Fishing boats loaded with traps at Nova Scotia’s South Shore in West Dover, in November 2019.Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press
In late 2020, standing in a lobsterman’s living room in southern New Brunswick, journalist Greg Mercer found himself writing from within a maelstrom. Outside, a vicious storm – powerful enough to “blow the rabbit right out of the woods,” according to fisherman Brad Small – had grounded boats and stripped siding off buildings. But the real reason Mercer was there, as The Globe and Mail’s Atlantic Canada reporter, was to cover the violent reaction to the entry of Indigenous fishermen into the region’s multimillion-dollar lobster fishery.
In his new book, The Lobster Trap, Mercer draws on his Maritime roots and decades of reporting experience to paint a vivid portrait of a historic, lucrative industry facing the brunt of intersecting crises. He travels from the roiling shores of his home province of New Brunswick to a world touched by the tendrils of the global lobster industry; from a bustling seafood market in Quingdao, China, to Narragansett, R.I., where warming ocean waters are fuelling a shell disease that turns the crustaceans’ carapace to sponge.
At the heart of the book lies a question: How much do we value this pricey, contested species and what are we – particularly our federal government – willing to do to save it and the rural communities dependent on its harvest? The answer, as Mercer discovers, is as complex as the creature and the fishery itself.
Mercer’s earliest lobster memory is watching his grandfather eat an entire lobster, green tomalley and all, on his parents’ back deck. “He’s sucking the meat out of the tiny legs, and there’s lobster juice everywhere, and I’m fascinated and terrified,” he says. “With the claws and the hard shell, it doesn’t look like something we ought to eat. But the joy is on the inside; they make you work for it.”
That work, as he explores it, could technically include the entire commodity chain of those catching and profiting off the creature, from Toronto chefs struggling to keep lobster on the menu in the face of record-high prices to the shadowy black market of unreported catches, estimated at between 10 and 30 per cent of known landings, injecting uncertainty into how the fishery is regulated.
For Mercer, who grew up paddling kayaks with his father near Saint John, writing about the sea has always held a primal appeal. “You get this respect for just how immense and powerful and mysterious it can be,” he says. In his teen years, he witnessed firsthand how a global lobster boom helped Atlantic fishermen buy new trucks and homes, and later, as a journalist, how the entry of Indigenous fishermen into the industry tapped into a deep vein of jealousy and mistrust.
In 2020, when Mi’kmaq fishermen began catching lobster out of season without federal licences, dozens of predominantly white fishermen responded with violence, shooting flares at boats, burning cars and ransacking a warehouse, and Mercer rushed to cover the conflict.
“Naively, I was thinking, ‘There’s lots of lobster in the ocean – what are we worried about?’” he says. As he dove deeper, he combed through scientific studies and thorny legal history, including the 1999 Supreme Court of Canada Marshall decision that established the Indigenous right to a moderate livelihood fishery.
In The Lobster Trap, Mercer expertly toes a fine line, articulating why Indigenous fishermen should be “equitably” included in the fishery, but also facing head on why others are concerned about further extraction and quota reallocation.
The titular lobster “trap,” he says, is that many lobstermen are so deeply invested in licences, gear, boats and labour that their only option is to catch more and more lobster. Meanwhile, scientists warn that our warming oceans are sending clear signals that lobsters are on the move and that dwindling populations may not be able to sustain the global appetite for the delicacy.
Still, he never blames those who catch lobster to keep their families fed. “They are doing what the market teaches them to do,” he says. A system incentivizing fishermen like Brad Small to land as many big lobsters as possible, including two-pounders destined for China that would otherwise be the future of the breeding population, risks collapse.
That, he says, is where federal regulators need to step up. “We are smart enough. We know how to use science. We know how to regulate, and there’s enough people who want to see this fishery survive for generations. But now is the time to make those decisions,” he says. “Because you don’t have to look very far in the lobster fishery to see where they’ve waited too long, and where this species has disappeared.”
