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Loyola Hearn’s moment of truth
SILVER DONALD CAMERON
HAS LOYOLA HEARN, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, been captured by his own bureaucrats? Or is he still his own man?
Watch what he decides about deep-sea trawling — trawling in the deep ocean, beyond the territorial waters of any nation. In November, the General Assembly will vote on whether to declare a world-wide moratorium on such trawling. The matter is of no practical consequence to Canada. No Canadian vessels trawl in those waters. Yet the vanished Liberal government opposed any moratorium.
" Canada’s position," said former Fisheries and Oceans Minister Geoff Regan, "is that no specific gear type is inherently destructive depending on how they are used."
His English was barbarous, and his policy was worse. There is no question that bottom trawling demolishes fish stocks and habitat. A trawl, remember, is a huge bag of netting that is dragged across the ocean floor by a fishing vessel. Its mouth is held open by two "doors," and the lower lip of the mouth rumbles across the sea floor on a string of rollers or wheels, scouring the bottom and capturing everything in its path — fish, corals, sponges, old tires, human skulls. (I am not being melodramatic; a neighbour of mine did once catch a skull in a trawl.)
Supporters of dragging could once argue — like Geoff Regan — that there was no solid scientific evidence that trawling damaged the ecological community on the ocean floor. No more. Last May, a science advisory report submitted to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans acknowledged that trawling and dredging are destructive fishing techniques.
And in 2004, the UN General Assembly called for a review of fishing practices on the high seas — which are "the common heritage of mankind", to use the ringing phrase coined by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. This year the review reported that the impact of bottom trawling is severe, and the need for regulation and restraint is urgent. Repeated trawls leave a desert on the ocean floor.
If you want to see the process for yourself, the Ecology Action Centre’s web site ( www.ecologyaction.ca) has an underwater movie of a trawl in action. The EAC is also leading the campaign to abolish deep-sea trawling. Trawling is not fishing. It is pelagic mining — and, as we’ve seen in the cod fishery, it ultimately destroys the fishery permanently. I repeat: permanently. Does anyone still believe that the Atlantic cod will rebound within any time span important to humans?
All of which led Mr. Hearn to agree that "bottom trawling does damage to the stocks and it does damage to habitat."
So Canada will support the UN resolution calling for a moratorium on high-seas trawling, right? Wellll maybe. It depends on whether Loyola Hearn listens to the scientists and the public — or to his bureaucrats, who have always been obscenely intimate with the fishing industry.
Let us remember that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans presided over two of the greatest ecological and social catastrophes in human history, the collapses of the Atlantic cod fishery and the Pacific salmon fishery. This region is still slowly sinking to its knees — towns dying, populations shrinking, incomes falling — as a result of the cod collapse a dozen years ago.
Yet although DFO has botched its responsibilities on a planetary scale, nobody has ever held it accountable for the damage. Its failures should have been the subject of a ruthless public inquisition. Those responsible should have been jailed, like the people involved in the relatively minor Quebec sponsorship scandal. DFO should have been disbanded, like the Canadian Airborne Regiment, whose sins were far more modest than DFO’s.
No part of the country has suffered more from DFO’s bungling, villainy and obfuscation than the Southern Shore of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, where Loyola Hearn was born and raised. As his ill-advised but heartfelt blustering over the seal hunt demonstrates, Hearn is still capable of genuine outrage on behalf of the outports.
If Loyola Hearn isn’t going to bring DFO to heel, who ever will? He’s a new minister, who knows first-hand the havoc wrought upon fishing communities by the department he now heads. He was appointed by a new government grimly bent on fundamental change. He should be sweeping through DFO like an avenging angel. The sidewalk outside his office should be piled high with bruised ex-bureaucrats.
That is not, of course, the way Ottawa normally works. New ministers are quickly tamed by their own staffs and enlisted in support of existing policies and practices. Six months after their appointments, they sound exactly the same as their predecessors.
If Hearn is still his own man, the tribune of rural Newfoundland, he’ll support the moratorium on deep-sea trawling. If he doesn’t, it’s a sign that DFO has emasculated him already. Stay tuned.
Freelance writer Silver Donald Cameron lives in D’Escousse.
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