A federal proposal that would redistribute the overall quota for catching highly lucrative baby eels to individual fishers will not compensate commercial licence-holders who employ those workers, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) says, leaving owners feeling betrayed by the government.
The department first informed Maritime commercial groups and fishermen of the proposed pilot project in a letter in mid-October, designed to combat unlicensed fishing of the baby eels, known as elvers, and violent confrontations that have shut down the last two seasons.
The letter of intent said consultations would be held and asked for feedback on the proposal.
At the time, the department told elver fishers the quota redistribution program sought to “broaden the distribution of benefits” and “would not be accompanied by financial assistance or compensation to existing licence holders,” according to the letter.
More than a month later, a DFO spokesperson told Global News the department is still not considering compensation.
“Fisheries and Oceans Canada is currently conducting consultations on the reallocation of elver quota, without compensation,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement Friday.
“Given the significant increases in elver value and relatively low input costs, the commercial elver fishery presents a unique opportunity to broaden the distribution of the prosperity that can be generated among various types of harvesters, potentially including young harvesters, employees of existing commercial licence holders, and harvesters who participate in co-operative commercial enterprises.”
Commercial licence-holders in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick say the proposal would not only further harm their bottom line but also upset the industry as a whole.
“It’s definitely going to be hard to keep employees on,” Stanley King, a commercial licence-holder with Atlantic Elver Fishery and spokesperson for the Canadian Committee for a Sustainable Eel Fishery, told Global News.
The DFO proposal would offer 120 fishers currently employed by the nine commercial licence-holders their own small elver licences for next year’s season, and would also offer elver licences to 30 fishers currently licensed to catch adult eels. The pilot would last for three years and accompany new regulatory changes to the elver fishery the DFO is working to put in place for 2025.
The new redistribution scheme would be on top of an earlier proposal in June that would redistribute 50 per cent of the overall quota to local Indigenous groups to recognize their court-approved right to make a moderate living from hunting, gathering and fishing.
Combined, King said that could mean 75 per cent of the overall quota — which hasn’t changed since 2005 — will be redistributed away from commercial licensees.
The department told Global News in an earlier statement last week that it will set the overall quota before the season opens in the spring. In its October letter of intent, the DFO said it sought to redistribute the quota “without increasing fishing pressure on the stock.”
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The DFO said last week that consultations on the proposed redistribution program would seek comments on “the potential impacts a pilot might have on existing licence holders’ operations.”
The Fisheries Council of Canada wrote to the DFO earlier this month expressing “strong concerns” about the proposal, which it said is “disruptive, lacks a thoughtful policy foundation, and seems driven by objectives that do not consider the full ramifications for the industry.”
A meeting held between DFO officials and Nova Scotia elver fishers in late October about the proposal — a recording of which was reviewed by Global News — grew heated as fishers angrily accused the government of putting their livelihoods at risk.
“It’s frustrating to have DFO continually say, ‘We realize what your opinion is, we hear you, and we’re going to go ahead and do it anyway,” King said.
Elvers are fished at night from coastal rivers in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Maine.
They are harvested in the springtime as they return to the rivers from their ocean spawning areas. They can be harvested using minimal equipment, often with a bucket and a fine funnel-shaped net called a fyke net or a dip net, making entry into the lucrative market easy.
The federal government closed the commercial baby eel fishery on March 11 after violence and intimidation plagued last year’s fishing season in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
The 2020 season was also shut down for similar reasons.
At peak value, elvers have sold at about $5,000 per kilogram, according to DFO — more than lobsters, scallops or salmon — making them the most valuable fish by weight in Canada. King and other commercial fishers say the current value is well below that and fluctuates year to year and within seasons.
But the potential for sky-high prices has made the fishery highly susceptible to poaching and bad actors from abroad. China is the dominant market for elvers, and some buyers will both under-pay on the black market and overpay for licensed catches, driving out legitimate Chinese buyers, King said.
The fear among commercial groups is that individual fishers will sell to the highest bidder rather than resisting the encroachment of bad actors.
“The government is going down a path that not only will destroy the incumbent businesses and their futures, but it’s going to basically lead to a situation where the entire landscape of the Canadian glass eel fishery is going to be dominated by numbered companies,” said Mitchell Feigenbaum, an eel exporter and commercial elver licence holder who runs South Shore Trading in Port Elgin, N.B.
In May, federal officers seized a shipment of over 100 kilograms of elvers at Toronto Pearson International Airport they said was destined for overseas, valued between $400,000 and $500,000.
King said that seizure was “a drop in the bucket” and that overall enforcement of illegal fishing and exporting is nearly non-existent, particularly along the rivers where elvers are actually caught.
He said individual licences will make fishers more susceptible not just to the bad actors buying the product, but also the potential of losing entire catches if personal storage and transportation equipment fails. Smaller quotas will also mean lower salaries than what large companies have been able to pay those same workers.
“What the government has done with these employees is they have increased their risk dramatically,” King said.
Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier defended the quota redistribution proposal at a House of Commons fisheries committee meeting in October, telling MPs in French that licences “should be expanded to enable economic prosperity.”
Conservative MP Rick Perkins compared the proposed pilot program to the government telling a Tim Hortons franchisee, “‘Well, I think it’s unfair that you make a lot of money from that franchise, so I will take three-quarters of that business and give it to your employees. It’s too bad you invested all this in the business — so sad — but I’m going to make it more equitable,’ in some strange socialist world.”
Lebouthillier said Perkins’ analogy was “not true at all” and that “young people, the next generation, will have access to the resource” under the new program.
“She thinks she’s playing Robin Hood, and in actuality, she’s putting these fishermen in a worse-off situation than they currently are,” King said.
Perkins also suggested at the committee meeting the increase in licensees will make it harder for the government to enforce the law and stop bad actors, to which the minister promised new regulations that will address the issue.
King said Lebouthillier has refused to meet with the elver industry despite multiple requests.
Feigenbaum said offer letters for individual licences are being sent to his recent, part-time contract workers, rather than to the career employees who have worked for him for decades.
“How do I even explain this to DFO?” he said. “I fired a guy (for drug use) and he got a letter… I’ve got 25-year employees that are getting ignored.
“In 2024 we lost all our income; 100 per cent of our earnings was destroyed. And in the year 2023, we lost like 75 per cent of our earnings. So after two years in a row of this kind of treatment, we basically had to eliminate our payroll. We mothballed a lot of our facilities. We’re working on a skeleton staff.”
Commercial fishers say they have tried to work with the DFO on solutions to the elver fishery for years, but have seen their proposals — which include collaboration with First Nations — shut down by the government.
“We think there’s something very stinky going on,” Feigenbaum said.
—With files from Global’s Heidi Petracek and The Canadian Press