Baby eels worth $112K seized at Halifax airport
CBC
Authorities seized a shipment of baby eels, or elvers, at Halifax Stanfield International Airport last week as part of an ongoing investigation into the lucrative but increasingly troubled fishery.
Federal fishery officers intercepted 25 kilograms of elvers worth about $112,000 on April 5, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) said in a statement to CBC News. The seizure followed an inspection.
DFO did not say if the elvers were released live back into the ocean.
"As this matter is under investigation, no further comment will be provided at this time," spokesperson Lauren Sankey said.
Baby eels are the most valuable fish species by weight in Canada and were worth over $5,000 per kilogram in 2022.
They are flown live to Asia where they are raised to adulthood for food.
The tiny, translucent juvenile American eels, also known as glass eels, are harvested each spring from rivers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. There is also a fishery in Maine. The Maritime fishery is worth about $40 million a year.
This is not the first seizure at the Halifax airport. DFO seized 18 kilograms of elvers worth $90,000 at the Halifax airport in May 2022.
News of the recent airport seizure is the latest development in a fishery that has been marred in recent years by riverside threats and conflict among authorized harvesters and those who are not.
On Wednesday Conservative MPs Rick Perkins and Clifford Small issued a release demanding DFO stop what they call the "unprecedented levels of poaching" underway this season.
Citing reports from fishing communities, the MPs said there are unlicensed commercial harvesters operating in western and southern Nova Scotia from not only Nova Scotia but also Maine, Quebec and New Brunswick.
Perkins represents the riding of South Shore-St. Margarets in Nova Scotia, and Small, from Newfoundland and Labrador, is the party's fishery critic.
"Illegal harvesting is happening on rivers that are both designated and not designated as licensed elver fishery rivers by DFO. Illegally overfishing of elvers will reduce the sustainability of both baby eels and adult eels," Perkins and Small said in their statement.
"To date, there is no presence of DFO Conservation and Protection (C&P) enforcement on any of the rivers in this area. The lack of enforcement is encouraging poaching of this fishery…There is no excuse for the lack of DFO C&P presence, given that this region of Nova Scotia has five times as many C&P personnel per square kilometre as the remainder of the Atlantic region."
A Saskatoon judge has now heard about the hours just before and after Taya Sinclair's death.
Two people were taken to hospital after a fire tore through a unit in an apartment building just west of downtown Edmonton Wednesday evening.
B.C. Premier David Eby, who is on a trade mission to India, says that finding new trade partners is critical to ensure British Columbians' standard of living doesn't deteriorate amid the U.S. trade war.
A program aimed at preventing homelessness on Prince Edward Island that was halted last year due to funding issues is back up and running again with support from the provincial and federal governments.
Large crowds of people lined up around the block outside a pair of packed community halls in central Alberta on Wednesday night, to attend town halls focused on the idea of the province seeking independence from Canada.
The sight of a cyclist in January in the Yukon can prompt confusion from some onlookers — but historians say bicycles were being used to get around the territory in winter long before cars.
On Prime Minister Mark Carney's first day of talks in Beijing, the government agreed to co-operate with China more on clean and conventional energy after years of difficult relations between the two countries.
The city says it is one step away from returning the Bearspaw feeder main to full service, with a final water pump scheduled to be turned on Friday morning — if the pipe continues to remain stable.
When David St-Pierre saw the snow outside his window in Brossard, Que., south of Montreal, he decided to chance the metropolitan region's shiny light-rail transit system once more.
A Calgary lawyer who falsified court documents and repeatedly lied to a client, causing the man to miss out on parenting time with his youngest child, pleaded guilty to forgery on Thursday.
The Crown has stayed an assault charge against Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. president Jeremy Tunraluk.
Alberta’s minister of hospitals says a province-wide strategy has begun to ease the strain on the acute care system as frontline doctors continue to declare that provincial hospitals are dangerously overcrowded.
As snow squalls continue to blanket southwestern Ontario, school boards in the London region announced the closure of all schools Thursday morning, and police are reporting closures and collisions across the area roads.