The Decibel - Boiling point: the uncertain future of lobster fishing

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

The great boom of the lobster industry is, in many ways, a story of success. For more than 30 years, Canada’s most valuable seafood export has generated wealth for Canadian fishing communities and created an appetite around the world for the luxury food. But it’s also come at a tremendous cost – Indigenous fishers have been excluded, and scientists have warned warming waters and overfishing are severely affecting catches, causing high tensions and sometimes violent fights.Greg Mercer, investigative reporter for The Globe and author of Lobster Trap: The Global Fight for a Seafood on the Brink, joins the podcast to talk about how the gold-rush mentality of the multi-billion dollar industry is creating a crisis for both the shellfish and its environment.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I remember as a kid being sort of terrified of the sight of lobster. That's Globe and Mail reporter Greg Mercer, who grew up in New Brunswick. And I have these vivid memories of being very young and watching my family kind of tear into lobster, you know, opening the shells and the claws and these beady little eyes and the, you know, a long antenna in the legs, and just thought, why would anybody want to eat that? Greg's opinion eventually changed. I came to love lobster, love it as a food, and realize how much you could do with it and how delicious it was. And over the past few decades, the world fell in love with lobster, too.

When I was young, you could go to McDonald's and get a McLobster sandwich in a lot of eastern provinces. And the sandwich was, I think, about $5. You know, my grandparents' generation, it was the food that the kids with little money would bring to school. They would eat lobster sandwiches. And now it's something that if you're in Dubai or in South Korea or China, you pay top dollar for lobster. This has led to lobster becoming Canada's most valuable seafood export, yielding a fortune for fishermen in the Atlantic and revitalizing entire communities.

But the boom times may be coming to an end. Some regions have seen their lobster populations fall dramatically, the result of a warming ocean, disease, and overfishing. Greg's new book, The Lobster Trap, details the spectacular rise of the industry, the existential threat it faces, and all of the drama and sometimes violence that comes with it. And he's here today to talk about it. I'm Susan Krishinsky-Robertson, guest hosting The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hi, Greg, thanks for joining us.

Hi, Susan. Thanks for having me. So lobster is a big business on the East Coast. Can you paint us a picture of the typical lobster fishermen today? Yeah, I mean, a captain of a lobster boat can be bringing in $600,000 a year in revenue. Certainly they have a lot of costs. They often employ deckhands who can earn six figures. With no high school diploma in some cases, you can be earning over $100,000. Wow.

But they're essentially running a multi-term. million dollar business. When you think about the cost of their boats, which can run you a million and a half dollars, the cost of their licenses, which can be, in some cases, when the market is at its peak, close to a million dollars, maybe a little less now. I mean, there's a lot of money involved in getting into the industry, and they are part of a highly developed, industrialized, mass fishing operation that's really just a giant exporting machine intended to pull as many lobster as we can off the bottom of the sea and ship them around the world. So that picture some people might have of a fisherman in a small boat with like a handful of traps.

That's not what the industry looks like today. Not at all. Increasingly in Canada, lobster fishing is done on very large boats that go to sea for days at a time. They go very far offshore. And they're catching significant amounts of lobster. You know, the lobster industry today would be unrecognizable to someone who would say fishing 40 years ago in terms of the size of it in terms of the money that's involved. And also very dangerous work, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it's far more dangerous than being a frontline police officer or a firefighter.

You know, we have a lot of, you know, as a country, a lot of respect for those positions. I don't think we as a country are aware of how dangerous commercial fishing can be. Every fishing season, lives are lost. It is a part of the job, unfortunately, and I think it's part of the nature of the work that they do, the places that they have to go. You have to go to where the lobster are. And in Canada, that often means going out in late November or December, in very inhospitable conditions, it's a really tough way to earn a living. And you spend some time on those ships with the fishermen. And I understand, by the way, fishermen is the preferred term for both women and men.

Is that right? That's right. Yeah, when I would speak to women who were fishermen, they would correct me if I called them anything but a fisherman. So I think in their view, that's the term for someone who works in the industry. Got it. So you spent time on those ships. What was that like?

It depends on the weather. I had days that were lovely. I had days where it was a nightmare and I couldn't wait to get off the boat. I earned my living on land. I've certainly spent a lot of time at sea, but there was one trip that I went with a group from Dipper Harbor, New Brunswick, the day after a severe storm had kept most of the fishermen on land. And it was wild. I've never seen conditions like this in my life. And I spent half my time just being seasick.

And these guys, for them, it was just another day at the office. They were puzzled at the idea that someone who even feel seasick. You know, they've been fishing since they were little kids. So that gave me a real appreciation for the conditions that these folks work in and often how dangerous it can be to earn their living. Can you give us a sense of just how big this industry is, Greg? In terms of what it's worth to our country, it's the most valuable seafood fishery. Roughly about $14 billion worth of lobster were exported in the last five years. In the eastern provinces, you cannot overstate the value of lobster and what it's worth.

I mean, it's often said that it's as important to Eastern Canada as the auto parts industry as to Ontario or oil and gases to Alberta. And so what's driving this industry? How did lobster become so lucrative? Well, I think its growth, its evolution into a global luxury food is what's behind this. You know, 25 years ago, few people in mainland China had eaten, let alone ever seen a Canadian lobster. And that's changed now. If you go to China, they are buying huge volumes of lobster. lobster from this country. They've become the number one buyer of live lobster, in fact, far more than the U.S. So this entrance of a new market in the industry has sort of upended all the old rules around how and when lobster are sold and where they're sold. And it's raised

the floor of what people are willing to pay for lobster. So if we're grumbling about why lobster rolls now costs $30, we should look no further than to China and the volume that they're buying. You write in your book about how the peak years of the industry now may have passed and that catches are starting to drop in some lobster fishing areas. How bad is it? It depends on where you look. In the southern part of Canada's lobster fishery, there is a notable decline. But if you talk to a fisherman in Newfoundland, they've never seen so many lobster. So that is a reflection of what's happening in the sea itself, that as the ocean temperature warms, we're seeing more and more productive fishing zones in the northern part of the fishery. If you go to places like Connecticut

and Massachusetts, certainly south of Cape Cod, where it used to be the heart of North America's lobster fishery, it's all but disappear. I spoke to fishermen down there who said, it's not even worth us going out to sea. I mean, we can barely pay the cost of our fuel. There's still a fishery in main, but the declines have been dramatic there. So people are worried that that kind of change and a rapid change could happen here. And what is driving that decline? So a couple of things. The ocean is getting warmer. We know that and we know that lobster are incredibly sensitive creatures. So even a change of a half a degree in their environment affects all kinds of things in terms of the way they reproduce, the way they migrate, their resiliency, their ability to defend themselves against

shell disease and other kind of problems. So as their environment changes, lobster are under stress. And then you combine that with really intense fishing. We've never fished so hard for lobster in the history of humanity because it's never been so valuable, right? The world wants lobster. And so we are doing everything we can to fish every last lobster off the floor of the ocean. Certainly there are things that fishermen do to try to preserve the species. They throw back, you know, egg-bearing females, that kind of thing. There's restrictions on size. But everything that is fair game, we are catching as many of those as we can.

So you're talking about fishing harder and many people you've spoken to are obviously worried about the fisheries future. How are fishermen responding to this situation? Well, I mean, I was surprised how candid some fishermen were. They're saying, look, we need regulation. We need restrictions. Otherwise, we're going to do what the market incentivizes us to do, which is to catch as many lobster as possible.

There are other fishermen who seem to only be thinking about today and are not thinking about what's this fishery going to look like in 10 years or 20 years. We'll be right back. So there's a lot of money at stake here, and now there are these existential questions about the industry, as you point out. Just how tense can it get between fishermen? It can get very tense, right? I mean, for a lot of the folks who fish for a living, they see this as their livelihood,

and any threat to that is something that they're very concerned about. And, you know, there is a long history of fishermen taking matters into their own hands, of vigilanteism. And it's not, I don't think you want to paint the whole industry that way. That certainly most fishermen are peace-loving, you know, law-abiding people. But there are some folks who have gone to extreme measures when they feel like their livelihood is threatened. There was a case in Cape Breton that people might recall from 2013 when I, a guy named Philip Boudreau was actually killed when he was caught by other lobster fishermen.

He was caught stealing their traps and destroying their equipment. And they'd had enough. He had a history of doing this kind of thing. And so they shot him and dragged him out to sea and basically sunk his body in the ocean. I mean, that kind of stuff is still rare. But we do see these territorial fights, especially, you know, places in New England and in parts of Atlanta, Canada, where fishermen sort of stake out their turf. And if you go into that turf, you're crossing a line. that you should not be crossed.

And so sometimes way out on the ocean where the, you know, the police are a long way away, people take matters into their own hands. So speaking of tension and violence, there was a major story five years ago when a migma fish storage facility was ransacked by non-indigenous fishermen. What was the story there? Yeah, so that was kind of something that I've been bubbling under the surface for more than 20 years. In 1999, we had a landmark Supreme Court decision called the Marshall decision. which essentially said that indigenous folks on the East Coast had a right to what they call the moderate livelihood fishery,

essentially saying you have the right to fish as you please. The problem was it left unclear who should regulate that and when migmaugh fishermen should be allowed to fish. And so there was a First Nation of Nova Scotia that launched their own commercial fishery outside of the federally regulated season. And that upset a lot of commercial fishermen, the non-Indigenous folks, who said, said, no, if you're going to fish for lobster, you have to do it by the same rules as us. You have to fish within the seasons. And their argument was in the summer when the indigenous folks were fishing, that's when lobster are molting and it's a sensitive time for the population.

And it certainly got out of hand. We saw some violence. We saw, you know, an angry mob ransack, a warehouse and people were shooting at boats on the water. You know, the RCMP ultimately had to come in to calm things down. That sort of violence has subsided. but the tension over that question of who has the right to catch lobster in Canada still exists and has not been fully resolved.

And how do the indigenous fishermen respond to that criticism? So it depends on the First Nation, but many of the First Nations say we don't recognize Ottawa's power to regulate us, that we have this landmark Supreme Court decision that is rooted in a treaty that we signed centuries ago before Canada was even a country that said, we have the right to harvest fish and harvest lobster. And so they're doing that where the commercial fishermen take exception saying this is a modern commercial fishery that you're doing this. This is not what was envisioned when those treaties were signed.

And that's kind of the tension point. But if you talk to migmaugh fishermen today, they'll say, this is an ancestral right that we have. And we do not need Ottawa or Canada's approval to fish in our own water. So we have all of these tensions and uncertainty about the future. What options do lobster fishermen have? So, again, it depends on where you look in the fishery. In the very southern edge of the fishery, we're seeing a lot of fishermen quit. They're selling their boats.

They're getting into things like kelp farming or oyster farming. Some of them are just walking away from it outright, and that's changing the whole way those coastal communities look. There are some people saying, well, we need to resolve the indigenous fishery question, and maybe we need a quota, a quota that clearly lays out who can catch what. What is the indigenous share and what is the commercial fisheries share? That's obviously a controversial issue. A lot of people in Atlantic Canada remember what happened with the cod fishery and the quota and how that collapsed. So the issue is that we have all of these tensions happening and not a lot of agreement on how best to resolve it. But we know that now is the time to start having this conversation.

Greg, we hear a lot about fish farms in the global industry. but not a lot about lobster farming. Why isn't that an option? That's a really good question. And there have been people who have tried repeatedly through history. There's a guy named Brian Beale, a former biologist in Maine, who is trying to solve this problem. And he thinks he's solved it. But the short answer is, it takes lobster up to seven years to reach full adult size. And in the process, they're really susceptible to predators. They're sensitive to disease. And the odds of them making it to adult size are very slim, and the ocean does it very well naturally.

So it's been hard for people to kind of replicate that in a laboratory and do it in a way that is cost effective. We've yet to kind of solve that problem. But certainly there are people who have a lot of hope that lobster farming could offer a solution. We're just very early into the science on that. You also talked about quotas before. Is there anything else the government can do about the situation? The way that Ottawa controls the lobster fishery now is they limit licenses and they limit the number of traps that you can use under that license. But there are things they could do in terms of put restrictions on the size of lobster. The U.S. has increasingly raised the floor on the small end. So you cannot catch smaller lobster in the U.S. now that you can catch in Canada. And they've

also put a cap on the maximum size for lobster. Both of those things give lobster more time to reproduce and to grow and to mature and to kind of market-sized lobster. Those are simple things that we could do. There's a lot, you know, and there are a lot of folks already working on these problems, but the first step is convincing the federal government to make decisions for ecological reasons rather than economic ones when it comes to lobster. So we've got a situation here with declining catches. Some freshmen, obviously deeply in debt as they've established their businesses.

There's a worry that that speeds up the decline. you mentioned cod before, as you talked to fishermen across this industry and they look to the example of Newfoundland, how worried are they? Well, you're right. We don't have a great track record when it comes to managing fisheries, right? We just don't. And there was a time that we thought that codfish would last forever in Atlantic Canada. And we know what happened there.

So there are a lot of fishermen that I spoke to for the book who shared that with me, that they hope that their kids will have something to pick up and carry on in this fishery. They just don't know that it's going to be around or that it will be anywhere close to the size that it is now. That it may be closer to what we have in Europe, which is a very small scale, very premium fishery for lobster. But, I mean, they're catching a fraction there of what they used to catch and their word that could happen here. Greg, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks, Susan. My pleasure. That was Greg Mercer, Globe Reporter and author of The Lobster Trap.

That's it for today. I'm Susan Krishinsky Robertson. Kevin Sexton produced this episode. Our producers are Medlan White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thank you for listening.