Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

Paper Fish: The Transformation of the Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia

Caroline F. Butler

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874059.ch5

In British Columbia, the salmon fishery remains the most controversial and contested fishery despite its steadily declining profitability. Salmon management dominates both the regional Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) budget, and the public debates allocation and access. Commercial salmon fishers have seen the landed value of their catches decline during the past three decades, and have had their fishing opportunities severely curtailed, yet the battle over salmon rages on, and in fact, it has become increasingly heated in recent years. Less and less of fishers’ incomes is drawn from this fishery, but more and more of their energy is spent vying for an allocation of the resource. This conflict reflects the ongoing privatization of fishing rights in British Columbia and resulting transformation of the way in which commercial fishers understand their fisheries.

This paper explores the more subtle and gradual community impacts of fishery privatization, in particular the erosion of ideas of community and common property that accompany processes of enclosure and reinforce them. Privatization of fisheries resources changes the act of fishing, the social relations of production, and the structure of ownership, but it also changes the way people understand their livelihood, their community, and their future. During the past decade, social scientists have documented many socioeconomic changes wrought by fisheries privatization and, specifically, the impacts of individual transferable quotas (ITQs),1 such as distributional inequity and labor displacement (see Copes 1986; Helgason and Palsson 1995; McCay 1995). We must also pay attention to the sociocultural and conceptual displacements as understandings of access, rights, and property shift. One of the most critical community impacts of privatization is the transformation of how a community thinks about fish and fishing. This chapter traces the way in which the salmon fishery of British Columbia has been changed by processes of enclosure and privatization resulting in the conceptualization of salmon as an asset rather than a resource. They have increasingly come to be thought of in terms of quantified, proprietary shares, becoming “paper fish” that are owned rather than harvested.