Jay Pennell uses a net to dip for glass eels on the Gold River near Wasoqopa’q First Nation's Gold River reserve on the South Shore of Nova Scotia on April 25.Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press
Canada is reopening one of its most contentious fisheries for its second year under strict new rules, the federal government announced Wednesday, attempting to balance Indigenous rights and commercial livelihoods against mounting concerns about the survival of a threatened species.
The 2026 elver season – a high-value spring hunt for juvenile American eels, known as elvers, along Nova Scotia and New Brunswick rivers – will open around April 1, continuing the near-equal split of quota between Indigenous and commercial harvesters introduced last year.
The total allowable catch, first announced in February, will increase by 22 per cent, from 9,960 kilograms to 12,180 kilograms, marking the first change to the quota in 20 years.
“The Government of Canada is committed to sustainable and orderly fisheries that support rural, coastal and Indigenous communities,” the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) said in Wednesday’s news release.
It was a pointed choice of words for a fishery that is so disorder-prone that DFO cut the 2023 season short and cancelled it altogether in 2024. The fishery has been plagued by violence and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, fuelled by a landed value of $2,800 per kilogram, worth more per kilogram than bluefin tuna or beluga caviar.
The department returned in 2025 with new possession and export regulations and a mandatory Elver Monitoring and Traceability app, requiring everyone fishing, possessing or exporting elvers to log their activities digitally for the first time.
Opinion: Global trade controls could stop the $4.8-billion eel smuggling crisis
The 50-50 quota split was also introduced last year. DFO said Wednesday it was undertaken “in support of First Nations’ interests to fish in pursuit of a moderate livelihood” – the constitutional entitlement Mi’kmaw harvesters were affirmed under the Supreme Court’s Marshall decision a quarter-century ago, and one that remains legally undefined. For the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, the percentage was never the central issue.
“DFO’s approach has negatively impacted the delicate balance of our natural environment and put harvesters in danger,” Chief Wilbert Marshall of Potlotek First Nation, co-lead of the Assembly’s fisheries portfolio, said in a January, 2025, release. The following day, the Assembly rejected DFO’s proposed management framework outright. “Our Treaty Right to fish is not a commercial fishery,” Mr. Marshall said.
The Assembly – the aggregate governance body for Nova Scotia’s 13 Mi’kmaw communities – had submitted its own harvester-centred model, built on Mi’kmaw governance and self-determined river allocations. DFO proceeded with its own plan.
The quota increase runs counter to the government’s own science advice. Options presented to the Scotia-Fundy Region Elver Advisory Committee ranged from no increase to 10 per cent. DFO chose more than double the upper bound.
A 2025 report from the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat flagged that the population model used to set catch limits does not account for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing – a significant omission in a fishery that has faced years of heavy poaching. The same report noted that robust conservation advice will ultimately require a range-wide assessment framework reflecting the species’ shared population structure across more than two dozen countries.
Baby eels wade into high-stakes battle over treaties and fisheries in the Maritimes
That framework does not yet exist. Last year, Canada also voted against a proposal to list eels under CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which would have imposed tighter global trade controls. And Canada declined to list American eels – of which elvers are the juvenile stage – under the Species at Risk Act.
“The stock is not increasing, there is uncertainty around the science, and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing remains an issue,” Katie Schleit, fisheries director at Oceans North, a conservation advocacy group, said in a February release. “We question whether an increase of this size can be justified or sustained.”
Peter Lambertucci, DFO’s new national chief enforcement officer – a role elevated to report directly to the deputy minister – says last year represented a turning point, nonetheless.
“I would like to say, yes, we have turned a corner. It’s a more orderly fishery. I believe that wholeheartedly,” he told The Globe and Mail.
In 2025, his officers conducted 3,839 river patrols, 1,078 inspections and 478 airport checks at facilities in Halifax, Moncton, Montreal and Toronto, seizing 225 kilograms of elvers – worth roughly $630,000 at landed value – along with 253 nets, and making more than 100 arrests under the Fisheries Act. Sixty-five charges are currently before the courts.
The fishery remains extraordinarily difficult to police. It runs at night, on riverbanks often deep in the woods, with crowds sometimes gathered within 100 metres of residential homes. The barrier to entry is almost non-existent – hip waders, a headlamp, a dip net.
“That could be a $4,000 night to you,” Mr. Lambertucci said.
The complexity deepens when a harvester presents a First Nation community fishing plan rather than a DFO licence. In those moments, an officer at 2 a.m. must attempt to reach that community’s designated data contact to verify the fisherman is operating under a communal licence. The department’s position does not bend to the circumstances.
“Unauthorized is unauthorized,” Mr. Lambertucci said. “If it is unauthorized, we enforce through the continuum.”
Sheldon Jordan, co-founder of the Canadian Environmental Crime Research Network, sees Canada’s predicament as one chapter in a repeating global story. In Asia in the 1970s, and then in Europe and Africa in the 2000s, eel populations collapsed after decades of heavy harvesting and they have never recovered.
“If the pattern is indeed repeating for a third time,” he said, “it suggests Canada has a quickly closing window of opportunity to get this right.”
For 2026, DFO is setting aside 180 kilograms of quota – roughly 1.5 per cent of the total catch – for science. Whether that investment arrives in time to inform the next round of decisions is another question.
This story is produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.