Wearing a sharp three-piece black suit and his hair neatly coiffed, Matthew Cope looks nothing like a laid-back lobster fisherman at the helm of Mystique Lady as he climbs the stairs into the courthouse in Dartmouth, N.S.
Cope would rather be out on the water, where the weight of his legal battle dissipates for a while.
But that’s what landed him in court in the first place. He takes a deep breath and reminds himself whom he’s fighting for.
“I want my children to be able to exercise their rights,” he said. “I want them to be able to work hard and fish and be able to make a living out of it.”
Cope, who is Mi’kmaw, is facing federal charges for doing what Canada’s highest court said he has every right to do: fish for a “moderate livelihood.”
But Cope’s fight extends beyond the courtroom. He and other First Nations fishers who sell their catch without government authorization face allegations from some in the commercial industry that they’re fuelling crime and threatening lobster stocks.
The fifth estate investigated the legitimacy of these allegations and found federal government research does not support the accusation that lobster is at risk due to what it considers to be “illegal” trade. The investigation included an analysis of dozens of court records and interviews with lobster industry insiders, including an illicit player, in southwestern Nova Scotia.
- Watch the full documentary, “Trapped on the Water,” from the fifth estate on YouTube or CBC-TV on Friday at 9 p.m.
Uncontested by authorities, these narratives have led to deepening divisions between the primarily Acadian coastal communities and the most prominent First Nation group in the region, both on land and water.
From the water to the courts
On a cloudless August afternoon, Cope steers his vessel toward St. Mary’s Bay, the crown jewel of Nova Scotia’s lobster fishery.
A radio chatters quietly in the background and a beaded dreamcatcher sways in the wheelhouse. It’s a stark contrast to when, five years ago, he found federal fisheries officers hauling up his lobster traps.
“I let them know that I was fishing under a treaty,” Cope said, adding that each of his buoys had his name, status card and phone number attached. “They said that they were going to take my traps anyway.”
Cope sees the fisheries charges levied against him for fishing outside the government-regulated season as unconstitutional and is prepared to take that argument to the Supreme Court of Canada, where, 26 years earlier, another Mi’kmaw man fought similar offences and won.
That case, R. vs. Marshall, led to Canada’s highest court recognizing that Mi’kmaq had treaty rights to hunt and fish for a “moderate livelihood.”
But a quarter century on, how those rights work in practice remains hotly debated. Cope’s only legal avenue to legally sell his lobster is opting into the federal government’s complex system of licences, which mandates all commercial fishing must take place during regulated seasons.
He feels those rules infringe on the rights enshrined in 1700s treaties Mi’kmaq signed with the British Crown.
When Mi’kmaq are painted as criminals for exercising their rights, Cope says it promotes a narrative to Canadians that they are the bad guys, the villains.
“We’re not poachers. We’re not pirates…. We’re just doing what our ancestors agreed with your ancestors to do,” Cope told the fifth estate co-host Steven D’Souza.
The origin of stock anxieties
The suggestion that some Mi’kmaw fishers threaten lobster stocks can be traced back to the Marshall decision in 1999. However, commercial fishers’ worries proved unfounded. In fact, the industry brought in a record-setting amount of lobster in subsequent years. But as that heyday begins to wane, anxiety over stocks has reared its head.
Scientists with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) use many metrics to measure the health of the lobster population. Currently lobster across the Maritimes are ranked in “the healthy zone.”
Despite this and the fact Mi’kmaq make up about five per cent of Nova Scotia’s population today, non-Indigenous members of the commercial lobster industry continue to repeat the suggestion that Mi’kmaq threaten lobster stocks.
Bernie Berry, a Yarmouth, N.S., lobster fisherman involved with conservation advocacy, told the fifth estate that despite the government’s science, commercial fishers are seeing localized dips where there is summer fishing activity. They think that foreshadows what’s to come.
“The stock is the main worry here and without the stock — a healthy stock or a sustainable stock — nobody has nothing,” he said.
DFO regulates fisheries and governs what, how and when people can fish.
Lobster fishing area (LFA) 34 surrounds the tip of southwestern Nova Scotia and is the region’s largest and most lucrative fishery. Both Cope and Berry fish during its commercial season, which kicked off this week and will run until the end of May.
First Nations fishers take part in that season, but some may also legally harvest lobster all year around for ceremonial purposes or food for their communities. The license prohibits that catch from being sold or traded, not even to recoup costs of bait or gas. The government enforces strict trap limits and quotas on this fishery, which is known as Food, Social, Ceremonial (FSC).
Berry, who is part of a commercial industry group pushing to relitigate the Marshall decision, said he and others have witnessed a considerable amount of lobster being caught in LFA 34 under FSC and sold anyway.
“The number of people that’s got eyes on that place … there’s not much that escapes us,” he said, referring to Saulnierville wharf where an FSC fishery takes place.
The fifth estate obtained an internal federal government memo, dated June 13, that confirms some FSC and untagged lobster are being sold illegally, but that activity is not directly threatening the species or the commercial industry.
The June memo, sent to the minister, said that although the “catch per unit,” or how many lobsters are caught per trap, has declined in some areas in recent years, that decrease “has not been directly linked to FSC activity.” The memo also noted that the lobster population across the Maritimes is “in the healthy zone.”
It’s unclear why DFO has not quelled community fears by stating this publicly.
Federal Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson declined an interview and sent statements saying that the department considers any sales of FSC lobster, and any fishing out of season, as illegal and a threat to conservation.
“Lobster stocks in the Maritimes region are currently in a healthy zone, but that does not mean illegal activity is harmless. Illegal fishing undermines responsible science-based fisheries management and the long-term sustainability of the resource,” said in a statement sent Thursday.
“The minister has been unequivocal on this point.”
However, the memo reveals how DFO has been struggling to balance recognition of First Nations treaty rights with commercial anxieties over the state of the industry.
Fewer lobsters in traps, combined with high operating costs and tariffs, have “elevated tension within the commercial fleet, especially in areas where the summer fishing is concentrated,” reads the memo obtained through the Access of Information Act.
Marine biologist Shelley Denny says her research shows the immense pressures Mi’kmaw fishers face and that rights-based harvesting is too small to risk the lobster stock.
The document reflects what leading fisheries scientist Shelley Denny believes: treaty fishing, authorized or not, isn’t threatening lobster stocks.
“The amount of lobster that’s taken [by First Nations fishers] is just a minimal, little, tiny fraction of what’s taken in the lobster fishery itself,” Denny told the fifth estate in a September interview.
“I get angry when I hear it’s illegal. It doesn’t need to be portrayed that way,” Denny said. “They’re ignoring the constitutional rights to fish.”
Based in Eskasoni L’nue’kati, Denny is director of aquatic research and stewardship at the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources, which approaches resource management by tying together people and the environment.
Would report if offered a way, Cope says
In 2023, the government reported that $1.8 billion worth of lobster was pulled from Canadian waters, with almost half of that coming from Nova Scotia. The industry employs thousands of people across the province and is the lifeblood of coastal towns.
In these communities, talk of “illegal lobster” can mean one of two things: FSC lobster legally harvested but illegally sold or lobster being caught without DFO authorization and sold.
Cope does the latter, but he said he doesn’t like having to sneak around as if what he’s doing is wrong. This year, he built a 2.4-metre fence around his home in Millbrook First Nation, where he lives with his wife and six kids, in part because fisheries officers were surveilling him.
They drove by his house and flew drones overhead, he said, taking pictures and tracking his movements.
“If there was an avenue where I could report my catch and do it completely on the books … I would do that,” said Cope.
Matthew Cope, a lobster fisher from Millbrook First Nation, says that treaties in the 1700s, affirmed by cases that went to the Supreme Court of Canada, give him the right to make a living fishing.
DFO has ramped up enforcement on and off the water, seizing six boats and more than 1,500 traps between June and October. The main detachment on St. Mary’s Bay told the fifth estate its officers arrested four times more people this summer than in 2024, but it’s unclear how many were Indigenous. DFO says it does not track information about ethnicity.
Cope and other First Nations fishers said they felt criminalized for exercising their treaty rights.
After Thompson’s office declined an interview, the fifth estate approached the minister outside Parliament in Ottawa seeking a response to this allegation. The minister stayed silent.
While the Marshall decision said governments could regulate treaty fishing, it had to be justified on “conservation or other grounds” and First Nations needed to be consulted.
Currently, four First Nations have temporary DFO authorization to harvest lobster for a moderate livelihood in LFA 34, where one-fifth of all lobster in Canada is caught each year.
The Mi’kmaq Rights Initiative co-manages that fishery with DFO, and reported that their catch last season amounted to 0.5 per cent of all commercial landings in the area.
FSC is even smaller. Six First Nations and one Mi’kmaw organization are licensed to fish in LFA 34, the government confirmed this week.
Sipekne’katik First Nation, the most populous of the group, has a licence that allows one person to harvest five traps a day, according to harvest agreements. A single commercial licence allows for 375 to 400 traps.
Commercial fishing associations and industry stakeholders have banded together to form the Unified Fisheries Conservation Alliance (UFCA). President Colin Sproul says they have collected millions of dollars with a mandate to “pursue a legal resolution to the Marshall issue.”
“I think that a lot of Indigenous governments have perverted the Marshall decision into thinking that Marshall rights mean an open-ended accumulation of fishery access for coastal First Nations,” he told the fifth estate in an interview in September.
Sproul said he doesn’t believe First Nations have the right to govern their own lobster fishery.
“We vigorously defend that the minister is the only person who has the regulatory authority.”
Bernie Berry, a lifelong commercial lobster fisher based in southwest Nova Scotia, says he believes fishing even small amounts in the summer could be risking the stock.
He said the UFCA hired a private investigator to trail First Nations fishers it suspected of illegally selling lobster in southwest Nova Scotia. Members, including Berry, also surveil wharves where FSC takes place with drones and hidden cameras.
“This is not an FSC fishery,” Berry said. “This is a black market, out of season, large scale commercial fishery.
“Most of the stuff that’s being bought in here is being bought in cash and or drugs … your average lobster buyer isn’t doing that.”
When pressed, Berry said “it’s just anecdotal stuff.”
But Cope said he vets his buyers and there’s “nothing black market” about what he does. He wouldn’t say who he sells to because it could lead to them receiving a hefty fine or having their licence suspended.
“I know that my avenues to sell my seafood are righteous avenues.”
More novice fishers with fewer connections might not have that luxury, Cope said, and have to turn to “somebody that can really nickel and dime them.”
Inside the black market lobster trade
Zacharie Thibault of Church Point, N.S., calls himself a “shady fly-by-night lobster dealer.”
The 33-year-old told the fifth estate he used to work as an unlicensed broker, buying lobster at the wharf in cash and reselling it, taking home a cut of the profits. This longstanding practice is known as “unreported cash sales,” which he claimed is a way for fishers to dodge taxes.
“There’s nothing to do with conservation. It’s total greed,” he said. “If [DFO] said everybody can go fishing in the summer, guess what, they’d all be fishing in the summer.”
Thibault said First Nations fishers are being used as a “scapegoat” by the industry.
He said the vast majority of his business dealings — 85 to 90 per cent — were with non-Indigenous commercial fishers, but he wouldn’t name names.
“They want to deal in cash and then they want to scream ‘Follow the money’ all the time,” he said. “They can follow it up their f–king ass.”
He said his family has a reputation as a “lobster mafia” operating in Clare, a rural municipality with a population of 8,500 that borders St. Mary’s Bay. He is facing several charges for lobster-industry-related crimes, including extortion, harassment and threatening to kill a fisherman.
He said he has done some regrettable things, but denies committing these latest alleged crimes. None of the charges has been tested in court.
Local RCMP allege his father, Eric Thibault, is the “ringleader” of an organized crime group that has been terrorizing residents. The elder Thibault was arrested last week on a spate of drug and lobster-related charges.
His lawyer, Allan MacDonald, declined an interview with the CBC, but provided a statement saying Thibault will be contesting these allegations in court.
The RCMP told the fifth estate they’ve laid 75 charges in the last few years linked to fisheries activity and that with the latest arrests, residents can breathe a sigh of relief.
Trapped on the water
The arrests may do little to ease the tension in the area for Mi’kmaw fishers.
“I think there is a reason for the season, but I think it should be there to protect the Mi’kmaw fishers, not the lobster,” Denny said.
Denny conducted her PhD studies on developing an alternative fisheries governance model that would honour the treaties and found “undoubtedly, federal laws and regulations are ineffective as safeguarding provisions for the Mi’kmaq lobster livelihood fishery.”
She found Mi’kmaq have been fishing in the summer and fall, outside the commercial season, to avoid conflicts with non-Indigenous fishers. She said she heard many stories of traps getting cut, racist taunts on boat radios, and violence.
“Not every non-Mi’kmaw harvester is vile or against the [treaty] fishery, but there are some out there who will very much make sure people are bothered and try as much as they can to discourage them from continuing to fish,” she said.
But the UFCA argues no commercial activity should take place in the summer when lobsters molt and breed.
The internal DFO memo cited data from the 2022 FSC harvest that indicated “there is a higher incidence of soft and dead lobster found in freshly baited traps in mid-July to September.”
“There is therefore a higher risk in handling lobster during such vulnerable periods as incidence of damage and mortality are greater and the risk is amplified when large volumes are being harvested,” the memo reads.
In the memo, DFO said the department plans to consult with First Nations about changes to FSC licences.
“DFO is facing challenges managing the FSC lobster fishery in a way that fully supports the right to harvest for FSC purposes while preventing the unauthorized sale of lobster.”
Denny said those challenges won’t be resolved until the government recognizes First Nations’ right to trade for a moderate livelihood and cedes some power to Mi’kmaq to determine what that looks like.
“Power can be shared. It doesn’t have to be given up entirely. Why not empower people to govern the fishery?”
