Robin Tress: Clearwater Lobster is fishing on unceded, unsurrendered, stolen lands and waters of the Mi’kmaq Nation. Over the last forty years, governments have favoured corporate fishing operations like Clearwater over small scale owner-operators and Mi’kmaq fishers.
“The enemy of a healthy fishery is not the Mi’kmaq, but corporate profiteers like Mayer-Murphy and Risley who are bent on depleting this resource and resisting Mi’kmaq treaty rights. The Mi’kmaq fishery deserves our full support, while the corporate fishery should be shut down,” writes Chris Frazer.
As CBC’s Paul Withers reported yesterday Clearwater Seafood left thousands of lobster traps in the water for longer than the 72 hours allowed by law.
We’re not talking an extra day here because of bad weather. Sometimes baited and unbaited traps would be left on the ocean floor for as long as 98 days at a time, and this environmentally unsound practice has been going on at least since 2014. Breaking the law this way saved the company huge amounts of money. We talked with Shannon Arnold of the Ecology Action Centre to find out more, and what she told us is pretty alarming.