To seal or not to seal
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them”?
The arrest and seizure this past weekend of environmental activist/anti-sealer Paul Watson’s ship the Farley Mowat, caused an international media seal stew.
This morning I spoke with Liberal Labrador MP Todd Russell who was making seal stew and seal blood pudding in his Labrador kitchen. The wind was up today, and the ice flows too sketchy to seal this morning he told me. Later in the day looked better to hunt seals he said. The sun was coming out as he was on the phone. It glistened off of the ice as it bunched up on the shore line outside his house like so many pure, white, dinner plates.
“Hunting seals is a way of life for many here” he went on. “It is not just the economics – which is significant. Money alone it will add maybe a quarter of a fisherman’s yearly income. It means a lot. Paul Watson is full of crap when he says it is some kind of welfare and that we would be all better off if we were paid not to hunt, like the farmers out west are paid not to grow grain”. He paused. “There is an intangible here too. It is the activity itself which is part of a lifestyle and an identity and self-reliance. It isn’t just about the money”.
As far the conservation part of the anti-sealing argument goes, scientists agree that seal populations are healthy, relatively speaking (nothing is like it used to be), and that the culling of the herd is no big deal, despite the bloody optics of ripe, red seal guts upon snow white ice.
Deer bleed too, but it is forested: the leaves and the earth soak it up.
The problem with the seal controversy this week stems from the tactics of the Feds: they stormed Watson’s boat in international waters with a European crew claiming an incident had occurred on March 30th where his ship, Farley Mowat, had simply come too close to the sealers without government authorization. Watson denies this and says he can prove his case and the government will never prove theirs. History, he says is on his side too. “The DFO have written me big, juicy cheques before when they were wrong, and they will do it again this time”.
For his part, the apoplectic Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn has simply snapped his twig. In media interviews his face would turn red, white, and his forehead veins would bulge and pop like a cartoon character when he described nemesis Watson. It has become insanely personal.
By contrast, professional shit-disturber Watson has been the model of calm, rational, professorial discourse – articulate with a cool, deliberate passion.
The government has taken the bait more than the fish stocks have. It is now a vendetta. The government, with stand-up comic, drooling Hearn at the helm, looks like it would bend the rules like Paul Watson has (he was kicked out of Greenpeace for his aggressiveness), to get things done.
The Conservatives, always willing to promote their sovereignty integrity brand and to score points on the East Coast where they took their Atlantic Accord belly-flop were going to look good playing the heavy with the tree-huggers. But do they? Have they not played into Watson’s hands? Moreover, has the government broken the law? Earlier the RCMP refused to charge sealers in 1995 when Watson was beaten to an inch of his life with no one to defend him except actor Martin Sheen.
If the Feds cannot prove their case against Paul Watson this time, and he didn’t break the law, the government will just look like a bully who tried to play to the crowd under the guise of public safety (protecting the sealers from Paul Watson’s ship). And we will be the ones to pay for it, to write the cheque.
If Loyola Hearn appeared less like an enraged lunatic I might’ve believed the Feds. I don’t.
Yes, Paul Watson is an activist and a protestor. That is his right. If he broke the law he must account for it like everyone else.
But what happens when the government breaks the law?
I expect higher standards from the government than I do a citizen with a boat, a cause, and a lot of balls.
“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office”…