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Message: Silver Donald Cameron On Paul Watson SIlver Donald Cameron introduces his view of the great Sea Shepherd debate: Let me get this straight. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, aided by the RCMP, boarded and seized the Dutch-registered protest vessel Farley Mowat in order to prevent injury to sealers—just a couple of weeks after DFO drowned four sealers itself in a terrifying display of incompetence. And the European master and mate of the vessel have been jailed and charged with offences under a set of “marine mammal protection regulations” that were created specifically to stifle dissent by preventing protesters from approaching seals who are in the process of being slaughtered. And all this hits the headlines just as the European Union debates whether to ban seal products from the EU completely. A triumph of Canadian diplomacy. If you thought all Easterners supported Minister Hearn’s reckless seizure of a foreign vessel in International waters, well, you haven’t read Cameron’s blog, Silver Donald on Sunday. Is Paul Watson really gutless? But that’s not true of Paul Watson. Say what you will about Paul Watson—and you can say, with some justice, that he’s intransigent, uncompromising, hyperbolic, pugnacious, rash and intemperate—you cannot ascribe cynicism to a man who has spent his whole life charging whaling ships with rubber rafts, getting himself tear-gassed and beaten and jailed, and confronting armed and angry sealers and whalers far out on the cold and lonely sea. But Hearn, who has spent his entire working life in classrooms and legislatures, says Watson is “gutless.” Stunning. To read more of Cameron’s critique of Canada’s sealing policy, go to today’s Chronicle Herald. Meanwhile, in Watson’s personal blog on the Sea Shepherd site, the altercation continues: In a world where his Holiness the Dalai Lama is described as a terrorist leader by a world power like China, it is hardly an insult to be called a terrorist by some backwoods robber baron of a premier in Newfoundland. Last week Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams called me a “terrorist” because Sea Shepherd was documenting the slaughter of seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. My response to him on Canadian national television was to either arrest me or to shut up. I have never been convicted of a felony, I have never injured a single person, in fact I am so non-violent that I don’t eat meat. I am not wanted for any crime anywhere in the world. I am not on any “no-fly” lists. I am not barred from entry into any country. I don’t have the FBI sitting on my doorstep monitoring my every move so just what kind of terrorist am I? Williams said I would not be allowed to enter Newfoundland while he is Premier. I would like to see how he would stop me. The last time I looked, Newfoundland was still a part of Canada unfortunately and I am a Canadian citizen. I suppose he will charge me with slumming or being in Newfoundland without a club. Dan Leger, a columnist for the Halifax Chronicle Herald has the answer. According to this right wing bullet-headed scribe, both Elizabeth May the leader of the Canadian Green Party and I are “tofu-eating terrorists.” I don’t really know where “tofu eating terrorists” are placed on the spectrum of terrorism but there seems to be a vast chasm between the action of video-taping the slaughter of a seal and flying a passenger jet into a civilian building. It has been amazing to witness the polarization of the Canadian media in response to the campaign to oppose the vicious slaughter of harp seals. On one side there is “the defend the slaughter at all costs” and on the other there is the movement to abolish an industry that really has no place in the modern civilized world. www.corporateknightsforum.com