4. Policy paradox

4. The policy paradox of local food systems, subsistence harvest, and Indigenous rights in northern Quebec.

“Paradoxes are nothing but trouble. They violate the most elementary principle of logic: something can’t be two different things at once. Two contradictory interpretations can’t both be true” (Stone 2012)

As expressed by Stone (2012), policy paradoxes occur when general principles and evidence do not provide a single answer to a policy problem - when ambiguities coincide with differing perspectives, priorities, and values to create an enormous range of choice in interpretation and implementation - causing policy decisions to become the object of political struggles about differing values and priorities. Policy politics is the process of making these choices in interpretation and implementation.

Colonialism has compromised and transformed local food systems in many ways and for many years. The contemporary policy landscape that has emerged around local food systems reflects how aboriginal rights, title, and agreements have come to intersect with natural resource economies and with regional, provincial, and federal policy related to land, economic development, natural resources, wildlife conservation, justice, education, health, and the environment. Describing why and how all these agreements and agencies came to be, the colonial, regional and local agendas motivating them, and the power dimensions driving them is a complex and an important reflection. Furthermore, these dynamics are constantly changing over time. The same regulation or agreement may mean different things at different points in time. And, at a single point in time, the same regulation or agreement may mean different things to different people.

The history of northern Quebec is marked by some of Canada’s earliest and largest scale natural resource development projects, from the European fur trade centered on Hudson Bay, to iron ore and gold mining developments concentrated in the Labrador Trench and the Val-d’Or region, to the first hydro-electrical megaproject in the James Bay region. All of these projects have had major impacts on the people, land, and wildlife of northern Quebec and the subsistence economy that they create together. The James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA) was signed in 1975, out of court and in a hurry, in the midst of large-scale hydro-electrical development. Did the JBQNA recognize and seek to protect the contemporary subsistence economy of the Cree and Inuit living in northern Quebec? Is the JBNQA Canada's first comprehensive land claim agreement and first modern treaty? Did the JBNQA establish guaranteed levels of harvest? Did the JBNQA's creation of the Hunting Fishing Trapping Coordinating Committee (HFTCC) establish a co-management regime for wildlife in northern Quebec? The answer to all these questions is no but in some ways yes. For example, when the JBNQA was signed, it was not signed as a treaty, and when it was developed it was not envisioned as a comprehensive land claim. But, over time, Canada came to view the JBNQA as a comprehensive claim settlement by virtue of its Comprehensive Claims Policy first introduced in 1973 as did Quebec once ratified by appropriate Provincial legislation. Something that was not signed as a treaty or a land claim, over time, became one, of sorts, at least to some parties and some interpretations. The JBNQA continues to mean different things to different people, then and now. Similarly whether and how the HFTCC functions as a wildlife co-management committee, in principle and/or in practice, is unclear and ever changing. The JBNQA and the HFTCC are policy paradoxes; their meaning and their relevance are constantly being re-interpreted and redefined through the process of policy politics.

One of the most important, if not most important features of northern Quebec society to have developed since the signing of the JBNQA is a very strong and economically powerful public sector – in the fields of local government, regional government, health care and public health, policing, justice, and education. These sectors are, of course, still evolving – but they have profoundly influenced the structure of Cree and Inuit society – including the nature of Cree and Inuit land-based activities and how these intersect with regional development and wage economies. This public sector economy supports the hunting economy and its infrastructure, including but by no means limited to harvester support programs. As discussed in section 3.6.2.3. hunter support programs have received relatively little attention in the growing discourse on northern food security and climate adaptation. We speculate that this is not because they are thought to be unimportant, but because these programs are situated in a complicated and contested policy space, which conflates support for traditional harvesting activities with impact compensation, income security, and food sharing. The relationship between the local food system and harvester support programs, as these programs were originally envisioned and as they currently function, is a policy paradox. By extension, how local food systems intersect with regional development, wage economies, and the public sector is also a policy paradox.

Local food connects biodiversity, culture, environment, and health, while the current administrative and governance landscape silos these entities into separate mandates. For example, a declining wildlife population or a newly proposed natural resource development project is likely to intersect with the mandates of multiple government departments (e.g., Food, Fisheries, and Agriculture; Health and Social Services; Natural Resources and Wildlife; Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks) and multiple jurisdictions (e.g., local, regional, provincial, federal). Each department and every jurisdiction is likely to view the same situation through a very different lens. Inter-departmental and cross-jurisdictional working groups may be better able to recognize the inter-connectedness of the issues, but the need for each member to adhere to distinct and often conflictual mandates and policies may limit their ability to collectively effect change and outcome. As one among many examples, a way in which local food sharing practices are changing or may change involves the sale and purchase of harvested wildlife or prepared local food meals, including through social media. This practice is often both culturally and legally contentious. Cultural contentions relate to the reciprocities and respect embodied in traditional sharing practices and concerns that these will be lost or altered when transactions are monetized. Legal contentions arise from wildlife regulations prohibiting commercial sale of wildlife and wildlife parts (fur sales are a longstanding exception) and the sharing of wildlife harvested under subsistence rights with non-beneficiaries. Legal contentions also arise from safety regulations that apply to commercial food sales but not informal food sharing. Providing local food to hospitals and nursing homes tends to be less culturally contentious but still brings disparate policy and jurisdictions - medical facilities, wildlife law, aboriginal rights, food safety - into contact with each other, in a contestable realm, where their relevance and applicability is disputable. Whether as specific as the legality of serving local food in hospitals or as general as the reconciliation of health, wildlife, and Indigenous rights, these are disputes about what is safe and legal and wise, about who gets to have a say, about which mandate or policy comes first, and about which interpretation is more correct. Policy paradoxes and policy politics are the inevitable outcome of an administrative and governance landscape that silos biodiversity, culture, environment, and health into separate mandates and a local food system that connects them.

A fundamental limit to communicating the real extent and evolution of local food systems relates to Indigenous rights and imperatives of non-disclosure. Society and its institutions prioritize the safeguarding of personal information, but monetized economies have formalized exceptions requiring personal incomes to be reported, corporate earnings disclosed, and economic productivity tracked. Natural resource sectors like oil and gas, mining, forestry, and agriculture generate earnings and outputs that are quantifiable, similar to other economic sectors. Wildlife harvesting is a key natural resource sector across many northern regions, but is a special case in that it encompasses three forms of harvest activities differing widely in regulatory and reporting structures; i) commercial wildlife harvest, including fisheries and fur, for which the products of harvest are sold commercially and thus are quantified similar to other natural resource sectors, ii) recreational harvest associated with sport hunting and fishing, which can be monitored through license sales and may be subject to mandatory harvest reporting or voluntary harvest surveys, and iii) subsistence harvest by aboriginal rights holders, which requires no license, no mandatory reporting, and in most cases does not yield commercially sold products. As a result, subsistence harvest is not regulated, quantified, or monitored in the same way as the recreational or commercial harvest of wildlife. Among those participating in the subsistence economy, the system may be well known, quantified, communicated, and regulated, but for those operating outside the system it may resemble an informal and unregulated shadow economy. In this context, communicating the nature, extent, and importance of local food systems to outsiders can require the disclosure of what would otherwise remain private information, related to wildlife harvest (e.g., the number of animals harvested, where, and by whom) or food consumption (e.g., how much of what kind of food and drink consumed when and where). At the same time description and disclosure of subsistence harvest levels can be central to their protection. Within the JBNQA, ‘guaranteed level of harvest’ and application of the concept of ‘priority to native harvesting' is predicated on codified 'present levels of native harvesting' systematically surveyed and communicated around the time of the signing of the agreement. As time has passed, and wildlife management challenges in northern Quebec have shifted from the agreement to its implementation, credible information regarding levels of harvest by beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries is seen, by some, as an essential step towards maintaining or beginning to realize the priority to native harvesting and by others as a step towards infringement of aboriginal harvesting rights. Should 'present levels of harvesting' that were documented over a five year period, beginning in 1972 define the terms under which the JBNQA should be implemented in 2022 (50 years later when the number of beneficiaries living in northern Quebec has nearly double; from about 10,000 in 1975 to about 30,000 at present)? Yes and no. Does non-disclosure of subsistence harvest levels protect Indigenous harvest rights? Yes and no. Amidst a complex and contested policy landscape, where the interests and objectives of one group may oppose or obstruct those of another, and opportunities for cooperative alignment may be compromised by distrust and a history of conflict or abuse, the decision to disclose or safeguard privileged knowledge is bound to be complex and contested. In this case, information about the local food system itself becomes a policy paradox. Regardless of why local harvest and food use are not routinely monitored and reported and whether or not that may change in the future, the reality is, from a research, academic, and policy perspective, local food systems are poorly documented and data deficient.

In a WECLIFS associated project, Che and Hickey (2021) explored the potential for collaborative governance approaches to support Cumulative Effects Assessment (CEA) in Eeyou Istchee. Drawing on key informant interviews with policy actors from government, non-government and private sector organizations working on Impact Assessment in Eeyou Istchee, the potential for more decentralized and networked approaches to regional wildlife monitoring and baseline data collection in support of CEA was considered. Results suggest a shared willingness to collaborate towards improving the overall regional environmental conditions and to generate long-term data on wildlife population and distribution. Challenges include the absence of essential supporting programs (land-use plans, regional environmental frameworks, lead monitoring agencies, designated funding), and high levels of distrust between interacting organizations, which combine to suppress the initiation of collaborative governance processes as well as the potential utility of any regional monitoring program that might be established. There is a need for leadership to facilitate reciprocal knowledge flows among actors, build trust and enable long-term cooperative structures based on a shared vision and goal congruence. Environmental and social impact assessment is required to fully evaluate the potential social-economic and environmental impacts associated with development projects, yet effective impact assessment and post-approval monitoring continue to be extraordinarily challenging, especially in relation to protecting local food systems amid shifting baselines and multiple stressors. As Indigenous communities seek additional legislative instruments that can assist with the conservation of their land, sea, and food systems, impact assessment together with protected area creation (including the Indigenization of protected areas concepts and approaches; Mulrennan et al. 2019) are growing in importance within the contemporary northern policy landscape. Some of the same instruments of environmental protection that for years have been used by states to displace Indigenous Peoples from lands and infringe on their rights to harvest food are now being turned into instruments used by local communities to protect Indigenous harvest rights and land access from industrial development that is often state-supported.

"Something can’t be two different things at once" (Stone 2012) yet everywhere we look, in and around local food systems, subsistence harvest, and Indigenous rights in northern Quebec, we see these fundamental policy paradoxes. Things that are true and untrue at the same time. The same thing that changes in meaning and importance over time. None of these policy paradoxes offer a simple solution. Each of them contains ambiguities and problems of interpretation that make them the object of political struggles. What is true and right is being continuously constructed. In this context, general principles and evidence do not provide a single answer to a policy problem, but only a battleground for more particular fights. In a paradoxical way, these concepts unite people at the same time as they divide. People aspire to convince others that their interpretation best fulfills the spirit of the larger concept to which everyone is presumed to subscribe. There is an enormous range of choice in the interpretation and implementation. Policy politics is the process of making these choices in interpretation and implementation. Science has a role here too, especially the small branch of science referred to as political science and defined as the study of “who gets what, when, and how". In this context, the other sciences may have less to contribute, though they may offer new and different ground for these contested interpretations. Policy paradoxes present important knowledge and research opportunities, if they can be understood as collective outcomes and emergent perspective, not as isolated facts or objective realities.

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