Opération Déclubage: From private Eden to public plunder
(Excerpts of a study commissioned by the Center for Private Conservation of San Francisco.)
For the longer version, click here.
There was a time when fishing in Quebec was an experience to treasure. Quality fish stocks, calm, open spaces – a nature lover’s paradise. This era has, unfortunately, come to an end. Nowadays, fisheries management in Quebec is weighed down by frustrating waiting lists, overcrowded lakes and an overall decline in the quality of the fishing experience.
The marked drop in fish stocks, and in the quality of the remaining fish, is the result of a significant reshuffling of fishing rights in the late 1970s. Up until the mid-1970s, fishing rights in Quebec were mostly granted to private interests, either to pourvoiries – private enterprises, also called outfitters, offering fishing and lodging to a vast clientele – or to private fishing clubs. Private interests were the kings of the fishing domain, ensuring fish stocks and the quality of fish were always of a high standard. Now both have declined dramatically, forcing devoted anglers and former private club members to splurge on trips to remote areas such as Anticosti, rather than fish in Quebec.
In 1978, the newly elected Parti Québécois government revoked private leases and took away exclusive fishing rights from private clubs. The separatist government used the property rights granted to provincial legislatures by the Canadian Constitution to implement Opération Déclubage, an initiative enabling politicians to give the general public easy access to the province’s lakes and rivers. Fishing rights were taken away from rich, mostly English-speaking business professionals and industries such as pulp and paper companies, and turned over to the French-speaking population.
The PQ government led by René Lévesque – who, as a Liberal minister, had nationalized electricity in 1962 – gave Quebec lakes and rivers back to Quebecers. It was time to fulfill the promise made in the early 1960s by former Liberal premier Jean Lesage to become “Maitres chez nous” – masters in our own house.
The 1,500 private fishing clubs were to be replaced by zones d’exploitation contrôlée (ZECs, or controlled exploitation zones), a system of publicly owned and managed hunting and fishing territories created in 1978. From now on, the general public in Quebec would benefit from cheap access to the province’s best fishing lakes anytime they wanted, for a very low daily fee (from $5 in 1978 to around $25 today). The era of exclusionary fishing, and top-quality, plentiful fish stocks was over once and for all.
There are now 84 ZECs in the province of Quebec. In most ZECs, the only conservation measures are the basic fishing and hunting regulations of the provincial Department of Environment and Wildlife, such as limits on catches. These regulations are implemented by provincial guards. Approximately 200 of them are working on any given day, covering a territory of 48,000 square kilometres and 1,600 kilometres of salmon rivers. It is easy to assume that this striking degree of understaffing would open the door to intensive poaching.While it completely dismantled the exclusive fishing rights of private clubs, Quebec’s provincial government left pourvoiries – operating parallel to private clubs, under the supervision of the Department of Environment and Wildlife – untouched. It is still unclear why the Quebec government did not attempt any changes. One possible explanation is the obvious differences between the clienteles of private clubs and pourvoiries; clubs were mostly reserved for rich francophones, unsympathetic to the new independence movement, and for English-speaking business professionals, whereas pourvoiries seemed more popular with “good” French Canadians.
Government officials insist resource conservation is a primary concern in pourvoiries and ZECs, but they are unable to provide clear and reliable data on the state of the resource. Worse still, government authorities do not control whether pourvoiries actually respect their directive to ensure resource conservation. Pierre Bérubé, senior biologist with the Environment and Wildlife department, admitted that managers have no idea as to what the general situation is. There is no centralized data on fish stocks; every region is responsible for its own collection and storage of data.
The only significant study of fish stocks for this period is one conducted in 1997 by Françoise Tétreault, a biologist with Environment and Wildlife, examining the state of two particular species for the years 1985-1995. In her study, Ms. Tétreault stresses the decline in the quality of fishing and fish stocks, while emphasizing that the data is too partial and unreliable to draw definite conclusions.
A number of fishermen estimated fish stocks fell by approximately 80% in the few years following Opération Déclubage – it seems free access had indeed opened the door to overfishing and poaching. Experts such as Mr. Bérubé and Réjean Fortin, professor of biology with the Université du Québec in Montreal, were unable to dismiss this estimate.
As Aristotle said, “those things which are owned by the greatest number of people are the least well cared for.” And, it would seem, a clear system of private property rights is more likely than a public system of unaccountable bureaucrats to ensure resource conservation.
Up until the 1970s, private clubs did a good job of protecting fish stocks, owing to the large sums of money club members paid them to do so. The Bonne Veine fishing club, for example, had a lease covering 32 of the best lakes in the Quebec City area, all for the exclusive use of only eight members and their occasional guests. The club allowed only two or three fishermen at any given time on a lake, and made sure no one took too many fish. Since these members paid a significant amount of money – the current equivalent of $1,000 a year plus expenses – for the privilege of fishing in these lakes, they regulated themselves to ensure their investment was protected.
By seizing fishing rights from private interests and giving them away to the general public, the Parti Québécois government set in motion a “tragedy of the commons”: plunder, mismanagement of resources, destruction of natural habitat and a significant decline in fish stocks and in the quality of fishing.
It is a typical tale of political wrangling in which a natural resource becomes the devastated battlefield. Opération Déclubage was motivated more by politics and resentment against “les anglais” than by concern for resource conservation. Quebec nationalists sought to evict the wealthy English-speaking minority from their premises, and used the powers granted to them by the Canadian Constitution to do so. Resource conservation and the effects of policies such as Opération Déclubage on wildlife were clearly not on the government’s agenda.
[First published in the National Post]