Why Does the Federal Department of Fisheries Condone This?

I know, I know. So you're in Ontario and you think this doesn't matter to you. Think again. Go to your grocery store and buy that great looking "Atlantic salmon." Only it's not from the Atlantic. It's from a pen along the B.C. coast where this goes on before it gets to your dinner table.

It's a Poacher's Paradise in Harperland

Just when we thought our prime ministerial jackass had given the West Coast his worst, he pulls another trick on us.   This time it's all about giving free licence to poachers besetting our shellfish and fish stocks.

Was a time, pre-Harper, when the Department of Fisheries & Oceans actually attended to things like fisheries and, well, oceans.  Not so much any more.  It seems Harper didn't want them saying anything unpleasant about his Northern Gateway fantasy - stuff like bitumen spills and tanker accidents and marine habitat stuff.  So, in keeping with his responsibility to Canada, he shut them down, laid them off and gutted our fisheries and navigation regulations.  He even moved the West Coast oil spill emergency centre to Quebec where it would be, you know, out of the way.   And then he shut down all but two of our Coast Guard stations.  Neat tricks, eh?   But I digress, this is about poachers.

With all those Fisheries & Oceans people no longer around, Harper has decided we can do without fishery enforcement.   In lieu of that, he's come up with a new programme, one that'll save the taxpayers money.  It's called "self-assessment."

In August, Oceanside residents Eileen Becker and Monica Stuart began lobbying local councils to do something about commercial harvesters, posing as tourists, stripping the area's beaches of geoducks, clams and oysters.

They want the area's local governments to lobby the province to consider making the 17-kilometre-long waterfront Parksville-Qualicum Wildlife Management Area a biological park. In the interim, they want more enforcement of catch quotas and other regulations from DFO.

Qualicum Beach Mayor Teunis Westbroek raised the matter with DFO officials at the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention in Vancouver last month.

"It's now self-assessment, not enforcement," he says, noting he's not entirely clear on what "self-assessment" entails.

"DFO is much-weakened," says Westbroek, a commercial fisherman for 35 years and a former Canadian representative to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission. "It's not encouraging... They have definitely reduced resources."

When he pressed for an explanation of "self-assessment," he was told it's "an enhanced complaint procedure, not enforcement" based on "observe, record, report."

There, however, the process seems to stop.

Of course with no one left on the payroll to observe, record or report, it seems we'll have to leave it to the poachers to do that.

The Petro-Politburo Strikes Again

This time the malevolent hand of Steve Harper is obvious.

The entire Department of Fisheries and Oceans contaminants programme is being axed effective April Fool's Day.   In B.C. that means the entire staff of nine marine scientists and support staff are being canned.   Across Canada, this is the firing of almost all federal employees responsible for monitoring ocean pollution.

“The entire pollution file for the government of Canada, and marine environment in Canada’s three oceans, will be overseen by five junior biologists scattered across the country — one of which will be stationed in B.C.,” said environmental toxicologist Peter Ross., a expert on marine mammals, notably killer whales.

“I cannot think of another industrialized nation that has completely excised marine pollution from its radar,” Ross said. Hired as a research scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada in 1999, Ross was one of the nine employees who received a letter Thursday informing him his position will be “affected as your services may no longer be required due to a lack of work or discontinuance of a function.”

Any doubt that this was a targeted hit was dispelled, totally unintentionally, by a DFO spokesperson trying to polish this turd.

“Between the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, we have found $79.3 million of savings for Canadians primarily by adjusting our internal operations and administration,” said Melanie Carkner, a spokesperson for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in an e-mail, Friday.

“To put the impact on employees in perspective, we will be removing about 400 positions from DFO’s 11,000-strong workforce. This works out to less than 2 per cent a year over three years.”

Okay Melanie, DFO needs to trim a paltry 2% of its workforce over the next two years, we get that.  And it starts by immediately axing the entire contaminants monitoring programme?    Sorry sweetie, that's a targeted hit and you made that obvious.