A full-blown legal fight has broken out between Nova Scotia’s entrenched lobstermen and indigenous fishermen with close relatives in Maine.
If this internecine battle doesn’t heat up the depths of cold Canadian waters where many Gulf of Maine lobsters are allegedly migrating to as they search for a more-hospitable habitat, nothing will.
Indigenous fishermen along the coast just northeast of Maine argue an old treaty gives them every right to set and haul traps.
But Nova Scotia’s politically-established lobstering industry has gone to court to stop them, claiming they have no right to Canada’s commercial fish trade.
The tribe being sued by Nova Scotia’s old guard is known as the Mi’kmaq, an indigenous group of people native to Downeast Maine and Canada’s Atlantic provinces, primarily Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.
The Nova Scotia fishermen are countering that an historic treaty between England (Canada’s mothership, to which it is still connected by Commonwealth) and the Mi’kmaq isn’t worth the parchment it’s printed on.
But the Mi’kmaq lobstering family is contesting the claim, insisting they have as much right to the lobsters as anybody else inhabiting the region.
The indigenous fisherman nearly 30 years ago won a similar legal battle in the Supreme Court of Canada.
But apparently nothing is forever – the treaty they used as their legal defense in practice remains hotly debated.
