{"id":344555,"date":"2025-12-14T11:30:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T11:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/344555\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T11:30:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T11:30:12","slug":"colby-cosh-the-brewing-canada-u-s-fight-over-a-disputed-puffin-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/344555\/","title":{"rendered":"Colby Cosh: The brewing Canada-U.S. fight over a disputed puffin island"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last piece of land officially contested between the United States and Canada, a rocky outcropping in the Bay of Fundy called\u00a0Machias Seal Island<\/a>, has popped up in the news this week, delighting us lovers of bizarre legal abstractions. New Brunswick Senator Jim Quinn, a retired Coast Guard sailor and a former boss of the port of Saint John, is\u00a0raging<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0ranting<\/a>\u00a0over federal government inaction in the face of a\u00a0grievous American offence against Canadian sovereignty.<\/p>\n

The disputed island is, for everyday purposes, under the control of the Canadian federal government, which\u00a0operates\u00a0it as a bird sanctuary. It might be the single best place in the Northern Hemisphere for ordinary folk to\u00a0encounter\u00a0puffins, and there is a 200-year-old lighthouse on the island that is still\u00a0manned\u00a0year-round by keepers as an assertion of Canadian sovereignty.<\/p>\n

A very hypothetical assertion, mind you. The Americans have always allowed the lighthouse and the sanctuary to exist in peace, but their traditional legal position is that this\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0settle the open question of which country the puffin hangout really belongs to.<\/p>\n

Alas,\u00a0there\u2019s\u00a0no\u00a0compelling clear answer to this<\/a>. The island remains in international-law limbo because the original British definition of Nova Scotia (which then included New Brunswick) was incompletely specified, as were the peace treaties that wrapped up the American revolution and the War of 1812. The exact line between Canada and the U.S. in the waters of the Gulf of Maine was finally settled by reference to the International Court of Justice in 1984, in a trailblazing legal exercise. But neither country wanted to press a conjecture-filled case over Mathias Seal Island specifically, so the ICJ judges were basically instructed to leave an undecided \u201cgrey zone\u201d around the rock.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0grey\u00a0zone is still there, and there are occasional flare-ups in the area between American and Canadian lobster\u00a0fishermen, who are licensed by their own national authorities to use the zone in\u00a0different ways\u00a0and on different schedules. Times have been good enough in the lobster business lately to keep things cool.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0what\u2019s Sen. Quinn getting upset about? Well, as it turns out, the federal government issues licences to two tour-boat operators that land looky-loo tourists on shore, one from each of the countries that claims Machias Seal Island. The licensed American outfit is based in Maine, and its website invites nature lovers to\u00a0come see\u00a0\u201cthe largest puffin colony on the Maine coast.\u201d Moreover, it informs visitors, accurately, that \u201cno passport or other form of identification is required to visit the island,\u201d\u00a0which has no customs apparatus.<\/p>\n

Quinn thinks there ought to be one, and he intends to raise heck in the Senate about this. The commercial description of the island as being \u201con the Maine coast\u201d infuriates him: \u201cWe\u2019ve got the president of the United States that is attacking our economy, suggesting we become the 51st state, wants to take over different parts of the world, and we\u2019re sitting by with the State of Maine doing advertising inferring that Machias Seal Island belongs to Maine.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the life of me, I cannot detect the inference the senator sees. The island is uncontroversially nearest to the coast of Maine, much as St. Pierre and Miquelon are to Newfoundland. The non-exclusive Canadian presence on the island has worked out well for birds and even\u00a0fishermen, or well enough. I understand that we are all supposed to be in an \u201celbows up\u201d mood, but having a permanent customs station on the island sounds like nothing more than a\u00a0federally\u00a0funded\u00a0jobs project for Sen. Quinn\u2019s part of the Dominion.<\/p>\n

And if we began making trouble in the \u201cgrey\u00a0zone\u201d by cutting out all American-based tourist business, the folks in Maine might like nothing better than to destabilize the situation by flooding the island with puffin-hungry thrill-seekers in MAGA hats. Of course, the floodgates have been lately opened to new Canadian defence spending, so maybe the seafaring senator has been browsing Christmas catalogues for new Coast Guard goodies.<\/p>\n

National Post<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last piece of land officially contested between the United States and Canada, a rocky outcropping in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[150376,49,48,52878,77202,5659,150371,146773,150372,44,150374,150375,150373],"class_list":["post-344555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-bay-of-fundy","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canadian-federal-government","tag-canadian-sovereignty","tag-coast-guard","tag-jim-quinn","tag-machias-seal-island","tag-mathias-seal-island","tag-news","tag-postmedia-files","tag-ralph-eldridge","tag-seal-island"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}