‘We are going to lose this species forever’: How federal inaction is pitting communities against each other and risking the future of the American eel
As you read this, thousands upon thousands of tiny translucent juvenile American eels are drifting on ocean currents from where they were spawned in the Sargasso Sea toward our rivers.
If this year is like the last three, they will begin arriving in March to find rivers filled with nets.
Internal Fisheries and Oceans Canada communications obtained by The Chronicle Herald through a freedom of information request show how last spring’s elver fishery devolved into rampant poaching and violence while the federal government largely stood by.
Thirty-one years after Donald Marshall was arrested for fishing American eels, and 25 years since the Supreme Court ruled the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet have a constitutional right to earn a moderate livelihood off traditionally harvested resources, it still hasn’t been implemented.
Meanwhile, nine commercial licence holders (among them the We’koma’q First Nation) have developed a market in China for the juvenile American eels that has seen their price rise to $5,000 a kilogram.
Internal Fisheries and Oceans Canada communications obtained by The Chronicle Herald through a freedom of information request show how last spring’s elver fishery devolved into rampant poaching and violence while the federal government largely stood by.
In the absence of a regulated moderate livelihood fishery that is accessible to members of most of Nova Scotia’s 13 First Nations, many Mi’kmaq have taken matters into their own hands.
Over the past three years, more have begun fishing without licences or monitoring by DFO.
Commercial fishermen’s allegations that the federal government isn’t enforcing the Fisheries Act on First Nations members appears to be borne out by last year’s emails.
As the escalating poaching and violence on the rivers last spring began making it into the media, Rachael Burdman, an executive adviser to the associate deputy minister at DFO, sent an email asking if they could publish details of charges and prosecutions of those caught illegally fishing.
She got the following response from Adam Burns, DFO’s director general of fisheries resource management:
“(The Public Prosecution Service of Canada) must approve whether charges are laid, and the case goes forward for all files involving Indigenous individuals,” wrote Burns.
“This can take a long time, as we have seen in elver. Indeed, it may be that (the prosecution service) decides that notwithstanding the legitimate offence, it is not in the public interest to lay charges and proceed to court (most recently linked with Indigenous members).”
In the absence of enforcement, non-aboriginals with neither licences nor a rights-based claim to the resource began poaching in large numbers.
The internal emails show that biker gangs sought involvement last year, and some participants in the unlicensed and unregulated fishery began carrying guns.
There was at least one shooting involving unlicensed elver harvesters, kidnappings, a pepper spray fight on a river, stealing of fishing equipment, and a member of Parliament who spoke out about the lawlessness who had his life threatened.
What follows is the story of how a season spun into chaos and a warning for the human communities who share our rivers and the American eels that live in them.
DFO’s plan
Until recently, the elver fishery was one of Canada’s most tightly regulated.
The nine commercial licence holders employed teams who called in to DFO each evening in the spring, telling them where they were going to set their nets to catch the 10-millimetre long juvenile eels that rise to the surface at night. They’d call in their catch to the gram at the end of the night’s fishing, then again when they arrived at the holding facilities where they are kept alive.
The licence holders would, and continue to, report the weights of the eels when they leave their tanks to be flown live to China, where they are raised to adulthood before heading primarily into the Japanese sushi market.
Aware that First Nations are seeking increased participation, the commercial licence holders had been in discussions for years with DFO about selling portions of their quotas for redistribution among the Mi’kmaq.
In 2020, then Liberal federal fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan publicly committed to buying back the access through a “willing buyer, willing seller” framework.
Her successor, Joyce Murray, instead took 13.27 per cent off the 9,960 kilograms of quota held by commercial licence holders (but not from that held by the We’koma’q First Nation). Four hundred kilograms was allotted to the Bear River, Acadia and Annapolis Valley First Nations, and two hundred to the Wolastoqey First Nation in New Brunswick. A further 600 kilograms was not given to anyone to offset some of the amount being taken by poachers.
In 2020, Jordan closed the season early due to rampant poaching. During the following two seasons, DFO estimated unlicensed harvesting had grown.
As the 2023 season approached, Murray approved a very similar play book to the one that hadn’t worked the previous two years.
On Jan. 26, 2023, senior DFO staff and their lawyers sat down with representatives of the commercial elver fishery at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography and told them they have a plan.
“Conservation and Protection has the required resources to undertake enforcement activities including: riverside and buyer compliance activities and port of exit inspections (land and air),” reads a summary of the meeting.
No one, it appears, believed them.
“It is painfully obvious to anyone involved in the fishery that DFO (Conservation and Protection) has turned a blind eye to the rampant poaching which has taken place over the past 3 seasons,” reads a response by one commercial licence holder whose name is redacted.
“If DFO is unwilling to enforce the Fisheries Act to conserve this resource, then senior DFO officials need to stop referencing conservation as a concern — it’s just not believable.”
First Nations also had doubts when consulted on DFO’s plan.
The Peskotomuhkatiyik in New Brunswick responded to a DFO consultation letter by accusing its officers of standing by and watching as some 60 fishers from Wolastoqey First Nation fished outside their agreed upon quota.
“This was entirely outside the terms of the ‘understandings’ your Department had made with the six Wolastoqey elected councils,” reads the letter.
“This was not some rogue group. Their actions were co-ordinated by the band councils. Councillors from four of the six communities were present to protect the fishers. Months later, no charges have been laid, either against fishers or against black-market buyers.”
Unable to negotiate agreements with First Nations other than the three in southern Nova Scotia and the one in New Brunswick, DFO pressed ahead with its plan.
According to the Feb. 24 regional operational directive for the upcoming elver fishery, the director of conservation and protection’s intent was to “deter and interrupt the unauthorized harvesting, sale and export of elvers through safe, well co-ordinated and targeted education of harvesters, compliance and monitoring of harvesting activities, and enforcement in conjunction with partners as deemed necessary.”
Bad start, bad ending
The month before the legal season’s March 28 opening date saw emails from frontline fisheries officers at detachments along the south and eastern shores to senior officers with subject lines warning of illegal fishing activity.
The contents of all the fisheries officers’ emails are blacked out.
But not those from the RCMP.
On March 14, Cpl. Young of the Indian Brook RCMP detachment emailed DFO of a complaint from Sipekne’katik First Nation members that they’d been threatened by masked members of a biker gang, one of whom had a gun, while fishing elvers behind the Dartmouth Curling Club the night before.
When Young attempted to follow up with the fishers, who wouldn’t have had a DFO-approved licence, they declined to participate.
“There is a possibility that the fisherman may plan to carry firearms for protection,” reads Young’s email.
By the time the legal fishery opened on March 28, 911 calls from property owners along rivers and emails from RCMP and frontline DFO officers were pouring in.
Elver fishing starter packs, including nets and buckets, were being raffled off on Facebook, with $20 getting buyers a book of 50 tickets.
DFO’s April 3 report on the legal fishery’s first week noted its officers had observed about 370 people fishing without approved licences, and that 377 fyke nets had been stolen from licensed commercial fishermen.
Illegal fishing was confirmed on 83 rivers and suspected on 29 others.
“It has been reported that Sipekne’katik First Nation and Millbrook First Nation have issued authorizations to fish elvers to their community members,” reads the report.
Two days later, RCMP emailed DFO to notify them of a shooting in Meteghan involving elver harvesters. A 21-year-old from Eskasoni had been shot in the leg and police were searching for a 29-year-old Dartmouth man who fled in a red Honda Civic.
Meanwhile, $150,000 worth of elvers were seized at the Halifax Airport that were being shipped to China by the Kespukwitk communities (Bear River, Annapolis Valley and Acadia First Nations), the only First Nations in Nova Scotia with whom DFO had managed to negotiate a moderate livelihood elver fishery.
The Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs would issue a news release demanding DFO return the elvers, blaming the alleged infraction on “an accounting error.”
“Thirty-one Mi’kmaw harvesters, six women and 25 men, suffered an undue hardship at the hands of this Burnside (fisheries officer),” reads an op-ed contributed to The Chronicle Herald by the assembly at the time.
“This (officer) had opportunities to use his enforcement discretion in support of a DFO-recognized conservation-based elver harvest in collaboration with the Kespukwitk First Nations. Instead, he continues to criminalize all parties involved, including attempts to criminalize and interrogate four Mi’kmaw chiefs. This racial profiling, criminalization, harassment and discrimination of our people must cease immediately.”
Meanwhile, a week into the legal fishery, DFO was already considering shutting it down.
“(Conservation and Protection) is reporting that given the increasing amount of unauthorized harvestiving activities which exceeds levels experienced in previous years, and the mounting challenge in maintaining an orderly fishery, they will likely be finalizing a recommendation for the Minister over the coming week to close the fishery via a (ministerial order),” reads an April 5 email from Joe DeMora, DFO’s director general of public affairs, to fellow staff.
As of April 6, 859.3 kilograms of the quota had been caught legally and an unknown amount caught illegally.
The DFO weekly update noted that the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs was concerned about large groups of non-aboriginal poachers on rivers assigned to the Kespukwitk First Nations.
Calls kept pouring in to 911, increasingly mentioning unlicensed harvesters carrying guns. Some of the licence plates of illegal harvesters were from Maine and Ontario.
Two weeks after the commercial fishery opened, top-level staff requested that Minister Murray close it.
“DFO views the current situation and trajectory of the unauthorized fishing of elver as both a threat to the conservation of American eel, and a threat to the proper control and management of the elver fishery,” reads an April 14 request to the minister for a ministerial order to close the elver fishery.
“The fishery has become the focus of harassment, threats and violence between fishers and toward fishery officers, with a number of confrontations and incidents of violence in the recent weeks creating an immediate threat to the proper management and control of the elver fishery. Current control, management and enforcement tools and resources are not able to control the situation and urgent action is needed.”
Murray signed an order closing the fishery the next day.
Licensed harvesters had landed 3,470 kilograms of elvers (a third of the quota) and DFO had seized 36.1 kilograms of illegally caught elvers.
The illegal fishery continued largely unabated.
As did the 911 calls from homeowners and emails from the RCMP.
“We were enforcing the elver fishery,” Murray said of her department when cornered outside Parliament by reporters on May 10.
“It just got out of hand, partly because of the ease of fishing and the value of the catch.”
DFO did not respond to a Chronicle Herald request as to whether anyone was charged with anything in relation to the unlicensed harvest of elvers in 2023.
Federal inaction
“I had many constituents whose properties were being defiled, destroyed, as poachers parked and utilized their things,” South Shore-St. Margarets Conservative MP Rick Perkins told the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans last fall.
“I had single mothers threatened by people. I had death threats, as did my wife during this time.”
Two senior Canada Border Services Agency officials told the hearings they performed inspections looking for elvers that the commercial industry informed DFO were being flown out of the country live from seafood terminals in Halifax and Toronto.
They found none.
DFO did not respond to Chronicle Herald questions about whether it intends to change its enforcement strategy for the coming season.
Asked if it had prosecuted anyone for Fisheries Act violations in relation to the elver fishery over the past three years, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada responded:
“The PPSC does not have any data readily available on this type of offence and our case management system does not contain the type of detail that would be required to extract any data.”
The greatest casualty could be the American eel itself.
Prices rose on elvers after Asian and European eel populations were overfished, leaving the juvenile American eels as the only broodstock for aquaculture (no one knows how to replicate the Sargasso Sea in a tank).
“If we continue to have years like the last two, I’m very concerned, not just for the fishery but also for the eel population,” said Sarah Stewart-Clarke, a Dalhousie University marine ecologist.
“We can’t have an uncontrolled exploitation rate. We have to know how much we are removing from the ecosystem. Otherwise, we are going to lose this species forever.”
