Loyola Sullivan and his "messiah’s fisheries salvation"

Please read below a response by Dr. Phil Earle to Loyola Sullivan's address to the NL Employers' Council. 

The Sullivan's presentations this week, at the Newfoundland and Labrador Employers’ Council’s annual awards luncheon and appearances in the media, has been nothing but public deception. L Sullivan’s speech preposterously pontificated the salvation of our fishing industry and our fisher people. His pronouncements are nothing more than that of a personal, brain locked, cooperate philosophy, one which is destroying our Fishery.

The knowledge that explains the truth in the facts of the references that Mr. Sullivan used to support his messiah’s fisheries salvation of "the only way forward in the fishery’ ' is to modernize it the way I'm telling you', is not the saving of our fisheries future but it’s result will be, if followed, it’s tragedy. This is a destructive corporate philosophy,.. and efforts must be made to try and dissuade the influence it may have on Minister King and our government, dissuade them from giving what’s left of our resource over to OCI.

Imagine the audacity of saying that they know how to save and improve the fishery when they are directly responsible for closing numerous plants in 5 years, pitting our coastal people against each other...Marystown against Fortune, the trawlermen against trawlermen, saying members of the union are at odds with their union leaders. All the while they are sending fish out of here not processed, giving value added jobs by the thousands to elsewhere, and wanting all they can get to be FFT processed or given to Asia raw.

They have pitted industry people against each other, say that the government is harming them and the industry, and that we have an attitude in the province, of fishing like we did in the past and it is holding us back, all of which will destroy the Industry! The fact of it is what they are doing, from their powerful position in the industry, will lead to its total collapse... if.... our governments continue allowing them to rule the roost.

If OCI is allow to dictate the future of how we harvest and process our fish at home, in 10 years they will be out of business themselves, as will the industry as we know it. All that will remain will be the royalties they will receive from having Spanish fleets, and the like, fish their quotas. That is if there is anything left.

Imagine saying our government is not letting them compete with the rest of the world, when it has been their style of ineffectual competing which is destroying the stocks, harvesters, plant workers and their coastal way of life.

I get this image of our fishery... of a sock you missed in the washing machine, which is in the machine the next time you go to wash...a little squeezed up ball at the bottom and you reach in and take it out ....a cold, wet, bedraggled item. Our fishery is this beat up overlooked trashed out piece, of what was once part of something much, much larger, but is now something uncomfortable to touch or be involved with. And we have made it that way.

I hope to god, for the sake of our children and grandchildren that our government sees through this insanity of the ‘running of our fishery’ by the corporate book of modernization and success...because that will be, if permitted, the ruining of the fishery through the monopoly of greed and the insatiable wants of self.

Mother Nature has protected our fish stocks for eons, saving them from predations, diseases, shifts of temperatures and currents, the ice ages and the drift of continents ...but in all her wisdom she is not able to save our fish from fools. Only governments can do that.

Phil Earle