THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS.

Brought in to provide background on the current dispute over the lobster fishery between commercial and native fishermen in southwestern Nova Scotia, CBC News Network's chosen analyst put it all down to “racism and greed.” Or, sorry, I may have misquoted her. She may actually have said “greed and racism.” Well, there you go. It's so refreshing when a news story has no complexities at all.

The analyst in question was Pamela Palmater, associate professor and chair in Indigenous Government at Ryerson University. Also the author of Warrior Life, a collection of her writings, and, her website says, host of a podcast dedicated to warrior life, as well as another “Warrior kids podcast.” Warrior Life, which comes with a full line of tees, hoodies and coffee mugs, is about “educating the resistance.” Ms. Palmater came in second as a more radical alternative to eventual winner Shawn Atleo in the Assembly of First Nations election for National Chief in 2012. (She accused him, among other things, of “selling our souls to the devil.”) Her analysis that it's all down to racism and greed is therefore not altogether surprising. And, of course, helpful in a way.

But the situation on the ground — or water — is a little more complicated.

To begin with, let's do what the government has done (the one thing it has done) and condemn the violence. Roughing people up, torching their vans, burning down their storehouses and the like have no place in Canadian society. Everyone condemns it. Yes, tempers are running high. But the point of a ruleof-law society is that we all control our tempers. Angry lobstermen need to find peaceful ways to express their grievances — say, by piling lobster pots onto an important rail line or highway and blocking traffic for a few weeks.

The problem here, as many people have observed, is a simple tragedy of the commons. Simple, that is, as regards what the problem is, not so simple in terms of solving it. The most intuitive example of a tragedy of the commons (which was given that name in 1968 by ecologist Garrett Hardin) is this scenario: Two kids, each with a straw. One milkshake. Been there? I thought so. Unless they can work out some sort of non-aggression pact, the kids race to the bottom of the milkshake, thus enjoying it less than they would if, their shares somehow guaranteed, they could take their time to savour it.

Same problem with the lobster, or any other fishery, or with an oilfield or a forest: If everybody has their own straw, as it were, the incentive is to rush in and harvest the resource before the other guy gets it. Without some sort of control, the result is a tragedy. One kind of control is for a single entity to own the resource. If there's only one kid, he or she can enjoy the milkshake to its fullest. If only one company or government owns the lobster fishery or the forest or the oilfield, it will exploit the resource at whatever speed makes the most economic sense.

Given the well-known failings of monopoly, another way of dealing with the problem is to have some entity determine and then enforce property rights. Which is what happens in the lobster fishery: without a licence you can't legally trap lobster.

The problem is not racism and greed suddenly revealing themselves. The problem is there are new entrants declaring a generalized right to ignore the established and, until now, apparently well-functioning allocation of property rights. And though the Supreme Court did give such a right to the new entrants, it didn't specify the extent of the right with any exactness.

I'm a city boy and a central-Canadian to boot. I'm sorry to confess that until this week I did not know that lobsters moulted, i.e., stepped out of their shells periodically before growing new ones. Apparently, it is not good for the lobster if they are taken during moulting season. At least, that's what the commercial lobstermen say. Indigenous lobstermen seem not so convinced.

In any case, there is clearly a property-rights vacuum. Some agency needs to step in so that the lobsters aren't outnumbered and there's no war at sea.

Though Nature abhors a vacuum, the tragedy of the House of Commons is that politicians don't — just the opposite, in fact, especially if a problem is nettlesome, as this one is. Yes, political hay can be made from grandstanding, as the government has so obviously tried to do with its sanctimonious, virtue-signalling denunciation of violence. But actually reallocating property rights is no fun. With a bigger fleet, someone has to lose. And those losers are voters. Which is why the government has not rushed into this policy vacuum in the 21 years since the Supreme Court recognized the Indigenous right to make a “modest living” from the fishery.

On the other hand, money is a salve to many problems and the amount that would be required to buy out some current licence-holders is not great, not compared with what Ottawa has been spending in the past few months. Of course, the planet Jupiter is not great compared with what Ottawa has been spending in the past few months. And a well-trod road to financial ruin is to justify every expenditure by noting how small a share of the total it is.

Still, is there any other solution?

THE POINT

OF A RULE-OF-LAW

SOCIETY IS THAT WE ALL CONTROL OUR

TEMPERS.