By KiddieDaily Editors · 2026-06-29 · 3 min read · 1 source

The Personal Toll of Canada’s Broken Fishing Promises

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August 29, 2020, dawned clear over southwest Nova Scotia.

In the cabin of his lobster boat, the Mystique Lady, Matthew Cope was chatting with the other members of his crew as they chugged out from shore. The vessel was bound for the area where Cope, a member of Millbrook First Nation, had set his 150 lobster traps the day before. Cope had prepared those traps with plastic-encased copies of his status card, bearing his name, photo, and registry number.

On the back of each of card, Cope included the statement “These traps are being fished under section 4 of the 1752 peace and friendship treaty.” He was prepared for some trouble. For years, Indigenous fishermen had been operating in the area, asserting their constitutional right to fish and sell lobster for a moderate livelihood—efforts that had received pushback from non-Indigenous fishermen and the Canadian government. In the waning days of summer 2020, the situation had grown even more strained, and on the Mystique Lady, the atmosphere was tense.

On the radar screen, Cope could see a Canadian Coast Guard vessel in the same area as his traps. Drawing closer, he found Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) officers hauling the traps onto their boat. Cope tried the coast guard channel on CB radio, then hollered at the officers to call him (he’d put his phone number on the buoys).

Finally, Cope pulled close enough to the boat to talk, and gave the officer what he calls “the whole spiel”—he said DFO must be aware that they were violating his constitutional rights, that there was a duty to uphold the promises of the treaties, that what they were doing was wrong. “[The officer] said ‘Yeah well, we’re still going to take them.’” Altogether, officers took 90 of Cope’s traps; back on land, Cope called the DFO office, demanding that the traps be returned. A week later, DFO invited him for an interview.

In a cramped room, bare except for a container of cleaning wipes on the table, Cope sat down for an intermittently tense and congenial conversation, during which Cope told two officers he wasn’t hiding anything. “I don’t even know why my traps are still being held under investigation when I told you guys clearly up front exactly what I’m doing,” he said, according to a video of the interview. One officer told Cope the court would have to decide whether what Cope had been doing was legally protected.

Matt Cope with lobster traps at his home on Millbrook First Nation. Photo by Stephen Brake For decades, Canada’s most lucrative fisheries—including lobster and baby eel, or elver—have been the subject of a fraught national conversation over Indigenous rights recognition. In 1999, Canada’s Supreme Court confirmed that the Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik, and Peskotomuhkati Nations of what is now the Gaspé and Maritime regions had the right to fish for a “moderate livelihood,” based on 18th-century treaties, vindicating communities who’d been fighting for fishing rights for decades.

But the court didn’t define a “moderate livelihood”—and the government has not implemented fisheries based on Indigenous rights since then. In that void, uncertainty has proliferated on the water, in the courts, and among fishermen who thought they were protected by treaties settled centuries ago.

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