A Small Announcement With a Long Memory: Canada Rewrites Its Fisheries Future

By: Donovan Martin Sr, Editor in Chief

Image Credit, Freddy België

There is something almost symbolic about the way the government announced the next stage of the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation’s divestiture. No grand rollout. No sweeping rhetoric. Just a brief statement from the Minister confirming that Ottawa has chosen a preferred bidder and is preparing to restructure an institution that has defined the freshwater fisheries economy for more than half a century. It was understated to the point of sounding routine, yet the shift it represents is anything but.

For years, the FFMC was treated as a permanent fixture—a Crown corporation built for a time when centralization was considered both efficient and necessary. Provinces signed on, fish was pooled and processed, and the federal government served as the national broker. But the world moved on, the markets changed, most provinces withdrew, and the old machinery kept grinding long after the conditions it was designed for had disappeared. The divestiture is not just a financial or administrative manoeuvre; it marks a clean break from a model that no longer fits the present.

What stands out most is how closely this moment mirrors themes that once circulated on the campaign trail, long before the government was ready to embrace them. Ruby Dhalla talked openly about modernizing the fisheries—freshwater and coastal—arguing that Canada needed a more flexible, more responsive, and more equitable framework that truly reflected the realities faced by harvesters across the country. She was clear that Indigenous communities deserved greater economic participation, that outdated regulations were holding industries back, and that Ottawa should stop preserving structures simply because they had always existed. At the time, those ideas were bold and forward-thinking, but now, here we are. Some campaigns, including the current Prime Minister’s, seemed more focused on preventing her from participating fully in leadership debates than on engaging with the substance of what she was saying.

And yet here we are, watching policy steps that look remarkably similar to the reforms Dhalla once championed. This doesn’t mean the government is copying her platform. Politics is rarely that simple. But it does reveal a pattern that becomes harder to ignore with every new announcement. The government is finding its footing, learning how to govern in real time, and in the process rediscovering policy ideas that first surfaced during a leadership race many preferred to forget. A good idea has a way of resurfacing when the timing is right, even if the people who first articulated it are no longer in the room.

That pattern extends beyond fisheries. Dhalla was one of the earliest voices to press for a national housing strategy with real federal teeth, one capable of bypassing provincial gridlock and forcing progress where local politics stalled it. At the time, it sounded bold, even intrusive. Now, with affordability dominating the national mood, the government is steadily inching toward something not entirely unlike the approach she described. And as more policies are unveiled, the question becomes unavoidable: how many ideas once dismissed as political long shots will reappear, repackaged, as government priorities?

None of this is unusual. Ottawa has always had a habit of absorbing proposals that originated outside the circle of power. Governments rarely acknowledge it, and they certainly never give credit to the candidates whose ideas helped shift the conversation. But the pattern remains, and the FFMC announcement is simply the latest example. A quiet policy decision made in the shadow of an even quieter realization: the country is catching up to ideas that were ahead of their time.

As the Carney government continues to find its sea legs, it will be interesting to see how many more former campaign proposals—Dhalla’s and others’—suddenly find new life. Politics is not generous with attribution, and no one should expect the government to say aloud where its inspiration came from. But anyone who watched that leadership race closely will recognize the echoes. A good idea is a good idea, after all. It doesn’t always matter who said it first. It only matters who gets the chance to implement it.