Nova Scotia elver fisher says early signs of improved enforcement of fishery

Baby eels, also known as elvers, swim in a tank after being caught in the Penobscot River, Saturday, May 15, 2021, in Brewer, Maine. (Source: THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Robert F. Bukaty)

A string of recent arrests for illegal fishing is an early sign the federal government has increased enforcement since it closed the baby eel fishery, says one Nova Scotia commercial fisher.

Stanley King, of Atlantic Elver Fishery, reacted Thursday to news that the federal Fisheries Department arrested five people from Maine for illegal fishing in the Meteghan, N.S., area of Digby County last weekend.

Department officials have "upped their game," said King, who has been among the commercial fishers who have criticized the federal government in recent years for what they said was a soft approach to poaching. But he cautioned that cases of unauthorized fishing could still rise as the population of the tiny fish known as elvers increases through the spring with more favourable coastal tides and warmer waters.

Due to what it said was violence and intimidation on the water in the lucrative elver industry, Ottawa closed the 2024 commercial fishing season on March 11 in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Meanwhile, King has been taking part in a long-running study on the species on the East River near Chester, N.S.

"We are just starting to see good catches now, so will enforcement keep up?" asked King. "We will keep our fingers crossed."

The Fisheries Department said Wednesday that since March 8 it had arrested 95 people, seized 21 vehicles, 73.6 kilograms of elvers, 175 dip nets and 58 fyke nets.

"This year poaching is down," King said. "It's not gone but it's certainly down."

He added that it's not unusual for people from Maine to fish illegally in the Maritimes because Canada, in contrast to the United States, has developed a reputation in the last couple of years for lax enforcement.

"The problem with the Maine fishers coming up here is that they can catch our fish and sell them here to our black market buyers and they can go home and cross the border with just cash," King said.

Elvers are usually sold live to aquaculture operations in China and Japan where they are grown for food. In 2022 prices reached as high as $5,000 per kilogram, partly because sources for the fish species in Europe and Asia had begun to dry up.

The federal department has not identified the U.S. fishers arrested in Nova Scotia, but Darrell Young, executive director of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association, said a number of Indigenous fishers from his state have fished in Canada because they don't recognize the international border. In Canada, Indigenous fishers claim a treaty right to fish.

Poaching elvers, Young said, has been dramatically reduced in Maine because of stringent regulations and a catch tracking system. He said when elvers are shipped for export, state marine inspectors are part of the process.

"They weigh them and then they put a sealed sticker on the box and when they get down to Boston the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sees that sticker and they know that it's already been inspected by the wardens in Maine," said Young. "You can't get away with nothing."

Federal officials in Canada have also proposed a new system of possession and export licences aimed at tracking elvers from the time they are caught to their shipment overseas.

King said he was recently told by the Canada Border Services Agency that they had not intercepted any packages containing illegally caught elvers so far this year.

"I do think they are trying," he said about the boarder guard's desire to catch poachers, "but I don't know how much DFO (the federal fisheries department) is co-operating."

Neither the agency nor the department were immediately available for comment on Thursday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 25, 2024.

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