Nova Scotia Power says elver poaching forced shutdown of hydro dam for three weeks

Nova Scotia’s power utility says it was forced to shut down a small hydroelectric dam last month because of the presence of alleged poachers fishing for baby eels.

In an emailed statement Friday, utility spokesperson Jackie Foster said the generating station in Head of St. Margarets Bay, N.S., about 33 kilometres southwest of Halifax, was shut down for safety reasons for most of April.

“Due to the proximity of this activity to our generating station on the St. Margarets Bay hydro system, as well as safety concerns, we shut down generation at this site last month for about three weeks,” Foster said.

The utility did not provide specific details around safety concerns, but Foster said generation has resumed but on a smaller scale, and for a shorter period of time than normal. She said the utility has posted additional signage and added security at the dam site.

“We are monitoring the situation and will continue to take necessary steps to reduce risk and increase safety at and around our facility,” Foster said.

The federal Fisheries Department closed the lucrative fishery for baby eels — also know as elvers — on April 15 for 45 days in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for conservation reasons and because of concerns over violence related to illegal fishing. Since then, some commercial harvesters have complained that little has been done to stop poachers fishing for the small, translucent eels, which are worth more than $4,000 per kilogram.

Fished at night in tidal rivers each spring as they migrate inland from the ocean, the elvers are flown live to Asia where they are grown for food.

Stanley King, owner of Atlantic Elver Fishery Ltd., has a commercial licence to fish on the Northeast River, near the hydroelectric dam.

King said his company gave up fishing at the location after the first night this season because of the number of people, mainly First Nations fishers, who had shown up to fish without a licence.

Indigenous fishers have said they don’t need a licence because they have a treaty right to fish for elvers.

He said his company has fished the river for more than 20 years.

“We fished every night of the season in a typical year,” he said in an interview. “This year there were 50 plus (fishers) … we stayed for a few hours and then left and never went back.”

King said the frenetic elver fishing on the water has decreased, but he said he is disappointed by what he described as a lax enforcement effort by the federal Fisheries Department.

On Wednesday, the office of federal Fisheries Minister Joyce Murray defended her department’s actions. The office said that since April 15, fisheries officers have made 18 arrests and seized 6.5 kilograms of elvers along with one vehicle, 15 dip nets and 22 fish traps — known as fyke nets — in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Those statistics, King said, “are shockingly low. They can be attributed to one officer going to one river on one night for one hour and they would get the same amount of seizures.”

King figures the closure won’t be lifted this season given that fishing was halted after federal officials estimated that most of the 9,960-kilogram commercial limit had already been caught. He also sees little point in returning to the rivers on the slim chance the moratorium is lifted at the end of the month.

“It’s sort of a moot point because the (eel) run will be more or less over by then,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 5, 2023.