Fishery trapped between rudderless feds, reckless band
Sailing the rough waters of the native lobster question — one of the big todos for 2021 — is not going to be easy with the mast held aloft by two loose bolts: a muddled federal government and an erratic Sipekne'katik band using “moderate living” as cover to ransack lobster stocks at will, conservation be damned.
At any rate, as expected, this latter part didn't work out too well — at least not economically. Chief Mike Sack said a couple of weeks ago that all his Sipekne'katik fishers had lost money in the fall's controversial fishing on St. Marys Bay.
Nobody says anything in the open, but it must be a concern for the First Nations leadership generally that the mercurial Sack is becoming the public face of Mi'kmaw affairs, arguably to the detriment of Mi'kmaw advancement.
When the bands announced their half share in the purchase of Clearwater Fine Foods for $500 million this fall, the first thing I heard here in southwest fishing country was a snarling comment that this must be Sack up to more mischief.
The purchase was, in fact, a business coup, following other, smaller investments. The B.c.-based First Nations financial group that supplied the cash is raising money from investors in the financial markets.
Simply, fishing is profitable. With a basketful of federally-granted licences (the Sipekne'katik, for example, have 33 in various fisheries) and now private investment at hand, this is a major open door for First Nations.
It will be easier to take that door if the commercial industry is not hostile. In Western Nova Scotia, the lobster industry is officially receptive to increased Mi'kmaw participation within fisheries department rules. However, after Sipekne'katik's trash-fishing of St. Marys Bay and Sack earlier threatening to disrupt the opening of the big Lobster District 34, which would likely have meant Mohawk warriors and the like here provoking violence on the wharves — Sack said he called it off because of COVID — that sentiment might have hardened.
What we have here is the Maritime version of the national drama (which is playing out in the U.S., Australia and other places as well), in which the story of the dehumanization of native populations over the centuries, capped recently by accounts of residential schools and disappeared Aboriginal women, is finally told and modern populations are horrified — minus, of course, a pool of white supremacists and their ilk.
Setting things right — what we're calling “reconciliation” in Canada — however, is a fraught affair. It will never be fast enough for brutalized populations and occasional radical action will erupt — such as the pointless blockades of last winter — cooling the sympathies of the general population.
In the Maritimes, the point of contention is “moderate living” — the undefined concept launched by the Supreme Court 21 years ago. It's a powerful standard for the Mi'kmaw people to hold aloft, but in legal specifics, it's gobbledygook. It's the Supreme Court saying: “We can't fix this legally, so over to you in the political/societal sphere to work it out.” In other words, on the ground — or on the water — it depends on how it's bargained out in the larger sphere.
Sack and company have taken it to mean, with regard to lobster, that they can do whatever they like whenever they like, and that if anyone pushes back they'll demand, as they absurdly did last fall, that the Canadian army show up to protect them.
Granted that they've accomplished one positive result: bringing needed attention to the matter after the federal government dawdled for 21 years. However, again on the negative side, they've also thrown a monkey wrench into the notion that being Mi'kmaq automatically makes you the heir to a 10,000 year tradition of living with nature. The RCMP have been hauling up Sipekne'katik traps without the regulatory protections — escape hatches for the little ones, biodegradable panels for the big ones, traps untended with dead lobsters in them, plus lobsters dumped dead in the woods because they don't last when caught during warm-weather moulting season.
Alas, we have an irony here. With regard to lobster, at least, the predatory white man has developed a working conservation regimen and at least one Mi'kmaw band would be happy to wreck it.
In flushing out the federal government, Sack has also forced it closer to its logical fallback position, assuming that negotiations go nowhere, which seems to be the case: declare all Mi'kmaw lobster fishing valid only during the commercial seasons, and work out the details from there in the context of a broader Mi'kmaw presence in the fishery, and in society generally.
That is, assuming Ottawa is present at all. Granted, reconciliation is a big, complicated matter nationwide. But one of my suspicions is that with Ottawa's drift on this, as with much else, the inertia derives from the notion that this is, after all, just the Maritimes and it doesn't much matter in the larger scheme of things.