Dr. Phil Earle responds to Fisheries Minister Keith Ashfield

Below please find a response to Federal Fisheries Minister - Keith Ashfield from Dr. Phil Earle

 

Dear Minister Ashfield, March 1/2012

Part 1  

I would like to respond to your letter in a step wise manner, and I would like for you to answer my comments for the people of this province.

First what does “..we are time and again being out-performed by smaller countries with less access to the resource” refer to? Are you talking about NAFO countries that fish on our shelf, such as Spain? If it is, the answer is Spain has one of the largest fishing fleets in the world which is subsidized nearly a billion dollars a year by the EU to fish around the world.

Further if you and the DFO are inferring that we should therefore increase our efforts to catch more fish it would be a totally wrong conclusion. Our ground fish stocks have never recovered and are at an all-time low of less than 10% of historic healthy levels. We need to stop the fishing destruction that is occurring at present so the stocks can be allowed to recover. That includes the fishing inside our 200 mile EEZ and that of NAFO fleets fishing on the nose and tail of the grand banks.

Quote, “everyone is demanding change in how we manage the resource.” This is a non-specific remark that can be taken in a range all the way from more of the disastrous federal government’s mismanagement that has, and is destroying the resource to reducing government involvement in management while letting more influence in management from improved, prudent, scientific input like is done in other successful countries like Norway and Iceland.

 
“Canadian fishermen remain among the lowest earners in Canada.’ This is because the bulk of our resource and its profits are in the hands of a few powerful, wealthy people who own processing operations, and own quotas which your government gave to them. They operate factory freezer trawlers which have taken thousands of jobs away from inshore fishers while they send unprocessed fish away from our shore planets, giving jobs to foreign nation. Many harvesters’ licences are owned or contorted by corporations so that fishers working at sea have been squeezed out of their incomes by the need of companies to increase their profits.

 
There are people, such as doctors and dentists and the like, living on the main land who have never stepped on the deck of a boat who own fish quota’s, they receive millions of dollars a year from royalties on fish being caught. There is only so much profit that can be taken out of each season of fishing, if large percentages of this limited profit is taken by such ‘outsiders’ there is less and less for our fishers and plant workers.

 
Consider that in 1992, the year of the moratorium, our NL fishery was worth some $350 million and today it is near $900 million but yet our situation is worst then in 92 as we are losing more jobs and plants, fishers and coastal communities. So it’s easy to understand why our fishers are among the lowest earners in Canada, it is just economics 101. You can understand that can’t you?

“Canada’s fishery is becoming a smaller and smaller player on the world stage. We are no longer seeing the abundance of fish that our country enjoyed in the past, so we can no longer rely on the quantity of this renewable resource to create economic prosperity; better management practices are required. Our government has been making strides in helping the fishery.’

Our fishery is smaller because the bio mass of our fish is at an all-time low, the stocks have been destroyed are not allowed to recover because of mismanagement of the federal government. Your government wants to create economic prosperity for the elite few who now control the fishery.

Part 2  

Continuing the same practices that you have created in the past for giant corporations that has destroyed, and is, and will totally destroy the rest of the resource in the future if you continue in the manner you are implying in this letter.

 
The only way you can create further economic prosperity for anyone from our depleted, dying resource is for less and less peoples and corporations to take more and more of the less and less fish. You know what that means don’t you. In 10 years there will be no fishers, no plant workers, no comminutes in coastal NL and lastly no fishing corporations..because there will be no more fish.

Your government has been making strides in one direction, not in the direction of helping the fishery, but in the direct of destroying it, destroying our treasured heritage and our coastal communities, our maritime culture and our family structure. That is a Fact!

In 62 years of confederation you have taken away our spirit fish, by giving it indifferently to foreign countries, denied its access from our coastal people, and allowed cooperate greed to privatize and garbage can our legacy. You and you alone, the federal government of Canada, have destroyed the spirit of my people, whose ancestors were once the greatest fishermen in the world, the greatest sea people that ever lived.

”We must find ways to make the fishery more valuable, profitable and respectful of the resource for future generations.” If by value you mean the economic success of a few large processing companies there will be no respect of the resource, the fish stocks that god gave us, and in a few short years it will be no more. Your concern for “future generations” in that case is not just hollow, political, empty words they are the insensitive, thoughtless comments from a government who conducts themselves with absolute power, that have corrupted it absolutely.

Your corruption of power and ego is so complete that not only will it destroy the opportunities of our “future generations” of children; it would destroy that of your own children. Take a bow to the world Mr. Ashfield; take one for Canada to the world!

And as for the World Bank suggesting what we should do with our fishery for more money, they have a great record of being concerned for the global economy and the plight of the world starving peoples, who are in the 100's of millions. Their 100's of billions in profits and 100's of millions of dollars for salaries to their CEO’s really show how concerned they are for incomes of subsistence fisheries and laborers all over the world. They are concerned because it’s off the backs of labor industries that they cream off their billions, all on the backs of the struggling poor. Take another bow to the world Mr. Minister, for figuring out that you can squeeze out a few more million for the rich by abusing the lives of the fisher people.

All this ”.. means more jobs and more economic growth in our coastal and rural regions.”
The audaciousness of this remark is beyond my ability to express. How dare you write a letter and say such a thing about our fishery and to my people, and put it in our paper the telegram. You talk about more jobs and more economic growth in our coastal communities when you and the federal government are directly responsible in 20 years for destroying our families, fishers and fisheries jobs by the 10's of thousands. 

Part 3  

What you, and the federal government, are advocating in this letter will destroy our coastal way of life. Our NL soldiers fought in the great wars for Canada and the free world. Fought to protect their children’s, and their children’s children democratic rights as written in Canada’s ‘Chartered Bill of Rights’. If there is an ounce of decency anywhere in the halls of parliament or in the hearts of any person or member who works there I ask for it to be used to do the duty they have sworn to do. Administer to the costal people of NL, and their fishery, the principles so outlined in our bill of rights. Save us from the impending future genocide of our coastal way of life.

You asked for my engagement in this letter, of how we can better manage our Fishery for the future and how our coastal people can improve and save their lives. I have given you my honest answer to the best of my ability, so help me god.

Will you answer these questions for my people? The fisher people, the sea people of NL?

Philip Earle
B.Sc., M.Sc., M.D