The Trump administration is re-asserting that a small island off Maine’s coast belongs to the United States even though Canada has long claimed the barely inhabited spit of land for itself and operates a lighthouse there.
That island, Machias Seal Island, is roughly 12 miles southeast of the Down East fishing harbor of Cutler and roughly the same distance southwest of Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada.
It sits in a long-disputed 280-square-mile section of the Gulf of Maine known as the “gray zone” that has been getting renewed attention as rhetoric between the U.S. and Canada has heated up with Trump back in the White House. The gray zone has been increasingly prized by fishermen from both countries as lobster populations have grown there, and some Maine lobstermen are now pressing Trump to make progress in resolving the dispute in their favor.
While the gray zone has never risen to the level of a major international concern for either country, the Trump administration has made a few statements about it as part of its decidedly more aggressive approach to foreign relations with Canada and other countries.
Help us raise $40,000 to fund the BDN’s civic news mission this spring. Learn why we are asking and how to give.
Asked about the dispute this week, an official amplified the longstanding stance that the island belongs to the U.S.
“We have a long history of managing this dispute with Canada peacefully, but the U.S. position is clear: Machias Seal Island is U.S. territory,” a Trump administration official told the Bangor Daily News on Tuesday.
Trump himself reportedly has broached the topic, after he signed an executive order in April aimed at deregulating the fishing industry. In remarks that appear to refer to the territorial dispute, Trump said that Maine fishermen were being treated unfairly, according to the Telegraph-Journal of New Brunswick.
“So Maine’s forced to go for days out to some other area that’s not as good [for fishing]. We have to free that up, too,” the newspaper reported Trump saying. “Canada fishes there and we’re not allowed to.”
Federal Canadian officials did not respond to a request for comment this week about the territorial dispute. But Susan Holt, New Brunswick’s premier, called Trump’s comments on the matter “reprehensible,” the Telegraph-Journal added.
Machias Seal Island is a treeless 20-acre outcropping that, aside from the Canadian-staffed lighthouse, serves mainly as a bird sanctuary. Its economic importance lies in the fishing rights around the island, which are determined by its nationality — which is why fishermen are the ones primarily interested in which country it belongs to.
That interest has increased as the value of the lobster catch in far eastern Maine has soared. In 2004, the cumulative annual dockside value of lobster harvested in Washington County was less than $37 million, but by last year it had risen to $96 million.
Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham, a Winter Harbor fisherman and Republican minority leader of the Maine House, wrote a letter to the president last week urging him to take up the cause of Maine fishermen in the dispute.
“For decades, these contested waters between Maine and Nova Scotia yielded modest catches and were primarily fished by American fishermen,” Faulkingham wrote. “As lobster populations in the gray zone have surged, Canadian encroachment into these waters has intensified.”
Faulkingham said Trump’s efforts to address “longstanding economic imbalances” with Canada are overdue, and asked that the president defend Mainers’ “sovereign rights over our waters.”
John Drouin, a longtime fisherman from Cutler, said he hopes Trump can help make progress in sorting out the boundary dispute. He said the rival claims have yet to spill over into violent altercations between U.S. and Canadian fishermen — despite media references to the dispute being a lobster “war” — but that there have been plenty of angry exchanges over boat radios between the two sides.
“It’s been an ongoing issue since 2002,” Drouin said, adding that is when Canadian fishermen began fishing in large numbers in the gray zone. He said that besides lobster the dispute also involves fishing for scallops, which Canadian fishermen are allowed to do more of in the contested area, and for halibut, which American fisherman cannot do at all in the zone.
A big part of the problem for eastern Washington County fishermen is that the Canadians claim that the boundary runs roughly parallel to the Maine shoreline from Lubec to Machias Bay, which doesn’t leave much room for Maine fishermen to set gear, Drouin said.
Another is that Canadian fishermen don’t have the same conservation standards in the gray zone that Maine fishermen do. Canadians and Mainers have the same minimum sizes for lobsters they can keep, but Canadians can keep larger ones that Mainers cannot keep, Drouin said. Large reproducing females typically produce exponentially more eggs than smaller females, which helps to boost the number of lobsters in the ocean.
“Over the years, it’s escalated,” Drouin said of the territorial tensions. “There’s pressure on the resource, and we have no other place to go. Everything benefits the Canadians.”
Drouin, who sits on Maine’s local lobster governance council for far eastern Maine and is a board member with the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, said the dispute has created dangerous conditions because of gear conflicts.
The rival claims have resulted in entanglements between Canadian and American trap trawls, which pose injury risks to fishermen when they try to untangle their ropes in the heavy tidal currents that funnel back and forth between Maine and Nova Scotia.
Drouin said he hopes Trump can move efforts to address the situation beyond well-intentioned requests by Maine politicians — including Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden — for help from federal agencies. What Maine fishermen want is for the U.S. Department of State to send someone to Maine to hear their concerns, and then to take up the matter directly with their Canadian counterparts.
Even if the two sides cannot agree on a line in the gulf where the division between U.S. and Canadian waters should be, “at the least” there should be a formal agreement between the two sides to co-manage the gray zone, Drouin said.
He said he doesn’t think it will come to either government sending enforcement vessels to patrol around Machias Seal Island, but it will take more than public statements to sort it out.
“I do think they will have talks, but then what?” Drouin said, adding that executive orders won’t solve the problem. “This is going to take a lot of something else.”
