LogFAQs > #945970661

Antbregante posted...

It's really a complex situation that goes beyond "Grr, fisherman racist." Well I definitely don't approve of the tactics used by the fisherman they have legitimate concerns about their livelihood. They have a fishing season for a reason. That's when the lobsters are more mature and as such they are larger. So fishing off season means they need to catch more of them and they are a finite resource. So now there is two groups lobster fishing as well and eventually the area is gonna be over fished and there will be no lobsters. Then the non=native fisherman and the native fisherman will both be out of luck.

Conservation is being used as a pretense for this, but it's obviously nonsense to anyone that actually considers the facts. The natives in question had something like 250 total traps. The commercial lobster fishery has permits for a couple hundred thousand. The lobster being fished by the natives is not enough to make an appreciable dent in available lobster stock, nor even in the bottom line of the commercial fisheries. Also, if conservation was actually a concern, they lost any right to make that argument when they destroyed several thousand pounds of already-fished lobster.

Furthermore, even if the Mi'kmaq fishery were significantly impacting the commercial one, that is their legal right, and it's the commercial fishery that is legally obligated to suffer that loss however they need to in order to uphold their end of the treaty. That won't happen, because the treaty specifies a "moderate livelihood" (i.e. you can make a living doing it, but you won't get rich any time soon) and that precludes the off-season native fishery from growing into a serious competitor, but it's still what the government is legally required to enforce in exchange for using the land.

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