Among many things COVID taught us about governance in Canada in the summer of 2020 was that this country suffers from a fundamental misalignment of authorities and resources for law enforcement at sea. Two examples serve to illustrate the point. In the fraught, early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, among many federal government measures intended to protect Canada and Canadians was the diktat from the Minister of Transport that “[a] passenger vessel must not navigate, moor or berth in Canadian waters.” When issued in the first week of April, this ministerial direction hardly caused a ripple given the convulsions reshaping the day-to-day lives of Canadians. As the weather warmed, however, and recreational boaters looked to the water to escape the grip of the pandemic, the unprecedented nature of the directive came into focus. While not exclusively directed at Americans, the practical impact was that it became, for the first time in history, illegal for recreational boaters from the United States to enter Canadian waters. While U.S. boaters had always been required to clear customs upon entry, there had never been an outright ban. While enforcement of such a prohibition might appear superficially straightforward to Canadians, it soon became obvious to operational authorities in the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) that there was a problem. Firstly, as a policy department, Transport Canada does not possess the capabilities to monitor or enforce such a directive at the national level; such operational roles are delegated to the coast guard in the maritime domain. While the Coast Guard might have the vessels necessary to patrol boundary waters, its personnel lack any authority to enforce the laws of Canada. Those powers currently reside with a number of agencies whose officers must be embarked in coast guard vessels for those ships to be used in enforcement actions. In the case of the COVID-19 Minister of Transport directive, that power was vested in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Certainly, the RCMP’s West Coast Marine Services Unit is equipped with a small number of high-speed catamarans but the scope of the geographic challenge meant that there were not enough ships and not enough police to establish an effective cordon at the national level. In a word, the federal agencies with the enforcement authorities didn’t have the operational resources, and the agency with the marine resources lacked the authorities. Coordination, good will, and the phenomenon that most people will comply with the law meant that the prohibition was, by and large, respected. That, however, is hardly a recipe for effective, sovereign control of Canada’s maritime domain.