Posted on 04/20/2008 9:27:48 PM PDT by Clive
PAUL WATSON, high-seas "terrorist": That’s how Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams describes Watson, the anti-whaling activist who runs a side business as an anti-sealing protester.
Watson, who was born in Toronto and raised in New Brunswick, has used his vessels as battering rams for more than a decade now.
After he transforms his old scows into weapons, sailors and whalers tend to get out of his way – which is Watson’s goal, after all.
He particularly enjoys using this tactic against whaling vessels. (For evidence, see the New Yorker profile on Watson in the magazine’s Nov. 5, 2007, edition.)
Watson’s operations haven’t killed anyone to date, according to Farley Mowat (the author, not the boat). But that’s something of a miracle.
Watson did manage to disable two Icelandic sealing vessels in 1986, and to frustrate Newfoundland sealers in 1983 by blockading the harbour in St. John’s.
This was all a prelude to the recent confrontations on the ice floes of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Farley Mowat (the boat, not the author) was seized and towed to Sydney after allegedly coming too close to sealing operations.
Who should you believe in this dispute?
Well, following the war of words that broke out this week between Williams, Watson and hosts of angels in both their camps, I choose to trust the testimony of none of the above.
I turn instead to the eye-witness account of Robert Courtney, a Cape Breton sealer who was on the ice March 30, and was glad to get off of it alive after a run-in with sailor-activists working for Watson.
Courtney told Tera Camus, a reporter for this newspaper, that the Farley Mowat rammed the ice floe which held sealers from his vessel.
"One of our guys just made it back to our stabilizer when the ice fell under him. He had to jump … (and) just made it back," Courtney said.
"They would have drowned three or four of us that day if they had their chance, and from what I hear what Paul Watson said about the other sealers from the Madeleines after they died, that would have been another reason for them to applaud."
The contemplation of imminent death focuses the mind, as Dr. Johnson said, so Courtney’s comments ring true. And the disregard for human life, implicit in the actions of the Farley Mowat and her crew, is also reflected in recent words spoken by the master himself.
Here was Watson’s reaction to the recent deaths of four sealers from Ile-de-la-Madeleine: "The fact is the destruction of 300,000 seals is a greater tragedy than the death of four human beings … When you destroy species and alter ecosystems, it has profound consequences for all of us, which is a far greater tragedy in the long run."
Sorry, Paul. Harp seals are not an endangered species. Quite the contrary, there are about 5.5 million of them on the East Coast of Canada.
And the evidence suggests they are as resilient as the cockroach, as prolific as the bunny rabbit, and as common as the pigeon in the public squares of Europe.
Granted, Watson’s opponents also have a gift for stretching the truth, but he can’t justify his attack on the seal hunt by posing as an eco-warrior.
Loyola Hearn, Canada’s fisheries minister, gets closer to the truth when he suggests Watson is in it to raise money from gullible supporters.
"They are a bunch of money-sucking manipulators," Hearn said of the Sea Shepherd crowd. "Their sole aim is to suck as much money out of the pockets of people who really don’t know what’s going on."
Hearn – another Newfoundlander – may be laying it on a little thick.
But after decades of putting up with Watson, at least two Canadian politicians have shown a willingness to take on the self-styled activist on his own terms.
The remarks of Hearn and Williams also left me wondering why only Newfoundlanders seem capable of speaking plain English in any public debate in this nation.
But that’s another column for another day.
For now, let’s just thank Williams and Hearn for refusing to sink in the sea of Paul Watson’s ramming rhetoric.
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Isn’t whale oil the original biofuel? This man should be executed for contributing to global warming.
Just another potentially-lethal attention-seeker.
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