The Commons Project

Primary Investigator: Dr. Elizabeth Mancke, CRC in Atlantic Canada Studies

Research Assistants: Sydney Crain, Richard Yeomans,

Atlantic Canadians depend on sharing common resources: access to fisheries, water for agriculture and the timber industry, hunting for sustenance, and roads to travel through a sparsely populated landscape. Historical understandings of the regulation of the commons in North America, both terrestrial and aquatic, are limited. Working at the intersection of political history and environmental studies, The Commons Project is a multi-jurisdictional and longitudinal study of the commons in North America. As well, the project includes collaborative stages with the University of New Brunswick’s Atlantic Canada Studies Centre, organizing workshops, research trips, publishing research articles and blogs, and training for future study.

Atlantic Canada is unusually well suited for research on the commons.  First, it has a diversity of commons, some of which supported resource extractive industries (e.g., the fisheries and timber) and some of which supported the ability of people to subsist in harsh environments. For example, the 1835 Newfoundland assembly enacted legislation that made the commercial hunting or harvesting of seabirds and their eggs or hares illegal; these animals could only be hunted or gathered for subsistence needs. In subsequent acts, the Newfoundland assembly de-commercialized the hunting of most terrestrial mammals into the 1930s.  Second, profit-driven and subsistence-dependent access to the commons were not always antithetical, as the Newfoundland data show, but could be mutually reinforcing, emphasizing that in the actual regulation of the commons, policies were not necessarily polarized by binary decisions. Third, Atlantic Canada’s relatively sparse population and the challenges of travel obliged governments to fund and maintain common property infrastructure, such as roads and wharves, often to access the resources of other commons. Fourth, the multiple jurisdictions with overlapping interests in some commons create what Nobel prize political scientist, Elinor Ostrom, called polycentric systems of governance:  Indigenous, imperial, international, provincial, local, inter-provincial, and federal.

One of the goals of The Commons Project is to demonstrate that historical inquiry using Ostom’s polycentric theory is not only useful to scholars of Atlantic Canada, but also important. Creating a model using her theory for the study of the Atlantic Region will pull together aspects of scholarship on governance in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Lower Canada/Quebec. Often, colonial responses to the British imperial government, environmental change, and social disruption are understood as distinct from those of other British provinces in the region. Moreover, scholarship on the regulation of staple resources like the fishery has overwhelming focused on Newfoundland, and the tensions between the merchant-controlled government and out-port fishermen. How common-pool resources such as the fishery in the Atlantic region were regulated goes beyond any individual colony, and requires analysis of inter-provincial and international relations. From London, however, naval officers often imagined a kind of global imperial commons which raised tensions with locals (legislators, merchants, fisherman, etc.) who saw flaws in that system, and the damage that resource extraction such as overfishing could cause if regulation was left to the imperial, rather than local governing bodies.

Imaging the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as ‘zones of overlapping governance,’ this project can analyse how different political jurisdictions exercised power over the regulation of common-pool resources like the fishery: who could access it, how they could access it, and the limits of different regulatory frameworks. The Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence exhibited a British Imperial and transnational presence, traversed by American and French fishermen respectively, making comparative analysis of the two valuable. At the same time, waters within three miles of the low tide line were considered the jurisdiction of the provinces to which they belonged, whereas the British Government regulated waters outside the three-mile line. This confluence of governing bodies is an example of Polycentricity, or a system of governance in which multiple governing bodies interact to make and enforce rules within a specific policy zone or location. This kind of governing structure, to quote Elinor Ostrom, demonstrates that “complexity [was] not the same as chaos.” (Ostrom, 2009).

Common-pool resources, such as the fishery, required a layered form of state regulation at the municipal, county, provincial, and imperial level that the five Atlantic colonies (including Lower Canada) contributed to. How each of the colonies interacted with the other, and the imperial government, offers to historians and contemporary policy makers an important glimpse into the effect of measures used to promote the longevity of marine resources in Atlantic Canada. For historians, analysing the regulation of the common-pool resources, such as the fisheries or timber industry, offers up new transnational interpretations of pre-Confederation Canada that places focus on diverse historical actors and how competing jurisdictions found common ground in the regulation common-pool resources.

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Documents Relating to the Commons are being complied by the Atlantic Canada Studies Centre:

Pre-Confederation Reports on the status of the Atlantic fisheries commissioned by the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Assemblies are currently available here.

Initial findings will be made available in an upcoming short essay published on September 24, 2020 by The Otter, and part of NiCHE’s series on Canadian Coastal Histories.

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