Bryan Woolston/Reuters

People line up outside a Kentucky Career Center seeking assistance with their unemployment claim in Frankfort, Kentucky, June 18, 2020.

When Joe Biden steps into the White House on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, it won’t be just the furnishings that look familiar. The economy is wobbling after a severe downturn, much as it was in 2009, when President Barack Obama took office with Mr. Biden as vice president. 

Yet for President-elect Biden, today’s political landscape is vastly different. It has grown tougher on issues such as trade and China policy. Since the Great Recession, economic thinking has evolved toward greater flexibility when it comes to government deficits. 

And while the economic challenge does not look as dire as it did in 2008, it’s clear Mr. Biden will have less political maneuvering room than either Mr. Obama or President Donald Trump, who both took office with solid majorities in both houses of Congress. The U.S. Senate will operate with a ultra-thin power balance, whichever party wins two January runoffs in Georgia.

This political reality puts a sharp constraint on hopes within the Democratic base for sweeping economic reforms – or fears among Republicans that Mr. Biden will lead a sharp turn toward “socialism.”

“No matter what happens in Georgia, he has a virtually split Senate and a razor’s edge in the House, so anything that gets done will require bipartisan legislation,” says Robert Bixby, director of The Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group focused on federal debt. “Biden is probably a good president to deal with this situation.”

It won’t be easy. The emergency stimulus passed in the spring has helped the economy avoid a deeper and more prolonged recession, but determining how much more stimulus is still needed depends on how one views the recovery. By some income measures, it had mostly rebounded by this fall. Measured by unemployment, there’s still a long way to go – and the recovery is slowing. In November, the economy added only about 245,000 new jobs, the smallest total in five months of steadily declining employment gains. The U.S. still has 9.8 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic hit in March.

Inauguration paired with big U.S. risks

If Congress fails to act, specific stimulus programs that provided some 12 million Americans unemployment benefits and up to 87 million workers access to paid leave for pandemic-related health issues will expire this month. 

Then there’s the pandemic itself, which induced the slowdown in the first place. Until it’s brought under control, the prospects of a full economic recovery are nil.  

“There’s a great deal of uncertainty,” says Lee Branstetter, professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But “at the moment, the federal government can borrow at an inflation-adjusted rate of zero, even less.” So, he adds, “the balance of risks seems to clearly be in the direction of doing too little now,” while taking ambitious action carries relatively low costs. 

Leah Millis/Reuters

President-elect Joe Biden responds to a question as he speaks about the economy and the final U.S. jobs report of 2020 at his transition headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, Dec. 4, 2020.

Some kind of stimulus is likely to pass this year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over a $908 billion plan put together by a bipartisan group of senators. 

Even should that fail, Congress must pass a massive spending bill this month to avoid a government shutdown, says Bill Hoagland, longtime Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and now senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. Thus, while it might not be called a stimulus, the new spending bill would include some kind of extension on federal unemployment insurance, employment insurance, and some short term assistance to small businesses, he predicts. 

Whatever Democrats get during the lame-duck session, they will see it as a down payment for a more ambitious stimulus early next year, Mr. Hoagland adds.

“Congress and President Trump must get a deal done for the American people,” President-elect Biden said Friday. “But any package passed in the lame-duck session is not enough. ... Congress will need to act again in January.”

Biden priorities

Mr. Biden is proposing not only to get the economy back on track but, as he puts it, to “build back better.” He wants to spend $7.3 trillion in new funds over 10 years to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, and other infrastructure; boost research and development in manufacturing; address climate change by encouraging sustainable energy; eliminate loopholes in “buy American” rules for government contracts; and help the working class through a variety of programs from making community college free to universal preschool, affordable child care, and aid for renting and buying homes.

“We are once again living through one of the worst job crises since the Great Depression,” said Cecilia Rouse, the nominee for chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), last week when Mr. Biden introduced his economic team in Wilmington, Delaware. “Structural inequities that have always existed in the economy are being exacerbated like never before. This is a moment of urgency and opportunity unlike any we’ve faced in modern times.”

Ms. Rouse, an economist and currently a dean at Princeton University, would be the first Black person to head the CEA if the Senate confirms her.

Mr. Biden’s picks for his economic team reflect a focus not only on diversity but also on less-advantaged Americans. “The people he’s putting in place shows this is going to be a workers focused administration,” said Tom Conway, president of United Steelworkers labor union, in a recent online event sponsored by the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

Those picks include Janet Yellen for Treasury secretary. Ms. Yellen is widely respected for her former stints as head of the Federal Reserve and as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. His choice of Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey for his CEA team pleases liberals. His pick of Brian Deese for top economic adviser pleases Wall Street. Mr. Deese is global head of sustainable investing at asset manager BlackRock.

Is debt a worry or not?

The president-elect’s grand plans may be helped by an evolution in economic thinking. Where a dozen years ago, in the teeth of the Great Recession, stimulus plans were constrained by broad concerns that deficits would get too high, many economists appear less concerned today, even though the federal debt has soared since then. One reason is that the high inflation that was supposed to rage after rising government borrowing a decade ago never happened. Interest rates declined, instead, for reasons economists admit they don’t fully understand. 

“A period of extraordinarily low interest that can be locked in for 10 to 30 years provides an unprecedented opportunity to address profound and longstanding investment deficits,” Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, said at a recent online event at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. “Failing to take advantage of that opportunity is putting our children at risk and is putting our long term fiscal position at risk by weakening our potential for inclusive growth.” 

But in the long run, the federal debt numbers are scary, many economists say. In 2009, just as the Obama administration got underway, federal debt totaled less than half of one year’s economic output. Now, at about 100% of gross domestic product, the debt load has effectively doubled. That’s one reason many Republicans are urging restraint on the stimulus in the short term and are skeptical of Mr. Biden’s plans for the long term. 

“The big plans aren’t going to happen, but I do think that there might be some areas of cooperation,” says Mr. Bixby of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition. 

One of the biggest areas of common ground is infrastructure investment. Senators and representatives on both sides of the aisle want to fix roads and bridges. By taking an expanded view of infrastructure, the Biden administration might convince Congress to bolster the public health system, improve broadband access for underserved areas, and diversify the electrical grid with added solar and wind power, say analysts on both sides of the aisle.

Other economic priorities, such as raising taxes on corporations and individuals making more than $400,000 a year, look far less likely to get through Congress. 

“It will be difficult to pass many of the programs that the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party would like,” Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said at Brookings’ online event. “But I would expect that by the time we are talking about the 2024 election, we’ll look back and see one or two significant legislative accomplishments.”

As coronavirus cases swept through the rural communities of the upper Midwest this fall, more people here began to wear masks and stay home, say residents of Shawano County, one of the hardest hit counties in Wisconsin.

Richard Kucksdorf was not one of them. An Iraq War veteran and head of the Shawano County Republican Party, Mr. Kucksdorf goes out often, attends meetings, shops. He almost never wears a mask if he can help it.

“I put one on when I go in a store and don’t want to hassle anyone,” he says. “But they don’t do any good.” 

He’s not alone. At Wayne’s Place Bar and Grill in Bonduel, a crossroads hamlet in the eastern part of the county, owner Wayne Ort works behind the bar on a recent afternoon, filling small plastic containers with salad dressing, his snow-white walrus mustache drooping majestically and uncovered. No one else in the bar is wearing a mask, either. Most customers don’t, he says. 

“Some of them wear them coming in, and I don’t have a problem with that,” he says. “I kind of think it’s up to each individual.”

Resistance to mask-wearing and other measures has frustrated public health officials here, in a state that was at the leading edge of a second U.S. surge of coronavirus cases. It also shows the wider challenges facing the country and a new occupant of the Oval Office.

President-elect Joe Biden has urged state mask mandates and last week called for a 100-day period of mask-wearing vigilance nationwide. Wisconsin already has such a mandate, imposed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on July 30 and now under challenge by Republicans in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In the court of public opinion, many have rejected it.

The reasons include the reflexive partisanship of today’s politics, but also something deeper: a rural culture that prizes individuality and small government. That’s difficult to change, even in the face of a pandemic. 

“There is a general sense of distrust of government, [along with] the importance of individual responsibility and liberty, and these really are times when that philosophy is challenged,” says Patrick Remington, a public health expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That’s not to say most residents here or elsewhere are in outright rebellion against guidance from public health officials. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans, including in Wisconsin, are wearing masks when they’re out in public – and that the share has been rising since the summer.

Some 59% Americans say they are “always” wearing a mask when outside the home, according to an Economist/YouGov poll completed in early November, while another 22% said they do so “most of the time.” That left 13% saying “some of the time” and 6% “never.”

COVID-19 came late to Shawano County. After a spring and summer of relatively few cases, infections began to surge in mid-September. They spread rapidly in October and November, straining the local health care system.

Conservatism and compliance

According to health data, 1 in 10 residents has been infected. In a county of just over 40,000 residents, 52 have died. By now, it seems, almost everyone knows someone who has been diagnosed – including Mr. Kucksdorf, whose wife came down with a mild case of COVID-19 in early November.

“I never got it,” he says. “When you look at all the numbers, it’s not as contagious, I believe, as we were led to believe.”

Richard Mertens

Dale Hodkiewicz, president of the Shawano Area Agricultural Society, at his home workshop. The group went ahead with the Shawano County Fair this past September, to the dismay of many in Shawano. Mr. Hodkiewicz says he doesn't trust health officials.

Mr. Kucksdorf’s views are not uncommon here. They reflect in part the area’s conservative and mostly Republican politics. A recent Monmouth University poll found that only a third of Republicans said they were “very concerned” that a family member would become seriously ill, compared to more than two-thirds of Democrats.

Shawano County lies in the rolling hills of north central Wisconsin, a land once inhabited by Menominee Indians and settled by German and Polish immigrants whose descendants still farm here. For years it was the home of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who worked as a lawyer and circuit court judge here before becoming, after the Second World War, Congress’s most notorious red-baiter in an anti-communist era. 

The county went heavily for Donald Trump this year – he received more than twice as many votes as Joe Biden. Trump 2020 flags still flap in the wind here, paying homage to the outgoing president but also suggesting the ongoing influence of his rhetorical efforts to minimize the dangers of the pandemic.

In the early months, a statewide order shut down nonessential businesses for two months as the coronavirus spread in the state’s biggest cities. Despite few local cases, businesses in Shawano closed. The Shawano County Historical Society canceled its annual Rhubarb Fest. And yet in June the Shawano Area Agricultural Society decided to go ahead with the Shawano County Fair in early September, even though most fairs in the state had been canceled. It was a controversial move, even in Shawano, and attendance was down. 

“When we did it there were only something like 20 cases in the county,” says Dale Hodkiewicz, a retired cheesemaker and president of the agricultural group, about the decision. “So we were confident we could do it.”

For his part, Mr. Hodkiewicz doesn’t wear a mask and has little confidence in the pronouncements of public health officials.

“What did Fauci say?” he says, referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “‘Don’t wear masks. They won’t help.’ Now he swings around and says something different. I don’t trust him.”

“They’re taking it more seriously” 

The biggest stores in Shawano have complied with the state mask order. At Walmart, a thin, older man hands out masks at the door on a recent day, though most people come prepared. Smaller businesses are less predictable. At a store that sells ball bearings, the owner and a worker stand maskless behind the counter. At an antique store, some workers wear masks; others don’t. A small sign on the counter reads, “Please wear a mask if it makes you more comfortable.”

At The Cobbler’s Closet, a shoe store on Main Street, there’s no equivocation. It’s one of the locally owned businesses that has long insisted on masks.

“I’m happy to say more people are wearing masks,” says Nancy Dumke, the owner. “They’re taking it more seriously. It used to be a battle to get them to wear them.”

There are still battles. Two weeks ago a maskless customer entered and declared, “You can’t make me wear a mask.” He stormed out just as another customer was just about to call the police. Others have told Ms. Dumke that they shop at The Cobbler’s Closet precisely because of its insistence on masks. 

Rhonda Strebel, executive director of the Rural Health Initiative in Shawano, says the spread of COVID-19 in the county has tempered some of opposition to public health measures. “When it affects their family and loved ones, then there’s a change in heart,” she says. But “people who are still healthy, and it hasn’t affected them, the mindset is still the same – especially for our farmers.”

One of the more prominent residents to be infected is John Hoeffs, a member of the Shawano City Council. 

For a long time, many people didn’t worry much about the coronavirus, says Mr. Hoeffs, who spent five days being treated at a hospital. “I think they thought Shawano County was like the Siegfried Line, the war line in France, that nothing could penetrate it.” Now, he says, “I’d say a lot of Republicans are wearing masks.” 

In fact, the cultural attitudes at work in this region are varied and complex. Jasmine Neosh is a member of the Menominee tribe, whose reservation, just north of Shawano County, has also been hard hit by the virus. Ms. Neosh, who lives in Shawano, says people in the county are not taking the virus seriously enough and blames them for spreading the virus. On the reservation, she says, “Whatever we have to do to protect our elders, that’s what we do. There’s no question.”

In Shawano, she says, “It’s everyone for themselves.” 

Efforts toward unity

Local health officials have worked hard to untether the pandemic from politics. They have appealed to community solidarity. They have asked doctors and community leaders to write public letters, imploring residents to wear masks, wash their hands, and avoid large gatherings. To skeptics, “we say ‘follow the science,’” says Julie Chikowski, who heads the Thedacare Medical Center in Shawano.

If many are still reluctant to go down that trail, it could not only hurt ongoing efforts to curb the pandemic but also bode ill for any vaccination program, says Dr. Remington. “I fear that what we’re going to see is we’re not going to get the rate of adoption we need,” he says.

And yet, even now, public health officials find cause for hope. The number of cases has fallen in both the state and Shawano County. The percentage of positive COVID-19 tests has gone down, too.

“We’re not sitting in judgment of people,” says Ms. Chikowski. “We just want to save lives. No one here is preaching. We’re just asking human beings to band together to stop this.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

The day began bright and clear in St. Mary’s Bay, a narrow finger of water running alongside the southwestern coast of Nova Scotia.

For Fallon Peter-Paul, Sept. 17 was to be a festive occasion affirming her Indigenous rights. Along with other members of the Sipekne’katik First Nation, she’d gathered on the wharf in Saulnierville to celebrate the inauguration of the community’s first lobster fishery aimed at helping members earn a modest living. It was intentionally launched outside the official government-set season for lobstering – and exactly 21 years to the day after Canada’s Supreme Court reaffirmed the right of the Mi’kmaq to do so.

After years of failed negotiations to put these rights into practice, the Mi’kmaq knew they would be provoking a reaction from non-Indigenous lobstermen and women whose families had worked these waters since the 1600s. But they didn’t expect what ensued.

The mood quickly became menacing the very first day. Ms. Peter-Paul, a photographer, documented community members standing on the armor stone breakwater that circled the wharf like a comma, looking out into the bay, where several dozen boats from non-Indigenous fishing communities were waiting. Once out on the water, Indigenous lobstermen and women reported acts of intimidation by the other fishers, who cut traps and fired flares at Mi’kmaw boats.

“It was a really powerful moment,” says Ms. Peter-Paul. “And it was also really sad ... that all of those people were there because they didn’t believe we should be doing what we were doing, practicing our treaty rights.”

Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press/AP

Michael Sack, right, chief of the Sipekne’katik First Nation, presents the first lobster license and trap tags at a fisheries launch.

Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press/AP

Non-Indigenous boats protest the launch of the fishery, which operates outside the regular lobster season.

In the days that followed, local fishers harassed and assaulted the Indigenous lobsterers. They briefly barricaded one in a storage facility, which days later was burned to the ground. They seized crates of lobsters harvested by the Indigenous community; hundreds of lobsters were subsequently found dumped on the ground. 

Top Canadian officials quickly condemned the violence. The attacks spawned headlines around the world in what became known as Canada’s “lobster wars.” 

Now, with the commercial season in Nova Scotia’s most lucrative lobster fishing area, LFA 34, just opening, the two sides have never been more divided. Sipekne’katik First Nation announced Nov. 13 it would file a series of lawsuits against non-Indigenous fishers for alleged damages.

Commercial fishers and many in the tightknit communities where lobstering is the backbone of the economy say it’s unfair that the Mi’kmaq are fishing outside the regular season, citing a decline in the population of the species as their prime concern. Indigenous fishers and their allies counter that this is yet another example of racism and an inability of Canadians and their government to enforce their legal rights.

It’s a battle about jobs and livelihoods, ethnic identities and cultures, and deeply embedded family and social traditions. Yet it’s also a clash about something else: the future of what was once one of the most fecund fisheries in the world. 

Both sides recognize they have a shared interest in keeping the industry thriving in a place that has been traumatized by declining fish stocks. This is especially true at a time when the pandemic has temporarily cut off customers for the area’s succulent crustaceans. Even more worrisome, climate change is threatening to undermine local stocks permanently. 

All these forces are swirling in the cobalt waters off Nova Scotia, where everyone also knows one other painful fact: Lobster is the only real option left to harvest viably from these waters. 

The pride of Nova Scotia

Both sides have deep ties to the sea. The Mi’kmaq have hunted and fished for thousands of years across Atlantic Canada. They maintained their right to do so after colonization, as enshrined in the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1752 and 1760-61. But the treaties have never been systematically upheld. Then, in 1993, a man named Donald Marshall Jr. decided to go fishing. 

Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press/AP

First Nation lobster boats gear up in Saulnierville, Nova Scotia.

He tried to illegally catch eels as an assertion of his Indigenous rights. Authorities charged him with three counts of violating federal fishery laws. The Marshall case went all the way to Canada’s Supreme Court, which ruled in 1999 that the Mi’kmaw and Maliseet people had the right to a “moderate livelihood” fishery – one defined ambiguously as providing “necessities” but not for the “accumulation of wealth” – outside the federally regulated fishing season.

The English and French, for their part, settled in the Maritimes centuries ago for the stocks of cod, salmon, halibut, and lobster that thrived in the chilly Atlantic waters. But in the 1990s, groundfish stocks in the area – including, most infamously, northern cod – collapsed. Other fisheries, such as scallop grounds, shrank and their harvesting passed into corporate hands. That has left lobster as the only community-based inshore fishery in the region.

Today lobster is king in Nova Scotia, its top export commodity. The industry itself, romanticized from the outside, is one of the reasons this conflict has made headlines around the world. Trevor Corson, the author of “The Secret Life of Lobsters,” notes how lobsters capture the imagination and symbolize a “kind of rugged individualism.” 

“The lobster is a classic monster, almost alien, seemingly built for pure survival in the dark depths, and if it were any bigger it would terrify us,” he says. 

The violent clashes have hurt the pride of Nova Scotia, the heart of Canada’s billion-dollar lobster industry. Indeed, Susan Beaton, a commercial lobsterwoman, notes how much lobstering is bound up in the image of the province. But the latest skirmishes are “turning that on its head,” she says.

Growing up, her father harvested lobster, as well as other species. As a teenager, Ms. Beaton helped him catch groundfish with gillnets on Nova Scotia’s North Shore, and she would arrive back at the wharf covered in fish entrails. Ms. Beaton bought her own lobster license in the 1990s, shortly after the Marshall decision.

In her experience, Indigenous and non-Indigenous fishers have worked peacefully alongside one another in the commercial season, which runs May to June in her area, for the past two decades.

John Morris/Reuters

Lobsters sit in a crate aboard an Indigenous fishing boat on the Meteghan River in Nova Scotia.

But she says the recent launch of moderate livelihood fisheries outside the commercial season has non-Indigenous lobsterers, many of whom have watched the collapse of other species due to poor management, worrying about the impact on conservation – a claim many scientists question.

“I think some of the urgency we feel about it is that it’s been fairly well managed. We’ve sort of hit a sweet spot now with lobster,” she says. “And we’ve been pretty stable. So yeah, we’re pretty guarded about it. We know that ... it doesn’t take much to destabilize these things.”

She condemns the violence. And she worries it has hardened both sides’ positions – rolling back gains made in a relationship that has been productive. When a local pulp mill wanted to pump effluent directly into the Northumberland Strait, threatening local fishing grounds, commercial fishers and local Indigenous groups worked together last year to oppose the plan. Now, because of the tensions and violence, she worries such cooperation will vanish.

Weighing historic injustices

Canada is grappling with the encroachment of white settlers on Indigenous territory in ways the United States hasn’t. But even here, correcting injustices is something that is easier to do in principle than in practice. 

“The community level is actually the front lines of racism,” says Robert Huish, associate professor of international development studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “That’s where people’s lives are most deeply impacted and changed by the structures of race and racial inequality.”

It’s also where court decisions and political rhetoric are most intimately felt, whether in terms of both personal safety or material gain and loss. After the Marshall decision, the government spent millions of dollars buying licenses to transfer to Indigenous fishers, as well as on vessels and training, to bring First Nations into the commercial market.

That brought in significant jobs and income. According to a report issued last year by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a think tank in Ottawa, Ontario, total fishing revenues for the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet on their lands in all Maritime provinces grew from $3 million in 1999 to $152 million in 2016.

In early November, a coalition of Mi’kmaw nations announced the purchase of a 50% stake in Halifax-based Clearwater, North America’s largest shellfish producer. The deal involves offshore fishing, not the inshore lobstering that has been in dispute.  

Many in the local community feel that Indigenous fishers have already received sufficient support. They resent special privileges granted to Indigenous groups. They don’t understand the rights that First Nations possess outside the federal Fisheries and Oceans Canada management system – notably, the right to fish when they want, just as their ancestors did prior to colonization.

John Morris/Reuters

Indigenous lobsterman Jason Lamrock tosses an undersized lobster overboard.

Susanna Fuller, a marine conservationist at Oceans North in Halifax, says she can see the non-Indigenous perspective. “Particularly in lobstering, which has got this strange informal tenure system where usually a fisherman will fish in the same area year after year. ... There is a lot of ‘this is where Danny fishes, and that’s where Steven fishes,’” she says. “So imagine you’re a non-Indigenous fisher, and you’re sitting in your house and your boat is hauled up, and you’re not fishing right now because it’s outside the agreed season for non-Indigenous fishery. And you see somebody out there fishing where you usually fish.

“But that feeling of wanting to protect their territory should in some way give non-Indigenous people a sense of what the Mi’kmaq and First Nations are feeling and have felt for 300 years,” she says.

Mi’kmaw fisher Marilynn-Leigh Francis is one who felt aggrieved, and in 2016, decided she’d had enough. Ms. Francis, who is from Acadia First Nation, started taking her small boat out in St. Mary’s Bay in the summer to drop roughly a dozen traps for lobster. She harvested enough for herself and to give away to members of the community, with some for sale.

She did so without a license. Instead, she saw her fishing as part of her inherent right to resources, including lobster. She marked her buoys with “1752” to reflect the date of peace and friendship treaties signed between Europeans and the Mi’kmaq.

“I was tired of being a federal ward of the government. I was tired of being a prisoner within my own homeland,” she says. “I talked to my mom. I talked to our elders. And I was told to fish like our ancestors did. So that’s what I did.”

Federal authorities seized her traps, members of her own community criticized her, and non-Indigenous fishers at the wharf intimidated her. They vandalized her property and circulated her photo on social media. It all wore her down. 

Then, at a gathering in 2018, a young girl approached Ms. Francis. “She kind of tapped me, pulled my ribbon dress. And she said, ‘You that lobster fisherwoman?’” When Ms. Francis confirmed it, the girl said, “When I grow up, I want to be like you. I want to fish like you.”

Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press/AP/File

A commercial fishing boat leaves port in West Dover, Nova Scotia, on Nov. 26, 2019, the first day of the annual lobster season on Nova Scotia’s South Shore.

“Everything switched,” Ms. Francis says. “And I realized if I quit, who would these children look up to? Who would these sisters look up to? I’ve inspired a handful of women to buy boats and to go fishing. And that, to me, means more than anything.”

A rising tide of support

The clash over crustaceans has turned into a larger protest for Indigenous rights in Canada. Dwight Newman, a law professor at the University of Saskatchewan who studies the issue, says the launching of the moderate livelihood fishery in Nova Scotia fits in with a larger pattern across Canada.

The year started with the Wet’suwet’en demonstrations against the building of a natural gas pipeline through their traditional territory in British Columbia. In the face of heavy-handedness by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – who have been criticized in Nova Scotia for reacting passively as First Nations have been attacked during the lobster dispute – the protests spread through Canadian society, leading to shutdowns of streets and rail blockades.

“First Nations in Nova Scotia see this as a time when they can assert a fuller recognition of their rights than they might have received at some other time,” he says.

It coincides with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s stated commitment to reconciliation with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. Demonstrations against systematic racism also broke out in Canadian cities after the killing of African American George Floyd by a white American police officer.

All this reflects a dramatic shift in support for Indigenous causes. When Indigenous members first tested their legal rights after the Marshall decision 21 years ago and violence erupted, locals say they can’t recall receiving any backing from non-Indigenous groups. Now they have allies across the country.

In the wake of the fishing dispute in Saulnierville, the owners of Dear Friend, a bar three hours away in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, decided to take the most popular item off the menu – the lobster roll – in support of the Indigenous cause.

John Morris/Reuters

Canadian federal police officers investigate the remains of a lobster pound that was destroyed by a fire, in Middle West Pubnico, Nova Scotia. Local fishers reacted angrily to the launch by Indigenous lobsterers of a self-regulated fishery in September.

It was a way “to magnify the situation, but to also raise funds for front-liners, who were working at the Meteghan Wharf to promote peace on the Indigenous side,” says Matt Boyle, co-owner of the establishment.

Dear Friend has been joined by several other restaurants in Halifax, Toronto, and Montreal.

Professor Newman says the lobster wars may not inspire a larger movement the way the Wet’suwet’en protest did. That was clearly seen as a “David and Goliath” fight – an Indigenous nation against Big Oil. Here their opponents are fishing families who are vulnerable in their own ways. This includes the impact from the pandemic, which has cut lobster exports to China; climate change; and, some say, the pressure of corporate interests on Canada’s only remaining community-based inshore fishery. And the environmental message is murky.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court noted that the government does have the right to restrict a moderate livelihood fishery in the name of conservation. Commercial fishers point out that the fishery was started at the time of year when lobsters are molting.

But many scientists doubt any of this will adversely affect lobster populations. They note that the Sipekne’katik First Nation issued just 11 licenses, which encompasses about 500 traps, a tiny fraction of the commercial industry. And they point out that the U.S. doesn’t restrict lobstering during molting.

Yet questions endure about future populations. With more Mi’kmaw communities launching their own moderate livelihood fisheries, some worry it could eventually lead to a decline in lobster stocks.

One lobsterman who works in LFA 33, which adjoins LFA 34, says he and his fellow fishers aren’t greedy as the media have depicted them. (He asked that his name not be used, out of concern that he and his family could be targeted online.) Instead, with two lobster licenses, a snow crab license, and a boat, he says he’s more than $1 million (Canadian; U.S.$764,000) in debt. While lobster stocks in his fishing area are healthy, he’s worried what out-of-season fishing could mean for the long-term sustainability of the industry.

Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press/AP

A fisherman sets off fireworks as boats head from West Dover, Nova Scotia on Nov. 28, 2017, the first day of the season in Canada’s largest lobster fishery.

“Since being a young fisherman, young captain, the most important thing to me, to be honest, is not the money. The most important thing to me is ... I want to be able to hand this down to my children. And if I can’t do that, that’s where the uncertainty affects us the most.”

Shared stewardship?

But that’s why some see the room for common ground. Dr. Fuller points to a recent labor market study that shows a 40% shortage of workers over the next 10 years in Atlantic Canada’s fisheries – a gap that First Nations could help fill.

Both groups also face the same threat from climate change, which is warming waters and could eventually force lobster populations farther north and offshore. And they are uniquely positioned to share learnings and best practices as a path forward.

Once a week, commercial fisherman Darren Porter backs his boat down a ramp and into the muddy waters of the Halfway River, which flows into the Bay of Fundy.

On the boat, he joins master’s students from a nearby university and employees from the Mi’kmaw Conservation Group. “We’re tagging fish, doing surgeries [for tags], tracking fish, stuff like that,” says Mr. Porter.

The team is conducting work on punamu, or Atlantic tomcod, a fish that is culturally important to the Mi’kmaq. But the way this project is structured is as significant as the species they’re studying.

The project, called Apoqnmatulti’k, is a three-year study combining Western scientific techniques with Mi’kmaw ecological principles and local knowledge. The focus is on three species – tomcod, American eel, and American lobster – in the Bay of Fundy and, in the north of the province, the saltwater Bras D’Or Lake. The project blends Indigenous and Western ways to see the world from both perspectives.

Matthew Bailey/VWPICS/AP/File

Lobster traps line the harbor in Saulnierville,Nova Scotia. The collapse of groundfish stocks and corporate takeovers have left lobster as the only community-based inshore fishery in the region.

“We’re building a different way of doing research that is guided by community knowledge, values, and their priorities,” says Skyler Jeddore, who is from Eskasoni First Nation and is community liaison and field technician for the Apoqnmatulti’k project in the Bras D’Or Lake.

Many believe the research project could be a template for shared stewardship of lobster populations. 

“We work together, we collect any information, we share the information, and we at the end all understand what’s going on together,” says Mr. Porter. “That’s the path forward. ... First, we have to learn how to talk to each other.”

In a dispute where much of the tension has hinged on the conservation of a species that will affect the future of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike, that template offers a potential way forward, Mr. Porter says. “We all have to look past our own needs and wants. We’ve got to start doing something for somebody else, instead of just doing stuff for ourselves.”

When ‘Tokunboh Ishmael walked through the streets of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, there were women doing business everywhere she turned. They tended to stalls frying donuts and grilling skewers of meat. They sat behind sewing machines turning out custom-made designs and wove between cars in Nigeria’s infamous traffic jams, hawking air freshener and inflatable pool toys to bored commuters.

But inside the crisp, air-conditioned offices where she worked in banking, and later private equity, the story was different. Although Africa has the highest rates of female entrepreneurship in the world, there is a funding gap of about $42 billion between men and women entrepreneurs on the continent, according to the African Development Bank. In 2018, for instance, African startups received some $725 million in venture capital funding. Of this, just 2% went to businesses owned by women.

Ms. Ishmael is part of a growing group of women investors in Africa trying to rewrite that story by deliberately investing in businesses owned by and serving women. In 2016, she co-founded Alitheia IDF within Alitheia Capital, the private equity firm where she is managing director, to focus on exactly that. So far, the fund has raised about $70 million.

There’s a moral imperative to that work, investors like Ms. Ishmael say, because it brings women into spaces of power, wealth, and decision-making from which they’ve historically been excluded.

But it also just makes good business sense.

Courtesy of Tokunboh Ishmael

'Tokunboh Ishmael co-founded the Alitheia Identity Fund within Alitheia Capital. The fund has raised $70 million and has backed a number of African businesses that are led by and targeted toward women.

“We are operating in an area where money was being left on the table and we saw an opportunity,” Ms. Ishmael says. She knew the stats: businesses owned by women grow faster, use money more efficiently, and generate more profit than those owned by men. Diversity, more generally, makes companies more creative and innovative. “I want Nigeria to reach its full potential and I want Africa to reach its full potential and they’re not going to do that if they don’t fully embrace the potential of women.”

Worldwide gap

The problem reaches beyond Africa. In the United States, all-female teams receive about 2% of venture capital funds. In the United Kingdom, the figure hovers around 1%. And the problem is compounded for women of color. In the U.S., Black female founders received just $6 of every $1 million.

The problem, experts say, is that women have been cut off from participation at every level when it comes to venture capital, private equity, and even more traditional forms of lending and investment like bank loans.

“Funding is not a gender-neutral space,” says Sharron McPherson, a longtime investor in African business and lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s business school. “Women investors and women with companies to be invested in are working in spaces that were never made for them. They are swimming upstream, while men float along with the current.”

There are many hurdles to women’s participation, she says. On the smallest scale, only 37% of African women have a bank account, compared to 48% of men, and that gap is widening, even as access to finance grows. Women are often discouraged from borrowing money, both by lenders and by their own lack of financial education.

On the scale of startups looking for venture capital funds and established companies seeking private equity dollars, women still struggle to be taken seriously for their ideas because of conscious and unconscious gender biases. One 2014 study from Harvard, for instance, showed that a pitch presentation to investors given in a woman’s voice was less likely to be funded than one given in a man’s voice – even when the content was identical.

Another study from 2017 found that women founders were far more likely to be asked “preventative” questions about their businesses – that is, questions focused on their potential losses. Men, on the other hand, were asked more “promotion” questions focusing on the “upsides and potential gains” of their businesses, a line of questioning that resulted in six times as much funding on average.

Many investors also come out of male-dominated fields like technology, mining, and agriculture, and are more inclined to invest in them than businesses built around products or services targeted at women, like maternal health, menstruation products, or makeup. And much of the networking that leads to those deals still happens in informal settings that women either can’t attend or aren’t invited to – like golf games and after-work drinks.

“There are invisible barriers to entry for women that men don’t see or face,” says Nthabiseng Moleko, deputy chairperson of the Commission for Gender Equality in South Africa, and a development economist.

Funding change

That’s where funds like Ms. Ishmael’s Alitheia IDF come in – to direct money deliberately toward companies built around women.

“This is about finding companies with diversity at the top, but also at the bottom,” she says. For example, in recent years, Alitheia Capital, Alitheia IDF’s management firm, has backed a number of African businesses that are both led by and targeted toward women. In Ghana, Alitheia funded Innovative Microfinance, a company providing small loans to rural Ghanaians without bank accounts, most of them women who own small businesses like market stalls.

And in Nigeria, Alitheia backed a woman-owned tomato paste company called Tomato Jos. About 30% of the company’s tomato producers are now women, says founder Mira Mehta, and the company is trying to increase that figure – in part because they’ve found women are a better bet.

“We see our women farmers making bigger investments in their communities” with their profits than the men, she says, such as using their money to pay for children’s schooling and medical care. And when it comes to farming, Ms. Mehta says the women her company works with continually have the best yields.

“Time and time again,” she says, “they just outperform the men.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated the full name of Alitheia IDF, and its relationship to Alitheia Capital.

Reuters

U.S. Senators' Lisa Murkowski (R), Jeane Shaheen (D), and Mitt Romney (R) listen as Bill Cassidy (R) speaks about a framework for coronavirus relief legislation Dec. 1.

US President-elect Joe Biden, who has promised to “bind the wounds of division” among Americans, must be pleased with a change of tone in Congress a month after the election. Top leaders in both parties are not only talking to each other about a new coronavirus relief package, but also nearing a compromise that would give close to $1 trillion to individuals, businesses, and states.

Perhaps by ending their long divide over a second aid package, lawmakers will help the next president achieve even greater feats of bipartisan consensus.

Mr. Biden also says he “doesn’t see red states and blue states.” That befits his 36 years in the Senate cutting deals with rivals he warmly embraced as family. “I love you,” he told Republican Sen. Jesse Helms in 1999 after the two passed a measure to restore funding for the State Department. Genuine affection between opponents, built on honesty and respect, is a proven lubricant for successful legislation.

As a lawmaker, Mr. Biden had a knack for focusing on realities that neither side on Capitol Hill could ignore. COVID-19, like the Cold War during his time in Congress, has helped force Congress to overcome some “wounds of division.” The proposed relief package won’t satisfy everybody, Mr. Biden says, “but the option is, if you insist on everything, we’re likely to get nothing on both sides.”

Some call that pragmatism. Mr. Biden suggests such bipartisanship is national healing. While the former vice president won the election decisively, he recognizes many voters split their tickets, giving victories to Republicans in state races and gains in the House. Both parties also saw voters giving a thumbs-down to many extreme candidates.

“Americans are inherently optimistic,” concludes Time magazine’s wrap-up of the year 2020. “It’s why our allies like us, even if they secretly mock us behind our backs – but we don’t care!” Mr. Biden’s own optimism will probably lead him to focus on many bipartisan opportunities, such as infrastructure. His tenure in the Oval Office could be remembered like that of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, all of whom passed major bills with the opposing party.

Being “a president for all Americans,” as Mr. Biden promises, might already be off to a good start in the lame-duck Congress.