19/09/2025
I say good job 2 both bands practicing their inherent rights ✊🏽
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) has no idea how many elvers were caught during the spring fishery.
And it couldn’t confirm for licence holders whether it busted a single illegal shipment leaving Canadian airports.
DFO’s staff told the elver advisory meeting Tuesday at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography that either “one or zero” shipments of illegal elvers had been seized leaving the country from Canadian airports in 2025.
That’s despite a growing unlicensed fishery that led to the top brass of DFO, the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency getting raked over the coals by MPs last year during emergency meetings of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for allowing the once tightly regulated fishery to descend into rampant poaching and violence.
After those hearings, DFO came out with new regulations that included a traceability system that requires those catching, transporting, holding and exporting the juvenile American eels hold licences and that they report the product’s movement along each step from riverside to export.
Along with these new laws, DFO took 50 per cent of the quota from longstanding commercial licence holders and provided it to First Nations.
According to the 2025 season overview provided by DFO at Tuesday’s meeting, “catch and effort trip reports were filled out sporadically.”
Hong Kong connection
DFO staff told attendees that 7,710 kilograms of the 9,960-kilogram total allowable catch was caught by legal licence holders in 2025. Asked how many kilograms were caught illegally, DFO staff could not provide an estimate.
Almost all elvers caught in Eastern Canada are exported via Hong Kong as seedstock to Chinese aquaculture facilities where they are to be raised to adulthood.
According to the Hong Kong Bureau of Trade’s Census and Statistics Department, there have been 12,966 kilograms of live elvers imported as products of Canada this year, significantly more than the 7,710 kilograms landed legally.
“At every pre-season meeting DFO tells us they won’t patrol the rivers heavily because they will focus on export and it’s an abysmal failure every year,” said Stanley King of Atlantic Elver Fishery.
“It just gives them this veil of token enforcement.”
Outlying First Nations bands
While the majority of Nova Scotia First Nations fished under the new licensing system, Sipekne’katik and Millbrook First Nations did not. In March, they wrote to DFO’s elver review director, Jennifer Ford, saying that DFO had no authority over their self-managed fishery.
“We the Mi’kmaq of Millbrook have our own management plan that we have authorized under our treaties and the authority of Mi’kmaw law,” reads the letter signed by Millbrook Chief Bob Gloade that was obtained by The Chronicle Herald.
“We are not regulated by your colonial commercial licensing schemes, nor do we accept your proposed management plan.”
The letter cited a series of Supreme Court of Canada decisions, including R v Marshall and R v Sparrow, in justifying the stance. The letter went on to state that DFO officers would be refused access to the band’s holding facilities.
DFO’s Maritimes region director general, Doug Wentzell, wrote back on March 18, claiming DFO does have the authority to enforce federal fisheries law on First Nations and that it will.
“The courts have repeatedly upheld the Crown’s role in regulating the fishery, as well as the use of licensing as part of fisheries management, even when regulating the exercise of aboriginal or treaty rights,” reads Wentzell’s letter, obtained by The Chronicle Herald.
“Your letter suggests that fishery officers acting in the course of their duties require permission to enter Sipekne’katik reserve lands. While the department would always prefer to have fishery officers welcomed into your community, and is willing to establish mutually agreeable protocols where it is appropriate, if entry into reserve lands is necessary for fishery officers to exercise their legal duties and functions, they will do so in accordance with applicable laws and, again, with that overarching objective of fostering a safe, orderly and well-managed fishery for all.”
Sipekne’katik and Millbrook went on to launch their own fisheries.
The Chronicle Herald observed over 20 fishers using nets along the banks of the Tangier River in April. Many of the fishers said they were from Sipekne’katik and fishing under their own self-administered licence system.
DFO did not intervene.
