Another battle over lucrative juvenile eel fishery lands in court

A group of companies with licences to fish for highly lucrative juvenile eels along Maritime rivers turned once again to the courts on Friday in their bitter dispute with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans over decisions it has made in the fishery.

The latest case deals with the department's unwillingness to raise the total allowable catch in the elver fishery from 9,960 kilograms, a figure that has remained unchanged for two decades and which licence holders argue can be increased.

A lawyer for the attorney general of Canada and a lawyer for the group that represents a number of licence holders made their arguments Friday in Federal Court. The judge in the case said he will issue a decision soon.

The industry has suffered through several years of chaos along Nova Scotia and New Brunswick rivers due to unauthorized fishing spurred by soaring prices in Asia, where the young eels are raised to adulthood for food after being exported from Canada.

Mitchell Feigenbaum, the president of licence holder South Shore Trading, said in an interview that raising the total allowable catch would encourage the "rogues" fishing without federal authorization to work within the system.

He said there is science to support an increase, including work by DFO itself examining watersheds and their capacity to support the fishery.

"We think that the department is very dismissive of our concerns, of our ideas, and really does not even want to engage with us on these topics and … has already made decisions and just uses a paper process to make their decisions look good," he said.

The court battle comes as the department is carving up the fishery in a dramatic new way, stripping most longtime licence holders of much of their quota before the upcoming season, which is set to begin in weeks, and handing it to First Nations.

The judicial review is one of a series that elver licence holders have launched in Federal Court in recent years over DFO decisions, including quota allocations and orders that have shut the fishery down early due to chaos linked to unauthorized harvesting. 

While Friday's case deals with the department's decision on total catch from last year — a season that was ultimately cancelled — officials this week told licence holders the same 9,960-kilogram number will remain in place this year.

'Precautionary approach'

A DFO spokesperson said the department is taking a "precautionary approach," in part because unauthorized fishing is a source of "scientific uncertainty."

A monitoring study on a river outside Halifax has shown the number of elvers are above the "long-term median value," although the department notes the work was paused two out of the last five years due to safety issues.

"Observations following changes to the fishery being implemented for the 2025 season, in particular with respect to the level of unauthorized fishing, and any new science advice available, will be considered in developing management advice for the 2026 fishing season," spokesperson Debbie Buott-Matheson said in an email.

Susanna Fuller, vice-president of conservation with the group Oceans North, which was not part of Friday's court case, said there's not yet the scientific evidence to increase the quota.

DFO is introducing new regulations aimed at bringing the fishery under more control, and Fuller said the department should wait to see how those work before considering changes to how much people are allowed to catch.

Another major issue is that in 2012, an advisory panel recommended the American eel be listed as threatened, but the federal government has not yet decided whether to list it as a species at risk.

Fuller said it is hard to manage the fishery with that status in limbo, and she urged the department to make a decision, one way or another.

She said eel populations have declined in places like Ontario due to obstructions such as dams, and DFO is under pressure from conservation groups and some First Nations in those areas to list eel as a species at risk.

But it's also crucial, she said, to recognize how important the fishery is to communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. 

"When stock status is good and we know that it can contribute to, like, the health of coastal communities and livelihoods, let's increase the quota and make sure people are fishing sustainably," she said. "I just don't think that the American eel is in that situation right now."