My father was a Marine Engineer. He and his Boston based partners owned steel-hulled ocean going
trawlers in the 60's and early 70's. These were men who spent many years in the fish harvesting
and processing industries. I remember that they often discussed the serious decline in cod stocks
on the North West Atlantic, caused by overfishing, mostly by Russian and Eastern European
trawlers, which were very large ships, capable of catches much beyond a 12 man trawler.Their
catches were frozen on board and stored. Many Canadian fishermen sold their quotas several times
over at sea to the big Russian ships, that is why Canada insisted on fisheries inspection teams, which
were contracted to private companies, based in Halifax and Saint John's NF. But by 1995, the almost
total destruction of the Canadian Coast Guard CCG by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, plus the complexities
of EU control of much of the international quotas, led to what is described by the EU Fisheries
Commission in November 2003, to define cod stocks at "catastrophic levels". But the action by Tobin
as described by Blizzard was contrived, and the wrong target was focused. I think that Chretien was
unaware that Spain was and is a prominent member of NATO, and once aware, told Tobin to back off
-which he did. MacLeod
