John Ivison: They came fleeing communism. Now Ottawa’s expropriating and redistributing their property

Ahn Nguyen fled Vietnam with her parents when the communists took over in 1975. They lost their home and land but considered themselves fortunate to be able to start over again in Canada.

She then met her husband, Tien, and 35 years ago the family began fishing for elvers — tiny translucent baby eels netted in Maritime rivers and shipped to Asia where they are grown for food.

“We had no experience and there were no guidelines in Canada. Licences were yours for the asking — nobody wanted them,” said Tien. “It took me 20 years to figure things out, which rivers were productive and how to keep the elvers. There was no market, the price was low but we persevered. Then about 10 years ago, the market swung up and now we are successful.”

But it turns out that in markets where your fortunes depend on the discretion of those in government, success can be fleeting.

The Nguyens have found themselves the victims of socialist central planning once again.

Ottawa has announced a “pilot project” that will take three-quarters of their quota, without compensating the Nguyens, and offer it to First Nations and to their own employees.

The Nguyens employ 25 fishers every year, but Tien says it will be “financially impossible” to hire that number next season if the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) follows through on its plans.

DFO has just informed him and seven other commercial elver licence holders that the bulk of their quota is being expropriated. This is being done not for conservation purposes but as part of an exercise in income redistribution: to “broaden the distribution of benefits,” as the DFO put it in a letter.

DFO was explicit the move would not be accompanied by financial assistance or compensation.

When Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier appeared at the fisheries and oceans committee at the end of October, she excused the plan to take quota away from existing licence holders by saying “there should be a broadening to allow for economic prosperity.”

At the committee, Rick Perkins, the Conservative MP for South Shore—St. Margarets in Nova Scotia, exploded the notion that this was a great act of benevolence.

He compared the expropriation to the owner of a Tim Hortons franchise being told she will have to give three-quarters of her business to her employees because she is making too much money.

“You come along and say: ‘Too bad that you have invested in the business. So sad. I’m going to make it more equitable in some strange socialist world’,” he said.

The authorized $47-million elver fishery has had a troubled history in recent years, plagued by illegal fishing, violence and sustainability concerns.

The government shut down the legal fishery in 2023, while doing little to stop poachers.

Ottawa promised a review and new regulations but was unable to get its act together in time for the 2024 season. At committee, Lebouthillier promised it will be reopened in 2025, “with clear rules.”

However, those rules include stripping existing licence holders of most of their quota.

Much of the unauthorized fishing was being done by Indigenous harvesters who said they did not need DFO authorization under their treaty rights, which as the Supreme Court has reaffirmed, grant them the ability to earn a moderate fishing livelihood (without defining “moderate”).

Ottawa appears to believe it has struck on a cunning solution to that problem by simply handing quota to First Nations, without increasing the total allowable catch. A thorny political battle has been avoided and everyone is happy — except, of course, the former licence holders.

Another 25 per cent of quota is being offered to elver fishers currently working for existing licence holders, although the proposed individual quotas being offered are not clear yet. The existing holders claim that their employees earn an average of $95,000 a year and are unlikely to match those salaries by going out on their own. “In many cases, elver fishers would face a significant income reduction,” said Genna Carey, the president of the Canadian Committee for Sustainable Eel Fishery, in a letter to the minister. “We believe that the (DFO) pilot project will not redistribute wealth but will have the opposite effect.”

The existing licence holders do not contest that the fishery is a public resource, but they do point out they have spent millions on infrastructure like storage facilities to build viable businesses, and contest the government’s estimate of the prices at which they have been selling their catch.

At committee, Lebouthillier said the licence holders did not pay for their licences and are receiving around $5,000 per kilo of elvers. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions,” she said.

In her letter, Carey said this number is “simply inaccurate” and that the real average over a 10-year period is closer to half that amount, after accounting for landing, transport, storage and marketing costs.

Carey called the government’s pilot project “government-led social engineering in private commercial enterprise.”

“While our members recognize the inherent risks associated with doing business involving a public resource, no reasonable business decision could have anticipated the government actively encouraging employees to abandon their position in favour of a government-favoured alternative,” she said.

The possibility is hard to fathom, but she is exactly right.

“This is exactly what the communists did in 1975 — taking private property away. It’s nonsense,” said Anh Nguyen. “We fled our country thinking we had found freedom, equity and the rule of law. But I’m starting to have my doubts.”

We are at the stage in the life of this government where it has run out of innovative ideas and is falling back on reflexive economic interventionism, a self-defeating policy that usually leaves things worse off than they were before.

As Ludwig von Mises warned in his classic study, Bureaucracy, “they promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office… Common sense is needed to prevent man from falling prey to illusory fantasies and empty catchwords”.

The minister’s idea that her new policy is going to spread prosperity up and down the East Coast is just such an illusory fantasy.

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