St. John's lawyer Averill (A.J.) Baker owns quite a reputation among some readers of the weekly newspapers in the province, thanks in largest part to her bi-weekly column.
She's especially popular among the proponents of the Damn-Fool fishery, the crowd that talk about a supposedly God- given right to keep jigging a fish regardless of how few fish there are to jig. This is the same crowd that pass around Baker's columns and then call Randy or Bill or Lynda pointing to Baker as proof of what they have been fighting all along. That's all that Baker does, by the by: she tells a certain group of people what they want to hear.
In the past week, A.J.'s column claimed that foreigners can take 5, 900 tonnes of cod while the locals here in Newfoundland and Labrador can't get a single fish. That's what she wrote.
Then the Department of Fisheries and Oceans [DFO] took issue with what she printed, and for the past few days, the call-in crowd have been lambasting DFO and standing behind their favourite writer.
People are sticking behind Baker since she has nothing to gain from her claims.
Fair enough.
They are attacking DFO for spreading false information.
That's not fair enough. In fact it is almost laughable since Baker got her information from the same place the Bond Papers did: DFO and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization [NAFO].
The difference between DFO and Baker is that what DFO has put on the table are not the total possible by-catches of cod, which definitely total 5, 900 tonnes. DFO has been talking about actual landings and those are far less than the maximums allowed. DFO has been drawing a more accurate picture of what is actually happening to cod stocks, as best as anyone can figure it out.
The obvious value of this is that when you look back to the late 1980s and early 1990s you could see the looming cod collapse not from the total allowable catches set by John Crosbie but from the actual landings which declined steadily year after year. If the goal is really to bring back the cod as a commercial fish stock, we should be very cautious about fishing the stock at all.
The major problem with Baker's column is that she is fueling just the opposite political pressure. It isn't the first time Baker has disregarded the important details. She has a track record in her column of publishing things that are only sort of vaguely accurate. She sometimes gives bits of information rather than the whole schmeer. In other instances, she gives ludicrous interpretations, such as claiming that Canada breached its obligation to disclose relevant facts during the Terms of Union negotiations when it failed to tell the Newfoundlanders about something that wouldn't occur for another 30 years and that wasn't even thought of when the Terms of Union were signed.
Yeah. She did that: hang the Canadians for not being clairvoyant.
Anyway, aside from the stuff that DFO has already challenged, they should have made much more of information DFO provided to the Bond Papers in answer to a simple set of questions.
They should have pointed to the fact that Newfoundland and Labrador fishing interests landed 15, 000 tonnes of cod last year.
Baker claimed we couldn't catch a single fish.
But let her have the 5, 900 tonnes of cod for the foreigners. It is still half of what the locals caught themselves.
Just remember, though, that the total biomass of cod is estimated at a mere 170, 000 tonnes.
That means the total cod catch last year was more than 12% of the total amount of fish the very best guess claims is out there.
Take that tack and you completely refocus the discussion to what is best to help restore cod stocks.
That's what the talk should be about.
And almost best of all, everything else would then be seen for what it is:
cooking up numbers.