Anti-sealer activists jailed

You’ll read a lot of angry rhetoric about the boarding and seizure of the anti-sealer ship, Farley Mowat, just off the coast of Cape Breton Island. The ship was boarded, her crew arrested and the ship impounded by an elite RCMP marine team last Saturday.

Loyola Hearn, Canada’s Minister of Fisheries, said he had to take action before someone was killed on the ice. Throughout the weekend, Hearn said he was taking steps to ensure the safety of seal hunters; claiming, at one point on March 30, the Mowat came within nine metres of a group of sealers, shattering floes as sealers scrambled to get back to their small boat.

Did the Minister have cause for concern? Damn straight he did!

Harvesting seals requires climbing from the relative safety of the vessel onto the treacherous ice floes in the Gulf. A ship the size of the Mowat getting within nine metres of a sealer is a very dangerous situation. But then, maybe the activist scum aboard the Mowat got a chuckle out of seeing men scrambling for their lives across the ice.

The activist vessel had been forced from the harbour in St. Pierre/Miquelon, French islands just off the South coast of Newfoundland, following comments made about four sealers who drowned a week or so earlier.

"We don't accept those kinds of people in St-Pierre," fisherman Carl Beaupertuis told the CBC. "We cut the rope and let the boat go. If they want to come back I tell you this time there's going to be some violence, 'cause we won't let him back in the harbour."

Four crewmen from the Acadian II, all from the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, drowned in the frigid waters off the Cape Breton coast when the sealer went down. Three of the bodies were recovered; the fourth was never found.

Paul Watson, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which operates the Mowat said, “The deaths of four Magdalen Islands sealers were a tragedy, but the slaughter of young seals was a greater tragedy. These men are sadistic baby killers."

While Watson’s crude and extremely offensive remarks may play well in the upper middle class suburbs up the line, maritimers, who know better, take a somewhat different view.

Fisheries Minister Hearn heaped justifiable scorn on Watson's group. "These are a bunch of money-sucking manipulators," he told a news conference in Ottawa. "Their sole aim is to try to suck as much money as possible out of the pockets of people who really don't know what's going on."

Letters in local newspapers echoed the Minister’s sentiments.

“Isn't it convenient that Watson badmouths this country from the comforts of NYC, while his minions do his dirty work on the front lines? The gall of this man, to imply that the boarding of this vessel is "an act of war" against the Netherlands, a country that was liberated by Canadian soldiers! If Watson's followers are convicted, what better place for them to be sentenced to community service than the Magdalen Islands, whose dead were besmirched by this **** attention-seeker.

“Why did we board these miscreants when they would have provided good target practice for our frigates and subs? If it's war, then let's do it right.”

The Minister was right. Canadians can hold their heads high. Watson’s insensitive remarks deserved a response. The Mowat’s crew ignoring Canadian law and endangering Canadian lives deserved a response.

The Minister, and the Mounties, responded admirably.