As tensions rise between the United States and Canada,
there’s a new clash in the cool waters off the northeast tip of Maine, which
are rich with lobster, scallops and cod.
For more than a decade, American and
Canadian fishermen largely have had a friendly but competitive relationship in
an oval-shaped region of the Bay of Fundy known as the gray zone. But this
summer that camaraderie has been threatened, Canadian fishermen claim, as
officers with the United States Border Patrol have started to wade into the
area, pull up aside their vessels and ask about their citizenship.
“We don’t want this to be a great
international incident, but it’s kind of curious,” said Laurence Cook, the
chairman of the lobster committee at the Grand Manan Fishermen’s Association in
New Brunswick. “They say it’s routine patrolling, but it is the first routine
patrolling in 25 years.”
At least 10 Canadian
fishing boats have been stopped by American immigration authorities within the
past two weeks, Mr. Cook said, the latest escalation in a more than 300-year
disagreement between the countries in the disputed waters off Machias Seal
Island. Both countries claim the island, which is about 10 miles off Maine and
home to two full-time residents (both Canadian), puffins, rocks and not much
else, and say they have the right to patrol its boundaries.
“That wasn’t coincidence,” Mr. Cook
said.
The scope of the Border Patrol activity,
as well as what motivated it and what, if anything, it has uncovered, is not
clear. The agency has not disclosed how many stops have been made. But both
Canadian and American fishermen said they noticed increased activity in harbors
and in the Atlantic in early June.
The clash, which has caught the attention of Canadian leaders, has taken
on added significance, coming just weeks after President Trump took
parting shots at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he left the Group
of 7 summit meeting in Quebec.
Canada’s foreign affairs
department said that it had heard about two stops in late June involving Border
Patrol officers and had asked the United States government for an explanation.
“Canada continues to
investigate these incidents that occurred in Canadian waters,” said John
Babcock, a spokesman for Global Affairs Canada. “Canada’s sovereignty over the
Machias Seal Island and the surrounding waters is longstanding and has a strong
foundation in international law.”
The State Department did not
respond to a request for comment. The Border Patrol described the encounters in
the Atlantic as “regular patrol operations to enforce immigration laws.”
“The U.S. Border Patrol does
not board Canadian vessels in the gray zone without consent or probable cause,
and agents only conduct interviews as a vessel runs parallel to it,” said
Stephanie Malin, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, which
operates the border agency.
Mr. Cook said that he heard
from boat captains that the Border Patrol had searched at least two Canadian
vessels in June. No one was arrested and nothing was confiscated, he said.
“There is no illegal
immigration going on there,” he said. “It seems silly.”
While the bulk of the Border
Patrol’s operations focus on the United States’ southern border, the agency
maintains a modest presence near the northern border with Canada. One of its
smallest outposts is in Houlton, Me., the division assigned to patrolling the
state’s boundaries with Quebec and New Brunswick, conducting
checkpoints on highways and cruising the coastline.
The region is not exactly a
hotbed of activity for the Border Patrol. Of the 310,500 apprehensions the
agency conducted from fall 2016 to fall 2017, only 30 were made by officers in
the Houlton office. But those officers have been spotted on boats at a higher
rate this summer, fishermen said.
“I wouldn’t call it
unprecedented or say that the fishermen were harassed,” said John Drouin, 53, a
member of the Maine Lobster Advisory Council who lives in the coastal town of
Cutler, about 10 miles from Machias Seal Island. “They have had a strong
presence in the area for a good solid month. It
wasn’t just in the gray zone.”
EDITORS’ PICKS
Mr. Drouin said he was stopped
about two weeks ago, when a roughly 20-foot-long Border Patrol boat pulled
beside him in the Cutler Harbor. The agents did not board his boat.
“The patrol approach them just
as they do me,” Mr. Drouin, who catches tens of thousands of pounds of lobster
annually, said about his fellow fishermen from Canada. “They ask what your
citizenship is and ask for your name and stuff.”
Chris Mills, a former
lightkeeper in the Canadian Coast Guard, said he never saw a Border Patrol boat
or a United States military vessel pass by when he worked at the Machias Seal
Island Lighthouse in 1991 and 1992. He said he found the Border Patrol
operation “entirely farcical.”
“It’s just a small part of a
huge sea change in the way Canada is interacting with the U.S. and vice versa,
especially with the trade issue,” Mr. Mills said. “It will have to be handled
carefully by Canada and the States because it will just add fuel to the fire.”
To get to the gray zone,
fishermen in the United States depart from a port like Cutler, and those in
Canada take off from Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick. But once they are in
the same waters, it becomes nearly impossible to determine at a glance whether
the fishing boats are Canadian or American.
Mr. Drouin said he believed
Canadians were overreacting to the Border Patrol stops. “If we had a single
boundary line and weren’t intermingling, it would be a lot simpler,” he said.
He thinks something else is at
play: competition.
For hundreds of years,
lobstermen in the United States have sailed the chilly waters off New England
during the summer, lowering and raising traps along the ocean floor. Their
counterparts in Canada mostly stayed off in the distance, setting cages during
the winter around the coast of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
That changed in 2002.
Fishermen from Grand Manan Island got approval from the Canadian government to
fish year-round in the gray zone, setting up direct competition with Mainers.
It is the only lobster region in Canada near the shore that remains open all
year. Now, about 50 Canadians and 50 Americans fish the area together.
As Canada’s presence increased
in the area, Mr. Drouin said, so did Canadian fishing patrol boats, watching
Americans operate their lobster traps. Planes began flying overhead, taking
pictures of American boats.
“If the Canadians wants to use
the term harass, they have been harassing us for years,” Mr. Drouin said. “They
fly over the top of all the boats in the area, sometimes fairly close,
sometimes within 50 feet. It scares the crap out
of you.”
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