Controlling Common Property: Regulating Canada's East Coast Fishery

L. Richard Lund is a Ph.D. candidate in history at York University.

This book combines an analysis of common property resource theories with
an examination of federal inshore fishery regulation in five
Newfoundland communities over the last two decades. Despite some lack of
clarity in his description of federal policy, Matthews’s argument that
the “tragedy of the commons” perspective came to dominate Ottawa’s
view of the fisheries in the early 1970s is convincing. Policy-makers
assumed that because fish were common property, fishers, in the absence
of state intervention, would pursue their own individual economic
interests by maximizing each year’s catch until stocks were largely
exhausted.

In what constitutes the most effective section of a well-written book,
Matthews illustrates the flaws in this view by arguing that
Newfoundlanders did not view fish as a resource free to be plundered by
anyone. Instead, the five communities studied possessed such a sense of
collective ownership over their traditional fishing grounds that they
chose to regulate the local fishery themselves. Their regulations
included provisions to prevent overfishing, but Ottawa and St. John’s
seriously undermined these efforts in the 1970s by encouraging the use
of gillnets and large boats known as longliners.

Although the recent collapse of the cod fishery demonstrates the
failure of this and other attempts at centralized state regulation,
Matthews does not suggest that such efforts should be abandoned.
Instead, he makes a compelling argument that federal supervision of
offshore fishing must be combined with an official recognition of common
property rights and a considerable degree of local self-regulation in
the inshore fishery. Such measures would provide fishers with a more
direct long-term interest in the preservation of fish stocks, as well as
with the ability to play a meaningful role in protecting that interest
through rules that are widely respected and sensitive to the differing
characteristics of each community.

Readers interested in environmental issues or state regulation will
find this book interesting and informative. Environmentalists and their
critics would particularly benefit from reading it, because Matthews, to
his credit, does not downplay either the complexity of the problems
faced by the fishery or the difficulties involved in implementing his
prescription for its future good health.