Ottawa warns it will likely close lucrative baby eel fishery

Canada’s most valuable export fishery could be done for the season before it’s even started.

The federal fisheries minister has warned she will probably shut the baby eel fishery this spring in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia because her department doesn’t have time to come up with new rules to stop rampant poaching threatening the longterm survival of the species.

In a letter sent last week to the 12 baby eel, or elver, licence holders in the Maritimes, Diane Lebouthillier says time is running short and there’s just too much to do ahead of the season, which normally starts in about six weeks, near the end of March or beginning of April.

“It is my view that it is not possible to have a safe and sustainable elver fishery in 2024, and therefore the fishery should not be opened,” she wrote in the private letter, obtained by Brunswick News.

However, she said she is willing to listen to feedback from the licence holders for American eels before making a final decision and has asked them to reply by Feb. 23.

Last year, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, or DFO, ended the season early, only two weeks in, after it was faced with an unprecedented number of reports of poaching on rivers where the baby eel float in from the ocean – more than 1,550 reports.

The brazen attempts to plunder the rivers came as prices for baby eels – which are raised to adulthood in tanks in Asia before being sold for numerous dishes – hit as high as $5,000 a kilogram. Prices have skyrocketed as eels around the world have become scarcer.

The poaching largely occurs at night on dozens of rivers over a vast area, making enforcement all the more difficult.

Andrea Anderson-Mason, the Progressive Conservative MLA for Fundy the Isles Saint John West, reported seeing dozens of poachers late at night in her community of St. George, as did Mary Ann Holland, whose company Brunswick Aquaculture, is the sole commercial licence holder that operates exclusively in New Brunswick.

But the harvest was also complicated by the fact that some Indigenous people claimed they could catch the baby eels as part of their inherent right.

Holland took legal action against several Indigenous leaders over the battle, but was unsuccessful in her Court of Kings Bench application. She is now appealing to the Court of Appeal, New Brunswick’s highest court.

“The elver 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 creating an immediate threat to public safety and management of the elver fishery,” wrote the fisheries minister, who added that since 2020 authorities had received “numerous complaints of violence, trespassing, property damage, weapons offences, organized crime, forcible confinement, and other significant risks to public safety.”

The licence holders are nine commercial operations – including Weycobah First Nation in Cape Breton – and three other Indigenous groups that have communal fishing permits.

Holland, whose husband Philip started the first commercial baby eel harvest in the Maritimes 35 years ago, had a quota of about 1,000 kilograms, worth several million dollars, a figure that had been reduced by 14 per cent when Ottawa agreed to give Indigenous people a stake in the fishery. Her husband has since passed away and she is now the company’s president.

“The minister has asked for input and I’ll give her some,” said Holland last week, offering that it was still too early to say what she’d write.

In a statement, the department said since the closure of the commercial elver fishery on April 15, 2023, it had been consulting with industry, First Nations, and stakeholders to chart a path forward.

The minister sent the latest letter asking for feedback from commercial licence holders, First Nations and Indigenous organizations.

“Once the 10-day comment period is over, and input has been considered, the Minister will make a decision on the 2024 fishery,” reads the department’s statement. “That decision will be publicly announced.”

Lebouthillier had far more to say in her private letter.

She mentioned that following last year’s closure, her department immediately launched an extensive review of the commercial elver fishery, rooted in lessons learned from other places, including the State of Maine.

She said the department wants to give more access to Indigenous communities, create a new framework to regulate and license the possession and export of elvers, and change the way the baby eel fishery is managed.

Those changes, the minister said, would require the enactment of new regulations, including the introduction of a new traceability system to track the movement of elvers.

“Despite the department’s best efforts, these changes will not be in place to support a 2024 fishery,” Lebouthillier wrote.

The industry responded to the letter with dismay.

Genna Carey, the president of the Canadian Committee for a Sustainable Eel Fishery, told Brunswick News it was a “garbage decision” that the Canadian government “should be embarrassed to make.”

“The concerns cited by the minister in this letter are ones that industry have asked to be addressed for many years, with the DFO taking no action in that time,” she wrote in an email. “Licence holders have been asking for a traceability system for at least 10 years.”

The licence holders had proposed setting up and paying for their own traceability system, but Ottawa rejected it.

“The minister has chosen to support organized crime rather than hard working fishers that have created this industry from scratch,” Carey said. “They have had since 2020 to make a plan to enforce this fishery, but instead they would rather give up, costing commercial fishermen and First Nation communities their livelihood. DFO has ‘rolled over’, letting organized crime operate unfettered.”

John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Daily Gleaner