Canada’s lobster industry is on a roll. But we can’t take the good times for granted

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Greg Mercer is an investigative journalist for the Globe and Mail. His book, The Lobster Trap: The Global Fight for a Seafood on the Brink, is available Aug. 12.

Back in the 1990s, the lobsters poured out of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island so quickly that commercial fishermen like Mark Sweitzer couldn’t catch them fast enough.

“I used to just envision that there was some kind of hole in the bottom of the ocean that they were spilling out of, like an anthill, or bees out of a beehive,” recalled Mr. Sweitzer. For more than five decades, he’s been fishing in the state’s waters, where the boats used to go out seven days and the traps always came back full. “It just seemed that there was so many of them.”

Then it all collapsed. Today, Rhode Island’s lobster fishery, once the most productive in America, is a shadow of its former self. Shell disease, overfishing and climate change have pushed lobster populations there to historically low levels. And each year, the decline seems to creep further north, into Massachusetts and Maine – and now, even the southern edge of Canadian waters.

That’s a problem for Canada’s multimillion-dollar lobster industry. While many Canadians may have a quaint view of our lobster fishery – fishermen in woolly sweaters hand-pulling wooden traps along lighthouse-dotted shorelines – that outdated image ignores how it has evolved into a massive and modern global exporting machine. Seemingly endless worldwide demand and historically high prices have turned this industry into the biggest in the world, with much of that growth driven by China’s insatiable appetite for the prized shellfish, but also by demand in places like Europe, where centuries of unchecked fishing have depleted their own local lobster stocks. As catches have declined in the U.S., lobster has become a phenomenal success story on the Canadian east coast, with lobster exports exceeding $14.8-billion between 2018 and 2023 – by far our most valuable seafood export. As has often been said, lobster is now as important to Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec as the auto industry is to Ontario and oil is to Alberta.

Atlantic Canada’s lobster industry stung by low prices and global economic turmoil

U.S. lobster catch drops as crustaceans migrate to colder Canadian waters

But like all natural resources, there are limits, and there are plenty of warnings on the horizon that we’re pushing things too far with our lobster populations. The problems in the fishery south of the border should be a warning about how temporary these booms can be. And if Prime Minister Mark Carney‘s government is serious about nation-building projects at a time when the U.S. is upending the global order, Ottawa would be wise to address some of the challenges facing an industry that matters so much to Canada’s Atlantic provinces.

As I found while researching my book, The Lobster Trap, there’s a gold-rush mentality on the water in Canada and the U.S. – and the race to catch as many lobsters as possible is putting pressure on stocks in ways that have never been seen before. As a journalist who grew up in the Maritimes during the Great Lobster Boom in the 1990s, I used to think of lobster as something that was cheap and plentiful – so abundant they once made a McDonald’s sandwich out of it. I was surprised how many industry insiders told me they were now worried about the fishery’s future.

“All of a sudden, the dollar bills are showing up and everybody wants a piece of it,” Richard Thompson, whose family company Coastal Enterprises has been buying and processing seafood in the Maritimes since the 1970s, told me. “All this is pressure on the lobsters. Whether or not the stocks will sustain what is happening here in the industry, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. We have to put our faith in science, and hope that we may be okay.”

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As the seas warm, the old rules of lobstering – when, where, and how they should be caught – are being dramatically rewritten by environmental shifts that no fisherman (the preferred term for both men and women in the industry) can control. But the federal government does have the power to regulate the fishery, through the Fisheries Act, to help give it the best chance at a more sustainable future. And only Ottawa has the power to finally, and equitably, bring First Nations communities more fully into the fishery in a way that gets all harvesters – both commercial and Indigenous – pulling in the same direction.

When it comes to lobster, there are many things the Carney government ought to be doing. First, Ottawa needs to fund more research into the health of Canada’s lobster populations, and how forecasted ocean warming could affect things such as their reproduction, migration patterns and resiliency to disease and heavy fishing. That kind of science, to supplement the research that’s already being done, can help inform better conservation measures to protect lobster stocks.

While the U.S. has a maximum size restriction for lobster that can be caught, protecting the species’ most productive breeders, some fishing zones in Canada have no such limit – largely because those jumbo lobsters are so popular in China. If preserving the abundance of lobster as long as possible is the goal, there’s no good reason why Canadian officials shouldn’t impose a universal limit. And all fishing zones in Canada should also follow the U.S. and raise minimum size requirements, which gives lobster more time to mature and reproduce.

Ottawa also needs to crack down on the long-running problem of off-the-books cash sales in the fishery, which make it difficult to get an accurate assessment of how many lobsters are actually being caught in a given year. Lobster fishermen operate on what’s essentially an honour system to report how much lobster they’re catching, as a condition of their licence. There’s simply too many boats, and too many wharves, for government fisheries officers to be able to monitor harvests effectively. Some estimates put the size of this black market in Canada at between 10 to 30 per cent of the total catch.

As the value of lobster has grown, so have the income-tax implications for those catching them – making some fishermen increasingly incentivized to underreport the size of their catches. Given the competition for lobster among processors, there’s no shortage of seafood buyers willing to pay in cash, too. That’s a big problem for a species that needs good data to help guide conservation measures, now more than ever.

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Exacerbating concerns over lobster conservation in Canada is some First Nations’ decision to fish outside of the federally regulated seasons, arguing they have a centuries-old treaty right to do so. The 1999 Marshall Decision by the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that legal right, but there’s disagreement over how it should work in practical terms, and that’s led to violence on the water and at the wharves. Commercial fishermen worry that if an unregulated Indigenous fishery continues to expand, it will increase the pressure on fishing stocks, inflaming an already volatile situation.

So far, the federal government’s approach to the Indigenous fishery issue has been to negotiate with each First Nation individually to finance their entry into the fishery, something Canadian historian Ken Coates argues only fosters inequality between Indigenous communities. Instead, he says First Nations in the Maritimes should be allowed to create a regionwide, federally funded organization to manage the purchase and allocation of commercial fishing licences from non-Indigenous fishermen, bringing First Nations harvesters fully within the federal system with one set of rules for all.

No federal government has been able to resolve the First Nations fishery issue in the 26 years since the Marshall Decision came down. But the Carney government should prioritize fixing this question once and for all, if it actually wants to address centuries of economic marginalization of First Nations on the east coast in a way that also satisfies the concerns of commercial fishermen.

Some fishermen, meanwhile, suggest a quota is the best way to fairly split up the Indigenous and commercial lobster fishery. Without restrictions on the catch, and clear rules around who can catch what, fishermen will do what the market encourages them to do: try to catch as much as they possibly can. Yet fishermen, who have long protected egg-bearing females by releasing them back to the sea, also know better than anyone how important conservation measures are.

“This is a competitive industry. Nobody wants to catch less than the next guy, or less than they did last year,” Brad Small, a fisherman in Dipper Harbour, N.B., told me. “I’m like a hockey player whose job it is to put the puck in the back of the net. And I’ll fight and scrap and do whatever it takes to do that. That’s why we need referees. We need regulation, to slow me down.”

Ottawa tries to control the fishery by limiting fishing licences and the number of traps fishermen can use. But there’s no limits on how many lobster they can haul up. With no quota system to control the total volume of lobster being caught every year, there are few other levers that can be pulled quickly to conserve stocks. Instead, things regulators have no control over – market prices, for instance, or a decline in demand in China because of tariffs – have a greater ability to influence conservation of the species.

Quotas are understandably controversial, and fishermen have a right to be skeptical. For decades, governments often set cod fish quotas on the east coast based on economic factors rather than ecological ones. Federal officials responsible for regulating that fishery consistently overestimated the size of cod stocks and, as a consequence, also overestimated the amount of cod fishermen could harvest at a supposedly sustainable level.

The quota system ultimately failed, and the 1992 cod moratorium crashed like a tidal wave across coastal communities, particularly in Newfoundland. Almost overnight, more than 30,000 Newfoundlanders were out of a job. Fish plants that had kept seagoing communities alive were suddenly idled. Fishermen sold their boats. Families were torn apart as young people left in search of work. The fishery’s collapse altered the region’s economic and demographic makeup in ways that are still felt today.

There was a time, not that long ago, that we thought the sea would produce an endless bounty of cod. We know now how foolish it is to think like that. With lobster, it’s important we don’t repeat the same mistake.