Nova Scotia’s Kejimkujik National Park and Historic Site is home to old-growth forests, white sand beaches, diverse wildlife and abundant natural beauty. But long before it was established as a national park in 1969, it was the site of Mi’kmaw fishing villages, hunting territories and burial grounds for thousands of years. Now, the Mi’kmaq will once again play a central role in deciding how that land, which is the keeper of their stories and memories, is cared for.

A new agreement between the Mi’kmaq and Parks Canada will allow both parties to govern almost all of Nova Scotia’s parks and historic lands together. Announced in December 2025, the Toqi’maliaptmu’k Arrangement, which means “we will look after it together,” reflects a relationship based in mutual respect and allyship — one that has taken decades to nurture and create.

Roughly 30 years ago, that relationship was essentially non-existent, Eric Zscheile says. He has been a legal advisor to the Mi’kmaq, who operate as one nation, since 1992 and negotiates on their behalf with the federal and provincial governments. 

Nova Scotia’s national parks (excluding Sable Island), as well as many more throughout Canada, were created from land that was directly taken from First Nations, often through “dubious land surrenders,” Zscheile says. For generations, the Mi’kmaq had no say in how unceded land was protected, used or accessed, and there was a deep sense of distrust toward the federal agency as a result. 

 “Most Mi’kmaq refused to even go into a national park because of the past,” Zscheile says. “There was a feeling that it was government appropriation.”

Then came the Marshall Case, a 1999 landmark decision in favour of Mi’kmaw fisherman Donald Marshall that affirmed First Nations’ Treaty Right to fish, hunt and gather for their livelihood. After that, Zscheile says, things slowly began to shift.

“ People within Parks [Canada] started looking at what was happening legally when it came to the rights of Indigenous Peoples and their relationship with Indigenous Peoples, not just in Nova Scotia but across the country,” he says. “There started to be a concerted effort to say, ‘I think we have to do things differently.’ ”

In the years since, progress has been gradual. Mi’kmaw leaders have worked with Parks Canada on a number of projects to help repair the community’s relationship with both the agency and the land they’d historically been excluded from. In 2012, they formed an arrangement to allow Mi’kmaq to enter national parks for free.

They’ve also worked to incorporate Mi’kmaw place names into official signage and interpretive displays, create visitor programs highlighting Mi’kmaw history and culture and organize harvesting, protection and restoration projects. One such project focused on white birch conservation and gave the Mi’kmaq access to white birch for traditional crafts, including building canoes.

Today, Parks Canada is lovingly seen by the community as the “least offensive federal agency,” Zscheile says. That’s thanks to years of collaboration and a willingness to listen and work together as equal partners. 

That status as equal partners is now official, according to the Toqi’maliaptmu’k Arrangement, which took nearly a decade of negotiations to bring to fruition.

The arrangement is unprecedented and monumental in its scope. While similar agreements exist in Gwaii Haanas in B.C., Newfoundland’s Torngat Mountains and Saoyú-ʔehdacho in the Northwest Territories, those partnerships apply only to individual parks. This agreement’s underlying principle is to recognize and implement Aboriginal and Treaty Rights within lands that have traditionally been governed, managed and utilized by the Mi’kmaq. 

Because of that wide scope, it’s the first agreement to apply province-wide and covers all Parks Canada-administered national parks and national historic sites in Nova Scotia.

The only exception is Sable Island Reserve, which was left out because it remains unclear if Mi’kmaq traditionally frequented and used Sable Island, Jonathan Sheppard, says. Sheppard is superintendent of Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site, one of the locations covered by the arrangement. Discussions about the governance and management of Sable Island are ongoing between Parks Canada and the Mi’kmaq.

The choice to create a province-wide agreement, rather than one focused on individual lands, was largely based on the Mi’kmaw preference for a collective approach because the Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia operate as one unified political group, Sheppard says.

“[It was] really important for the ideas associated with self-governance and self-determination that this is a pan-Nova Scotia initiative, because it is ultimately about a nation-to-nation relationship and the nation-to-nation decision-making governance structure,” he says.

A shared vision 

Fundamentally, the arrangement is a framework to formalize the modern-day relationship while recognizing and implementing the Peace and Friendship Treaties, signed in the 1700s between the Crown and east-coast Indigenous communities.

 “This was not about negotiating rights and it was not about creating rights or extinguishing rights,” Sheppard says. “It was really about implementing rights originating from those original Peace and Friendship Treaties.”

In practice, the framework will be guided by a co-management board that will be made up of an equal number of Parks Canada and Mi’kmaw representatives. There will also be technical committees made up of Knowledge Holders, Elders and harvesters focused on specific topics, including language, culture and heritage; archeology; natural resource stewardship and harvesting; and economic opportunities.

While exact details will be developed over the coming months, the arrangement will include opportunities for practices on the land, including in protected heritage places. This will allow for practices such as ceremonies, Indigenous-led conservation activities and place-based learning and knowledge sharing.

The 10-year agreement has an option to extend or renew, although the Mi’kmaq are free to opt out at any point if they are dissatisfied. 

“ It was really clear to Parks Canada that there was a lot of overlap in vision about land stewardship, and that formed the basis for the agreement,” Sheppard says.

The Mi’kmaw concept of Netukulimk teaches about the respectful use of resources and only taking what you need from the land. It’s one of the principles Sheppard says aligns with Parks Canada’s vision for ecological integrity and preservation. Another is Msit No’kmaq, which suggests that all living beings are sacred and interconnected.

Etuaptmumk, or two-eyed seeing, is the concept at the very core of this new partnership, according to Lindsay Marshall, the Mi’kmaq relations advisor for the Cape Breton Field Unit for Parks Canada and a former chief of Potlotek First Nation.

Coined by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall, it means “looking at something with your western eye, and also with your Indigenous eye to come up with something truly beautiful and unique, and to understand it more,” he says. It is about combining both wisdoms to create a more holistic, in-depth approach. 

While the timeline to establish this arrangement was long, Marshall says it was the Mi’kmaq who set the pace, not the government. This required patience from Parks Canada at times, patience that helped demonstrate respect. So far, Sheppard says, the public response has been positive.

“ I’m really proud of the way the approach has been at the speed of the communities and not rushing, not being forceful in any way,” Marshall says. “That shows understanding and appreciation for culture.”

For First Nations in other provinces who may want to develop their own arrangements, Marshall suggests a similar strategy: go slow and build a real relationship before rushing into anything. 

And to federal agencies that may want to build partnerships with Indigenous communities, Marshall stresses the importance of doing the homework first. 

“Before you even set foot in the community, you should learn about the community,” he says. “You go at [their] speed and you approach with respect.”

Heal the people, heal the land 

For Clifford Paul, the moose management co-ordinator for the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources, this new arrangement is an opportunity for true healing among the Mi’kmaq.

“The Mi’kmaq language hasn’t been spoken in these areas in a long time,” Paul says. “The language belongs there. Our people belong there.”

It is also a chance to draw on Indigenous wisdom to help heal the land at a time when the environment is in dire need of protection. The Mi’kmaq have a proven track record of helping to improve the ecosystems in Nova Scotia’s parks, Paul says. In recent years, for example, they reintroduced pine martens into the boreal forest and helped to rectify an overabundant moose population through harvesting.

While the latter project was highly controversial — both with people who oppose hunting and non-Indigenous hunters who opposed being excluded — Paul says the Mi’kmaq successfully demonstrated their ability to get the job done safely while providing positive social impacts to their communities.

Restoring the spiritual connection between the Mi’kmaq people and the land is another crucial part of this deal, Paul says. Although the arrangement is about resource management and economic opportunities, it is also about harvesting knowledge from these sacred lands after hundreds of years of severed access.

“ When we go to these places and do our storytelling, it widens the breadth and scope of our Traditional Knowledge,” he says. “ You heal the people by taking them back to the land.” 

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.

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.”

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.

After 24 days of being forbidden from entering the forest, some Nova Scotians are returning to nature. The province lifted its wildfire-related ban in Halifax and counties farther northeast on Aug. 29, with Premier Tim Houston saying in a news release that conditions were “heading in the right direction in certain parts of the province.” 

Every Atlantic province had some form of fire or burning restriction at different points during the dry summer of 2025, but Nova Scotia invited fresh controversy when it banned all access to the woods provincewide on Aug. 5. The province set its fine for violating the woods ban at $25,000, the same amount it fines those that set illegal fires. According to CBC, more than $1 million in fines has been issued for illegal burning in the last two and a half years. 

New Brunswick followed Nova Scotia’s lead and restricted industrial and recreational activities on Crown land, a ban that was mostly lifted on Aug. 26. 

Nova Scotia’s problems aren’t over. Crews are still battling fires in Long Lake, along the province’s north shore in the Annapolis Valley region. Despite the continued risk and considerable damage — over 1,000 residents were evacuated because of the Long Lake fire and 20 homes were lost — not everyone agrees with the restriction on entering the woods, which remains in place in 11 of the province’s 18 counties. In mid-August, Jeff Evely of Westmount, N.S., recorded himself violating the ban.

“I want to challenge this in court,” Evely says to Department of Natural Resources officers in the video. “And the only way for me to do that is to get the fine. So, I’m not trying to make trouble for you guys, okay? I just want a piece of Tim Houston and I want to be as accommodating and as nice as I can be.”

Evely, a veteran who was a People’s Party of Canada candidate for Sydney-Glace Bay in last spring’s federal election, wasn’t alone. The social media response to the woods ban invoked COVID-inspired debates about safety and government overreach. 

Opinions were just as mixed last weekend in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park and Shubie Park in Dartmouth, as families, dog-walkers and runners headed back into the woods. Some parkgoers said they were glad to follow the rules to help keep the province safe from fire, while others said at least some public spaces should have stayed open. 

Everyone said they were happy to be back.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Point Pleasant Park — Halifax

James Byers, public servant

What he was doing in the park: walking his dog.

“It gets boring walking the same routes and I like feeling grounded, but I think the ban was a good preventative measure and I think that most people respected it. I had coworkers that lost their cottages and had to evacuate last year with the fires out in the Beechville, Hammonds Plains area.

We did our camping and our summer trips earlier in the season, so it didn’t impact our vacation plans. We had family who went camping and couldn’t light a fire but they still had a good time.”

Chris Webster, student, and Lauren Theriault, film and television costumer

What they were doing in the park: walking their dog.

Theriault: “We’ve had a sad dog. It was really hard because it was too hot during the day to walk her on pavement.”

Webster: “It’s been a long month and a half. I think the worst thing was trying to get the unhoused community in Halifax out of the woods. They have nowhere else to go and they’re already kicking them out of encampments. They go to the woods to get away from the city that they’re being kicked out of and then they’re being kicked out of the woods.”

Abdoulaye Barry, founder, Ten Toes Down run club

What he was doing in the park: leading a run.

“I’m the type of guy that loves the outside, and every member here loves Point Pleasant. We tried running at [a local track called] The Oval but a lot of people didn’t like it that much.

Honestly, Point Pleasant, there’s no better place to run. I think a place like this should always be open to the public, because everyone has reasons why they’re here. For the run club, it’s health benefits, right? Social benefit and psychological growth.

I live downtown in an apartment that has a gym and equipment. So, when it came to physical fitness, I had other [options], but I’m sure other people were affected.”

Jay Gaerlan, digital creator

What he was doing in the park: running with Ten Toes Down.

“This community really started in Point Pleasant Park. To have that taken away was really awful. It feels good to be back. A lot of people relieve stress by being in nature. It felt like something was missing.  

We almost had to evacuate when there was a fire in Bayer’s Lake. My house was like a kilometre away.”

Shubie Park — Dartmouth, N.S.

Jared MacPhee, comic artist

What he was doing in the park: walking his dog.

“I have a very high-maintenance dog and the ban prevented me from going to parks in the area, so he was going stir crazy in my house.

I thought it was reasonable. I understand the precautions. Obviously, I don’t want forest fires. Obviously, post-COVID you never like government lockdowns. A bit of a PTSD situation, but I go along with the rules, even if I don’t like them.

There’s a little trail in the woods that we walk every day. It’s just weird, having a little slice of your neighbourhood you’re not allowed to go into anymore.”

Roberto Guebara, chef

What he was doing in the park: showing a friend from Italy “one of the most beautiful parks we have in the city.”

“Feels great, bringing the kids back to breathing fresh air and enjoying the views, seeing this beautiful thing we have here. I’m not really completely in agreement with the ban but we had to follow the rules and respect the fires that were happening.”

Donna King, anesthesia assistant

What she was doing in the park: walking her dog.

“I think it was a little over the top. I wish they’d have kept those city parks open, because it wasn’t deep in the woods. There’s not many places to go in the city. It’s tough not being able to take [my dog] Dino to water.”

Cheryl Cort, retired, and Kimberlee McTaggart, film and television editor

What they were doing in the park: running with the Heart and Sole Running Club.

Cort: “If it had to be, it had to be. We don’t want fires. That’s what they thought was necessary.”

McTaggart: “I’m glad they left the path along Lake Banook open. I really wish they would have opened the waterfront trail, which is a paved path through a tiny bit of woods that people use as commuters.

I like to bikepack and I was hoping to get one more weekend in August. My usual is out to Dollar Lake. That was the only thing that affected me and I wasn’t that upset about it because we needed to do it.

We have a place in Porter’s Lake and there was a fire nearby, mostly in Lake Echo. It didn’t hit us but it hit Mineville Road and it felt like it was on the way.”

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.

Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened to Atlantic whitefish in the wild? 

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

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

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

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

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

How whitefish got into Dalhousie University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing a natural environment into a dark basement room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habitat and funding loss still threaten Atlantic whitefish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope for whitefish in the wild

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

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

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

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

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.

Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.

Maurice Ruddick waited for nearly nine days near the bottom of a 4,300-metre-deep coal mine before he was rescued. An underground earthquake brought down ceilings and pillars and shifted debris into tunnels, trapping Ruddick and several other miners. Stuck in the darkness, with limited food and water Ruddick lifted his fellow miners’ spirits by leading them in prayers and song. 

In 1958, Nova Scotia’s Springhill mine disaster killed 75 men and trapped dozens in the tunnels. The world kept vigil for survivors as they were slowly rescued. Ruddick, a descendant of enslaved Black people, was among the last miners to be brought back to the surface. A media circus followed and the survivors’ stories were broadcast around the world.

“Maurice’s story is often celebrated for his heroism during the Springhill disaster but less attention is paid to the broader context of racial discrimination he faced,” Aderinola Olamiju told The Narwhal. Olamiju, a graduate student at Memorial University in Newfoundland, is researching the history of Black miners in Nova Scotia.  

“As an example, after the rescue, when he and other survivors were meant to travel to Georgia for vacation, there was still segregation in the United States at that time and he had to be housed separately from the white miners.”  

Ruddick’s story is one of the most well known of a Black miner in Canada. It was made into a Heritage Minute, covered in books and is now a musical play. Olamiju, originally from Nigeria, is looking to explore lesser-known stories. 

As he digs through archives, libraries, union pamphlets and historical newspapers, he hopes to uncover “the hidden stories of Black miners in Nova Scotia’s industrial past, particularly how racial dynamics influenced their experiences with workplace safety and health risks.” 

The Narwhal spoke with Olamiju about his research into what life was like for some of the first Black miners in Canada and the challenges of trying to piece together this history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What questions do you hope to answer through your research?

As part of the Mining Danger project, which investigates the history of accidents, occupational disease and pollution in Canada’s mines and mining communities, the main focus of my research is looking at the racial dynamics of mining labour, particularly how it connects to health and risk. 

My research will examine several key questions, but the main ones are: how did coal mining companies, labour recruiters and government institutions together create and reinforce racial hierarchies within the industry? And how did Black workers engage with unions and workplace advocacy to improve their working conditions and address workplace accidents and issues relating to occupational health?

What role did Black miners play in Canada’s first mining booms?

Historically, the coal industry in Nova Scotia was intricately linked to the steel industry, as coal was used to burn the furnaces in the steel-making process. So you had two industries heavily dependent on each other. During the industrial expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, there increasingly became labour shortages in the coal industry. Companies like Dominion Coal (Domco, later Disco) and Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company (Scotia) emerged as major players in the 1890s, and they turned Cape Breton into this industrial hub where you had rival companies running both steel and coal-mining operations. 

To address these labour shortages, some of these companies began to recruit labour from outside the country. Disco was actually a major facilitator of Black migration to Nova Scotia through agreements with the provincial government. The recruitment process sometimes used established networks within the North American steel industry, with company managers recruiting workers from industrial centres in Alabama, Buffalo, Maryland and Pittsburgh. 

Other times, you had labour recruiters going directly to Caribbean countries, and workers who returned home would also recruit their friends or families. As many Caribbean countries were colonized by the British at the time, it was easier to recruit labour from the Caribbean, particularly from Barbados and Jamaica. Nova Scotia’s location and shipping networks made this connection and recruitment easier and labour migration wasn’t only limited to the coal and steel industries. Domestic workers, particularly women, were also recruited from the Caribbean to work in Nova Scotia.

What do we know, so far, about what life was like as a Black miner in the early days of Canada?

We know these new labour recruits faced multiple layers of racial discrimination. Just like in our contemporary society, back then Black labour was devalued as Black workers were often paid much less compared to their white counterparts. Despite having skills, Black workers faced this constant discrimination that kept them in subordinate positions, doing the most physically demanding and lowest-paid jobs. During boom and bust cycles, these workers were often the last to be rehired and the first to be fired. 

Their housing situation was also subpar. For example, for some Disco workers, many lived in company shacks in the Cokeville section of Whitney Pier that lacked basic things like proper heating and running water. There’s this letter from 1908 where a blast furnace superintendent, J. McInnis, wrote to the general manager about how bad the houses were in the “Negro quarter” — they were unboarded and exposed to the harsh realities of winter weather. 

The work itself was extremely dangerous, especially at Disco’s blast furnaces and coke ovens. Black workers were concentrated at these positions because of racial stereotypes about their ability to withstand heat better than white workers. But despite all these negatives associated with labour and immigration, Black workers managed to build strong communities. They set up churches, schools and businesses to help each other cope with the challenges of industrial work and discrimination. 

What has surprised you most in your research so far?

Seeing how racial dynamics developed in Nova Scotia and what forces and factors shaped them. You had these companies actively recruiting Black workers from the Caribbean and the United States to address labor shortages, while at the same time Canada’s immigration policies were trying to restrict Black migration.

Where are you looking for information and what do you hope to find?

Over the summer months, I will be conducting research at various archives and libraries in Nova Scotia, including the Nova Scotia Archives and the university archives at Dalhousie and Cape Breton. Some of the most important sources will be company records, print newspapers and magazines and union documents. Canada’s immigration records are also useful in understanding the policy of immigration discrimination based on race and looking at the scale of migration and countries of origin.

How challenging has it been to find information on the history of Black miners in Nova Scotia? 

Generally, the historical record of such stories is often fragmented. Racial discrimination affected what stories were told and kept in archives. Sometimes the most valuable information can be found in places like immigration paperwork or company letters, rather than the usual mining narratives. Archives also may only keep what society at that time deemed important.

Another factor is scale. Compared to white workers, there weren’t that many Black workers in Nova Scotia’s mining industry. The Afro-Canadian population in Nova Scotia is significant and has a rich history, yes, but when it comes to mining specifically, their numbers were smaller. This was partly because of Canada’s immigration policies — immigration agents were actually given secret instructions to keep Caribbean Black people out, even when they met all the official requirements. They would even work with U.S. officials to restrict African-American migration by getting American railway companies to increase ticket prices for Black passengers from $20 to $200, for example.

Updated on Feb. 28, 2024, at 10:45 a.m. ET: The subtitle on this story was updated to clarify the researcher interviewed for this story is based in the Altantic region, not the Maritimes. He is based in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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.

 Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avon River becomes political wedge between lake community and environmental advocates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then wildfire season started.

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

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

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

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

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

Others have disputed that statement. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet in other contexts, communities have found solutions. 

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Flood risk maps are an essential public good. Indeed, many countries like the United Kingdom already offer flood risk mapping.

Canada committed to a public flood risk mapping portal in the 2023 budget. However, despite the increasing frequency and impact of large, catastrophic floods, we still have a sparse patchwork of flood risk maps at municipal and provincial scale.

What flood mapping that does exist is hard to find, of uncertain quality and currency, and often difficult for non-experts to understand and apply.

The unacknowledged reason why there is a lack of flood risk mapping in Canada is because such maps generally face public resistance. Indeed, it is not uncommon in Canada to see flood or wetland mapping withdrawn or modified because of public pressure.

I led two survey-based studies recently with former graduate student Samantha Howard and post-doctoral fellow Brooke McWherter to understand how people in flood-prone areas of Nova Scotia perceive publicly available flood maps. We found wide agreement about the benefits of such maps — until we asked about the impact on real estate value.

Flood risk mapping could be a critical tool in Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia faces some of the highest sea level rise in Canada under current climate change projections. Yet last week, the Nova Scotia government decided not to proceed with the long-awaited Coastal Protection Act, which had been passed with all-party assent in 2019.

Among other things, the act would have regulated how close people could build to the ocean based on assessments of sea level, storm projections and information about the elevation and erosion risk of each section of coast. This would have protected people and infrastructure, as well as sensitive coastal ecosystems, and left space for ocean dynamics.

In lieu of the act, the Nova Scotia government released a new website featuring resources to help individual coastal property owners make decisions about their bit of coastline, leaving dozens of rural coastal municipalities in the lurch. One of those resources was a new coastal hazard map.

The lengthy disclaimer you need to agree to before you can access the map immediately erodes its trustworthiness. Moreover, while people may trust any good news they see in its data, they may still be at risk due to the tool’s many data and design flaws. To supplement this tool, Nova Scotia has committed to finishing detailed flood line mapping by 2027.

It is too soon to know how people are responding to this tool, but we know it does not take a lot of unhappy constituents to make a government nervous, especially if those constituents hold financial or political power. The public engagement associated with the Coastal Protection Act was, after all, overwhelmingly in support of proclaiming and regulating under the act. Yet here we are.

Hesitation around public tools for measuring flood risk related to property value

The first survey we ran in 2021 — through an online link sent via Canada Post to all residents in two towns in Southwestern Nova Scotia — showed one in six people felt flood risk mapping presented too big a risk for real estate value. Our second survey of about 1,100 house residents around the Minas Basin, Nova Scotia, in 2022 found that one in three residents expressed concern about real estate value. Both studies had a margin of error of plus or minus six per cent at a 95 per cent confidence level.

The first survey had a smaller response rate but represented the population demographics better. The second was biased toward older respondents and those with higher incomes.

Moving back to our original question — why doesn’t everyone see flood risk mapping as a public good?

We used slightly different questions in the two studies to understand the drivers of resistance to flood risk mapping based on perceived impact on real estate value. What emerged speaks to the challenge of inspiring long-term and collective thinking about climate change.

Firstly, being focused on oneself rather than others was a reliable predictor of resistance in both studies.

Resistance in the first study was associated with agreeing to the following statements: “I am not able to cope with the land changes required to deal with significant increases in flood risk at this point in my life,” and “flood management decisions I make do not have implications for others.” The latter is demonstrably untrue: shoreline armouring, for instance, can have negative effects for neighbours. In the second study, being focused on others and having descendants led to less resistance.

Self-orientation was a strong underlying driver of resistance. It reduced a person’s likelihood of focusing on others, the future or the biosphere. People already make decisions to suit their own situation, just as the Nova Scotia government is now encouraging coastal landowners to do. Yet in these kinds of scenarios, collective and ecological interests are forgotten.

Secondly, the more vulnerable a person felt to flood risk, the more likely they were to oppose maps that would allow others to see their flood risk. This variable was only a strong signal of resistance in the second study when we used a combination of flood likelihood and vulnerability to measure it. This might also explain why resistance was twice as high in the 2022 survey than the one in 2021. It could be a regional difference based on actual differences in risk, or differences in survey method and thus respondent population, but it could also reflect increasing flood frequency and severity.

The second survey was still in the field when Hurricane Fiona hit Atlantic Canada. This timing suggests that instead of becoming more open to climate adaptation information, like flood maps, as flooding events occur, we might become less open as we seek to protect the value of our biggest investments: our homes.

Moving beyond the fear of the unknown

A clue to the path ahead may be found in our first study, where those who had previously seen a flood map for their region were slightly less likely to be resistant to public flood risk maps. This might indicate that such resistance is mostly borne of fear of the unknown.

We urgently need high quality, public flood risk maps that the government stands by (including with planning regulations). Then we can focus on rethinking what it means to live a good coastal life in the face of climate change, and how we collectively support those who may face decreases in home or land value.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a moderate livelihood, anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uneasy relations over Atlantic fishery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial fishers are frustrated, too

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who has the power to make decisions over Atlantic fishery?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are there enough fish to go around?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indigenous nations say Treaty Rights mean control over fisheries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The move angered many.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alana Westwood is an assistant professor at the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University.

Nova Scotia has had three gold rushes since colonization: one in the 1800s, one at the beginning of the 1900s and, most recently, in 1942. Eighty years later, the gold market is sitting near an all-time high — but this time, things are different: we’ve moved from miners with pickaxes to open pits deeper than high-rises, their waste stored in open tailings ponds the size of multiple football fields.

Like many places since the COVID-19 pandemic, Nova Scotia has experienced sharp rises in land values putting pressure on not only would-be homeowners, but also farmers and woodlot owners. Yet, the cost for any individual or company to obtain a mineral exploration licence — staked claims to the minerals found in the ground — is just 61 cents per hectare. Visions of enormous profit combined with a low upfront prospector cost has resulted in an explosion of exploration. Most licences are intended for gold.

In 2013, our calculations show there were 158 mineral exploration licences covering approximately 1.5 per cent of Nova Scotia’s total subsurface. Ten years later that number had jumped to 2,124 licences, covering 18 per cent of the province’s land mass. Although most claims don’t turn into mines — they’re often an effort by companies to assure shareholder confidence — many will still enter into the provincial environmental assessment process with the hopes of being approved for mining. 

It’s anticipated most new mines will be proposed to mill less than 5,000 tonnes of ore per day, avoiding triggering the more rigorous federal environmental assessment law: the Impact Assessment Act. Last updated in 2019, the act governs the application process for most of the largest resource extraction and infrastructure projects. Whether a project is subject to this act depends on its size and type (for example, projects that cross borders undergo federal assessment).

Most mines, however, go through provincial assessments. In Nova Scotia, the environmental assessment regulations, used to evaluate potential economic, social, health and environmental impacts associated with development, have not changed since 1995. Unlike the federal environmental assessment law, provincial assessments in Nova Scotia do not legislate companies to consider climate change, cumulative effects of a project or impacts on Indigenous peoples and surrounding communities.

When assessments don’t adequately incorporate science, risks from mining can rise dramatically. Abandoned mine sites from past gold rushes in Nova Scotia are currently leaching toxic heavy metal contaminants into groundwater and waterways.

Canadian history is riddled with examples of harm caused by gold mines, with a recent example being the only currently operational gold mine in Nova Scotia, the Touquoy gold mine. Its proponent, Atlantic Gold, received a $250,000 fine last year for breaking laws by harming freshwater ecosystems. A more staggering example is the 2014 tailings dam collapse at the Mount Polley mine in B.C., one of the largest environmental disasters caused by gold mining.

With this less-than-flattering track record in mind, Nova Scotians are paying attention to Atlantic Gold’s proposals for the Beaver Dam gold mine (5,750 tonnes per day) and Fifteen Mile Stream gold mine (5,480 tonnes per day). These two are both being assessed federally, but the Goldboro gold mine (4,000 tonnes per day) underwent the provincial environmental assessment.

Nova Scotia’s provincial assessment splits the regulatory regime into two: a small-scale process (Class I) and a large-scale one (Class II). Despite gold mines often having substantial footprints with relatively high risks to the environment, the province designates these assessments as Class I because they are “smaller in scale and may or may not cause significant environmental impacts or be of sufficient concern to the public.”

That’s the assessment Signal Gold received after submitting an application for the Goldboro mine in June 2022. Just 50 days later, the project was approved, despite many comments expressing concern with technical aspects of the proposal. The timeline was too brief for experts to conduct detailed reviews of the lengthy application — 26 files totalling 5,925 pages — despite warnings from government scientists that potential environmental risks had been underestimated.

These short approval timelines certainly don’t allow for sufficient public, expert or (apparently) even internal government scrutiny. And yet, there is an even murkier policy loophole in Nova Scotia. Once a mine is approved, the proponent can apply for an industrial approval to change or alter its operations. The approvals are not subject to public or Indigenous consultation, and most documents detailing them are not available to the public.

One industrial approval of note is the tailings dam height increase that was approved last summer at the Touquoy mine, a project that was assessed and approved in 2008 at an estimated ore production capacity of 4,500 tonnes per day. Now, the Touquoy project is producing ore at 8,400 tonnes per day due to expansions approved behind closed doors. The Goldboro gold mine seems destined for a similar fate. Despite being approved for construction just last year, Signal Gold has already “identified a significant opportunity to expand the existing … Goldboro Deposit for a further two kilometres,” hinting at following suit with a future industrial approval expansion.

Like the federal environmental assessment process did in 2019, it is time for the province of Nova Scotia to update its nearly 30-year-old environmental assessment laws and regulations. The 2021 mandate letter to Nova Scotia’s current minister of environment and climate change set out an objective of “amending the environmental assessment legislation to give voice to diverse and equity-seeking communities.” Acting on this objective must happen now, as mining claims are staked at an unprecedented rate in the province’s history.

To mitigate potential risks from future gold mining, an immediate short-term recommendation is to place all mining projects in the Class II environmental assessment process, which allows for more robust public input. Simultaneously, the province should work towards revamping the environmental assessment process to more closely mirror the rigour of federal environmental assessment. This includes increasing timelines for Indigenous engagement, increasing the window for public or expert input from 30 days to at least 100 days and providing funding to support the public to participate. 

The industrial approval loophole needs to be closed by drafting a clear, transparent and standardized assessment framework for how this process works, and ensuring that all documentation related to industrial approvals is publicly available in the permanent record. Finally, an updated law should include legally binding environmental assessment requirements for climate change, cumulative effects and impacts on marginalized peoples.

A revitalized, transparent, environmental assessment regime that separates science and politics would provide hope that today’s Maritime gold rush is inclusive and sustainable.

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.

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.