New BrunswickThere’s still a bit of magic — and market value — in one salmon pool along New Brunswick’s fabled Miramichi River fishery.Most leases in Crown auction fetch minimum price, but last-minute flurry injects dramaJacques Poitras · CBC News · Posted: Sep 18, 2025 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 4 hours agoOne lease for a salmon pool off the Northwest Miramichi River fetched a high price in a bidding war Wednesday, while all others just received one bid each. (Shane Fowler/CBC)There’s still a bit of magic — and market value — in one salmon pool along New Brunswick’s fabled Miramichi River fishery.Wednesday’s auction of once-coveted Crown angling leases, which grant exclusive 10-year fishing rights, featured a down-to-the-wire bidding war for the most valuable pool in the watershed. The seven-kilometre Square Forks lease on the Big Sevogle River, a tributary of the Northwest Miramichi River, had an “upset price,” or minimum bid, of $12,450.But a late flurry of bids in the final minutes of the auction drove the price up to $56,500.That’s more than four times the starting bid and it’s higher than the $49,800 minimum bid for the pool in the last auction, held in 2013.The website of Jardine Auctioneers, which conducted the online auction for the province, did not identify the successful bidders for the 15 leases that sold on Wednesday.A screen grab from the online auction for exclusive fishing rights along 15 sections of New Brunswick salmon rivers. (Jacques Poitras/CBC)But historically, incumbent lessees have been willing to increase their bids to stave off competitors, especially when they’ve invested in lodges and other infrastructure near the pools.The New Brunswick government slashed the lease prices for the 14 salmon leases in Wednesday’s auction by 40 to 75 per cent, depending on the river.Earlier this month, a spokesperson said a third-party appraiser based the lower upset prices on “comparable private land transactions, Atlantic salmon returns, and catch statistics.”Some salmon anglers say the drop in prices reflects a dramatic decline in Atlantic salmon returns in the rivers, making the once-coveted angling leases less valuable.Salmon catches in New Brunswick rivers have been declining in recent years. (Nick Hawkins/Submitted by Atlantic Salmon Federation)All the leases other than Square Forks attracted a single bid each, and each of those bids was close to the “upset price” or minimum amount listed in the auction catalog. Even so, those bidders — many of them exclusive salmon clubs — are paying much less for access this time around. Upset prices on the Restigouche River were reduced by 40 per cent and those in the Miramichi system by 75 per cent. Other rivers saw reductions of 50 to 55 per cent.WATCH | August heat threatens Miramichi salmon population:A warm Miramichi River can be lethal for salmonWarm water in the Miramichi River can be a death sentence for Atlantic salmon. DFO says it tracked water temperatures of about 30 C during New Brunswick’s August heat wave.Cross Point, a pool on the Restigouche River that had the highest upset price of $87,300 per year in the last auction, was reduced to $52,380 this time and ended up selling for $52,500.The upset price on the second-most expensive lease in the Miramichi system in 2013, called the Northwest Miramichi lease, dropped from $20,800 to $5,200. The rights sold Wednesday for $5,500.One of the 15 leases auctioned was for fishing rights to trout in Dicks Lake in southern New Brunswick.That was the only one that was not deeply discounted compared to 2013, with the upset price dropping from $2,900 to $2,728. The sole bid was $3,000.ABOUT THE AUTHORJacques Poitras has been CBC’s provincial affairs reporter in New Brunswick since 2000. He grew up in Moncton and covered Parliament in Ottawa for the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. He has reported on every New Brunswick election since 1995 and won awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association, the National Newspaper Awards and Amnesty International. He is also the author of five non-fiction books about New Brunswick politics and history.
Miramichi tributary salmon lease triggers bidding war, despite decline of species
