Natural resource regulations and the Peter Andrews case

Last Updat­ed on 2026-04-06

Many New Brunswick­ers have no doubt heard at least some of the details sur­round­ing the Court case (2014) involv­ing civ­il ser­vant Peter Andrews. Mr. Andrews, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of cor­po­rate ser­vices in the provin­cial Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture, Aqua­cul­ture and Fish­eries, is accused of inter­fer­ing with an enforce­ment action by the Depart­ment against Donat Robichaud, who just hap­pens to be the broth­er of (at the time) Deputy Pre­mier and Nat­ur­al Resources Min­is­ter Paul Robichaud.

Of course, the court case is news­wor­thy for just that rea­son – accu­sa­tions of polit­i­cal favoritism. I have no idea if Mr. Andrews is guilty or not, nor do I think much of the var­i­ous polit­i­cal actors try­ing to make hay out of this issue. Per­haps there was polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence, per­haps not — I will leave it to the court to make that deci­sion. The tes­ti­mo­ny, how­ev­er, cer­tain­ly sug­gests that there is a reluc­tance among Depart­ments to enforce the law. My con­cern there­fore lays in the details sur­round­ing the accu­sa­tions and their impli­ca­tions with respect to the enforce­ment of reg­u­la­tions.

Reg­u­la­tions are estab­lished to ensure that pri­vate indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es act with­in rules set up by the pub­lic sec­tor, in order to pro­tect the pub­lic and the inter­ests of the pub­lic. If those reg­u­la­tions are not respect­ed, and then not enforced, is the pub­lic inter­est being pro­tect­ed? Is the Depart­ment doing its job? Are reg­u­la­tions just a pub­lic rela­tions exer­cise designed to ease our minds while indi­vid­u­als do as they please? The resources in ques­tion here (fish­eries) are pub­lic resources and are sup­posed to be man­aged in a sus­tain­able man­ner, so that future gen­er­a­tions can also get eco­nom­ic val­ue from those resources. Let’s be clear here: this is not about tourism, or ‘nat­ur­al beau­ty’, it is about get­ting long-term eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits from a resource. That means min­i­miz­ing dam­age from cur­rent prac­tices and safe­guard­ing the resource for future use.

Appar­ent­ly this Depart­ment (and, I fear, sev­er­al oth­ers) is biased towards the short-term inter­ests of the few against the long-term inter­ests of the pub­lic. To quote from a CBC report “ “Tak­ing a pro­duc­er to court was a “last resort”, he (Andrews) said, cit­ing a pol­i­cy clause about work­ing with pro­duc­ers on com­pli­ance rather than pros­e­cut­ing”. In oth­er words, we may have reg­u­la­tions but we are pre­pared to over­look enforce­ment because Depart­ment pol­i­cy favors those pri­vate inter­ests over the pub­lic inter­est.

In this par­tic­u­lar case, Donat Robichaud is an oys­ter fish­er­man who was caught set­ting traps out­side of the zone des­ig­nat­ed for his busi­ness in 2004. That com­plaint was ‘resolved’ by send­ing him a let­ter, accord­ing to arti­cles in the press.  There were fur­ther com­plaints in 2008, when anoth­er let­ter was sent, and again in 2009 and 2010. Depart­ment staff final­ly decid­ed to do some­thing oth­er than send let­ters and Robichaud was even­tu­al­ly charged and plead­ed guilty in April 2012 to one charge. He was ordered to pay a $480 fine and a 20 per cent vic­tim sur­charge.  So after sev­er­al times being caught in the act this per­son was giv­en a small fine and sent on his way. Has he received suf­fi­cient dis­in­cen­tive to change his way? Seems unlike­ly. How many oth­er fish­er­man are act­ing in con­tempt of the law? What are the long-term con­se­quences for the eco­nom­ic val­ue of those nat­ur­al resources?

In my opin­ion this case expos­es the hypocrisy of suc­ces­sive provin­cial gov­ern­ments and their atti­tudes towards nat­ur­al resource devel­op­ment. Reg­u­la­tions to max­i­mize the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of renew­able resources are put in place as a sop to the pub­lic, but enforce­ment is uneven and uncer­tain. As the reg­u­la­tions them­selves are usu­al­ly com­pro­mis­es worked out among var­i­ous stake­hold­ers, the pub­lic should cer­tain­ly be con­cerned that their inter­ests are not being pro­tect­ed by pub­lic agen­cies.

We have seen in recent days a new forestry pol­i­cy announced by the cur­rent provin­cial gov­ern­ment  and, a few months pre­vi­ous­ly, a new set of ‘rules’ for the shale gas indus­try.  How much faith can cit­i­zens place in reg­u­la­tions giv­en what has been revealed in this court case? I under­stand that gov­ern­ments are des­per­ate to cre­ate jobs and it is fine to put in place devel­op­ment poli­cies to that end. How­ev­er, enforce­ment of reg­u­la­tions needs to be done in a man­ner sep­a­rate from those devel­op­ment goals. We need either sep­a­rate agen­cies for reg­u­la­tion enforce­ment, or we need a stricter sep­a­ra­tion of duties with­in Depart­ments to ensure that enforce­ment occurs in a time­ly man­ner that pro­tects the pub­lic inter­est.