Fisheries and Oceans Canada faced a five-fold increase in Mi’kmaw fishing for baby eels in 2020 primarily on Nova Scotia rivers — an event it did not expect and could not manage, according to internal DFO documents obtained by CBC News.
The federal department had been closely monitoring, and in some cases prosecuting, the unauthorized sale of baby eels harvested by Mi’kmaq under Food, Social and Ceremonial (FSC) eel licences since 2017.
The appearance of more than 110 Indigenous fishermen at the beginning of April 2020, up from 21 across the region in 2019, quickly forced a shutdown of the little known but lucrative fishery throughout the Maritimes, the documents state.
It was the first time that had happened.
DFO was in the middle of a collision between Mi’kmaq asserting treaty rights and commercial harvesters anxious to protect a fishery worth $38 million in 2019.
Nine licence holders share a total allowable catch of 9,960 kilos of baby eels — known as elvers.
They are primarily sold to Asian fish farms where they are grown to adulthood for consumption.
The tightly regulated commercial fishery was worth an average of $4.3 million per licence in 2019.
Unlike commercial licences where quotas and landings are tracked via logbooks and verified by dockside monitoring, FSC elver catches are not reported and sales are not allowed.
“Given the high value, and since elvers are not known to be a traditional or current food fish for Indigenous people, this harvest is suspected to be for sale into international markets,” Deputy Minister Timothy Sargent wrote to federal Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan on April 22.
Sargent was recommending the first of what would turn out to be two temporary 45-day closures, which effectively ended the entire 2020 season.
It was a response to the unprecedented increase in Mi’kmaw elver fishing and fears over escalating conflict as harvesters competed over access.
“The unexpected, heightened scale of the activities that have been observed to date (which by far exceeds what DFO had expected based on previous years) has led DFO to determine that those concerns cannot be managed through localized closures,” Sargent wrote.
“This level of fishing, in addition to the commercial fishery, has become unmanageable and represents a threat to the conservation of the species.”
In July 2020, commercial harvesters filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court of Canada seeking to overturn the shutdown order.
They argued DFO had not done enough to stop unregulated fishing.
In its defence, the department filed 60 pages of documents justifying its actions.
The lawsuit was later dropped. But the documents reveal what has been a mostly hidden struggle that features nighttime confrontations illuminated by flickering flashlights at the side of a river.
The DFO documents included advice from senior bureaucrats, assessments from its enforcement branch, Conservation and Protection, and detailed economic analysis of the fishery.
2021 CBC/Radio-Canada. All rights reserved.