtog #FrackingProtest #mikmaqblockade #occupy #ows pic.twitter.com/WKVtKRJhK7

— Occupy The Earth (@djjohnthomas) October 17, 2013

Rexton protest #nb pic.twitter.com/zeTxxdeuzo

— Jen Hudson (@hudson_jen) October 17, 2013

The Halifax Media Co-op is reporting that one of their writers, Miles Howe, may have been arrested.

SNIPERS Pointed guns at camp with elders children & women first thing this am. #Elsipogtog #AntiFracking pic.twitter.com/1ThhuJlcbX

— Rhonda Doxtator (@kawisaha99) October 17, 2013

Tensions flare as the police line advances. Police tear gassing the crowd. pic.twitter.com/3WrjsdA2EA

— Ossie Michelin (@Osmich) October 17, 2013

Police car on fire as police lose control of anti #fracking blockade. pic.twitter.com/MTmkY5arSF

— Ossie Michelin (@Osmich) October 17, 2013

2 more RCMP cars on fire #mikmaqblockade pic.twitter.com/5N7IHUIRhf

— stimulator (@stimulator) October 17, 2013

#mikmaqblockade pic.twitter.com/3qQRcyRaYZ

— stimulator (@stimulator) October 17, 2013

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