The ongoing tensions surrounding the First Nations lobster harvest in Canada’s southwest Nova Scotia erupted Tuesday night when several hundred commercial fishermen and their supporters raided two facilities where Mi’kmaw fishermen were storing their catches.
Indigenous leaders are condemning the actions as racist hate crimes and calling for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to step up their response.
Commercial fishermen began gathering Tuesday afternoon in Digby County and made their way to a lobster pound in New Edinburgh, where, by nightfall, a van was set ablaze, lobsters were stolen and the facility was damaged.
A similar raid also took place in Middle West Pubnico, in the neighbouring county of Yarmouth, where Mi’kmaw fisherman Jason Marr was forced to barricade himself inside a lobster pound while outside a mob vandalized his vehicle and called for him to relinquish the lobster he had harvested from the waters of St. Marys Bay.
By morning, hundreds of dead lobster were strewn across the pavement outside the pound, and confrontations continued on the ground throughout the day.
The two raids come after weeks of unrest in the province’s southwest, sparked by the launch of a “moderate livelihood” lobster fishery by the Sipekne’katik band outside the federally mandated commercial season.
Just last week, a Mi’kmaw fishing vessel was destroyed in a suspicious fire at a wharf in the community of Comeauville.
Marr said he had just returned from lobster fishing with his two daughters on Tuesday evening when he heard that a group of commercial fishermen were threatening to burn his boat and destroy his lobster.
“So I decided that it wasn’t a good idea to keep them there, and I loaded up my van and called a friend of mine and he told me he had somewhere I could store them for a while,” Marr told CBC’s Information Morning on Wednesday.
Marr said he believes he was followed to the Yarmouth County lobster pound, where he took his catch, and the facility was soon surrounded by hundreds of people.
“They said they were coming in to take the lobster,” Marr said. “They told us they were going to come in at midnight and burn us out, screaming a lot of different profanities at us.”
Social media posts being circulated by people defending the raid said egg-bearing female lobsters, which are not supposed to be harvested, and dozens of crates of frozen dead lobster were removed because they demonstrate poor fishing practices on the part of the Mi’kmaw fishermen.
But Sipekne’katik Chief Mike Sack said those lobsters are not his band’s property and that the facilities that were raided buy and store from commercial fishermen and Mi’kmaw fishermen alike.
Perry Bellegarde, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said in a statement that it’s time for the RCMP, as well as federal and provincial governments, to intervene in Nova Scotia’s fishery dispute “before someone gets badly injured or, possibly, killed.”
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