* deserves.to be mentioned in

4- Friday, February 8, 1985 - North Shore News

Canadian wildlife horror story

Or Whiteccat whitewash

Royal Commission on Seals and the Sealing

Industry, as it passed through town, is that it
was a last-gasp fraud perpetrated’ by ‘the late,
unlamented Liberal government before Pierre
Trudeau and his herd of trained seals became ex-
tinct themselves.

Te kindest thing that could be said about the

claim to fame is the fact that
he has consistently pushed
for the reckless exploitation
of the whales at the United
Nations, actually succeeding
in temporarily turning ex-
pressed UN policy away from
cautious management to a
position favoring higher
catch quotas.

Guiland’s ignorant asser-
tions have, by now, been
thoroughly discredited by the
Scientific Committee of the
International Whaling Com-
mission, and as a result, the
UN itself has done an about-
face, returning to a more
neutral position.

As late as 1976, Gulland
‘published a paper purporting
a to show that the blue whale
by was recovering quickly under

protection. This was shown
Bob Hunter by others to be statistically in

: error, Recent more serious
EEE cudies have shown clearly
a that the blue whale is in fact
I"m sorry to be so harsh. It much rarer than previously

would be nice to greet the thought. There is simply no
awn of a new age in Cana- gon that it is recovering at

dian political affairs with ait

Sweet, nothings whispered in“ Gultand’s reward for being
the “new environment yterly wrong? He lands a job
minister’s ear. But John on Canada’s, “impartial”
Fraser has his work cut out, ’ :
for him just trying to re-
establish seme semblance of
Canadian credibility in terms
of wildlife management in
the eyes of the rest of the
world.

The fact that British Col-
umbia has become the
Afghanistan of the ‘wolves,
thereby replacing the
‘Labrador archipelago of the
seals as the best-known wild-
life-horror story at the mo-
ment certainly doesn’t make
. Fraser’s, task. any easier, but
that’s another grim tale.

_ If you'll excuse the expres-
-sion, the purpose of the seal- ©
ing commission is so blatant-
ly to whitewash the whitecoat
slaughter and thus regain an
entry to the vital European
fur market that it hardly

strictly
' personal

print, except as a contempti-
‘ble footnote to history.

' No, I don’t have'a drop of
objectivity in my veins when
it comes to the seal massacre.
I’ve been out on the ice. I’ve
seen what passes for a
**hunt.’’ Moreover, I've
spent time in the homes of
Newfoundlanders, in their
pubs, and, as a matter of
fact, in their courts,

You can’t tell me that they
take any great pride ina dirty
job, except for the cynical
politicians (left, right, centre,
it doesn’t matter) who play
on regional chauvinism to
grasp a few more votes.

The sealing commission is
no more objective than lam, °
by the way. The biases of the
commission just happen to
lean in the opposite direction.

Consider just two of the
members.

I give you {you can have
him!) the notorious John
Gulland, a British
mathematician whose main

Remember family or friends
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B.C. Heart
Foundation

sealing commission. Inciden-
tally, Wf his work on whales
has proved to be nothing
more than the ill-conceived
ravings of an ignoramus with
a degree, consider the fact
that he has never done any
work on seals at all,

Okay, let's look at Com-
missioner K. Radway Allen.
who has never done any
tesearch on seals cither
(These are the scientific
heavies on the commission
no kidding!) This gentleman
an aging ex-chairman of the
IWC, was one of the
characters who kept coming
up with those optimistic fore-
casts about the number of

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whales left in the world whict
permitred the whaling na.
tions to justify their unremit.
ling over-exploitation of the
species.

Accordingly, he refused
time and again to consider a
moratorium on = whale-
hunting. His international
credibility? Zero.

The background politics to
this, you should know, is that
Canada, at a critical moment
in the struggle to save the
whales withdrew from the
IWC, rather than face up to
the fact that Canadians had
become the only non-whalers
to support the continuation
of whaling by the remaining

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fistful of nations with a
vested interest, i.c. Japan,
Russia, Norway and Iceland,

Why pull out instead of
changing our vote? Obvious-
ly, the federal government
didn’t want to have to admit
its errors, especially since the
fact that it had been dead
wrong about the whales
would inevitably rebound on

BRRERERERREREEE

its position vis a vis the seals.

Now, as a final payoff, the
retreating Liberals plucked
the tired discredited men who
nearly drove the whales to ex-
tinction to sit_in on an at-
tempt to ressurect the seal
hunt.

I hope that John Fraser is
holding his nose while this
charade runs its course.

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