Ottawa knew for 20 years before the moratorium how much fish was being taken by the Soviets and Spanish and left us out to dry

I received the following letter via e-mail on Friday, June 29th. Published with permission. The 20th anniversary of the northern cod moratorium is Monday, July 2nd.

I am a fellow Newfoundlander who has moved back home after leaving to join the military in 1970.

During my period in the military my main job was to monitor the communications of Communist-Bloc countries and any targeted vessel that posed a risk to our national security.

In 1972, I was stationed in Gander and one of the tasks that we were given was to monitor the communications of all the Soviet and Spanish fishing fleets that fished off our shores, especially in and around the Grand Banks.

In any one day we would fix the location via HFDF (High Frequency Direction Finding Communications) of anywhere from 350 and 400 Soviet fishing trawlers and draggers off our coast. At the same time, we copied their transmissions which were sent via Morse code.

These transmissions included each vessel`s catch for that day, which was mostly codfish. The hull number, name, latitude and longtitude were also included in each message. Each vessel sent this information to a mother ship, which was a giant factory-freezer ship. That mother ship, in turn, would report all of that info back to the home ports such as Kaliningrad, Klajpedia, Murmansk, Riga, etc.

The important part of all of this is that each and every day we reported all of that information to Ottawa to a part of the government called "The National Security Agency" located on Heron Road in the Sir Leonard Tilley Building in Ottawa. All of that information was then reported to the federal government to the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

So, my point is this: the federal government knew for 20 years before the collapse of the fishery exactly how much fish was being taken off our coasts by both the Soviets and Spanish and left us out to dry. It is our belief that even though the government knew what was going on, they sacrificed our industry for the sake of international trade talks to move minerals, raw materials from the mainland provinces.

What makes it even more surprising is that leading up to the collapse of the fishery, the federal minister of Fisheries and Oceans was John Crosbie. Was he informed of what was happening? Was the information kept from him? Did he Know and not take action?

I recently passed this information on to Gerry Byrne, only to find out that he was the aid to Brian Tobin when he was the Fisheries minister from 1993-96. I spoke with him a few weeks ago when he was in Cow Head for a function and he considers it a dead issue and brushed it off.

Why are we letting the federal government of the hook? I believe that you are calling for an inquiry. This seems to be information that has been kept as a secret for a long time and should be brought forward.

Rollie Wheeler,
Cow Head, NL

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The story of Samantha Walsh

Image
Samantha Walsh, a 13-year-old, Grade 8 student from Fleur de Lys on the Baie Verte Peninsula, disappeared one Sunday evening when walking home from her Grandmother's house, and I traveled to the community to research her story. The following feature article was published in The Telegram in February 2000. ••• "Sam, who had stripped off her ski pants when she got to her grandmother’s house, didn’t bother to put them on for the three-minute walk to her house. She went home wearing her coat and hat and long johns covered by flannel pajama pants, pink with black and white lambs, bought the day before at Value Village. But Sam never made it home. 'Loves you, Mom,' were her last words to her mother." ••• Samantha’s story By Ryan Cleary, The Telegram FLEUR DE LYS — The voice is that of a child, rising with a soft and sweet delivery from a room of living hell. It’s a haunting sound, the words of  Salt Water Joys , sung by a very talented and pretty littl
Read more

A survivor’s story

Image
The above picture of Bernard Dyke, a fisherman from Eastport, Bonavista Bay, was taken about two weeks after the fishing vessel Melina and Keith II sank off Cape Bonavista on Sept. 12, 2005. Dyke, then 17, was one of four crewmen who survived after spending four hours in the North Atlantic waiting to be rescued. Four others —Ivan Dyke, Justin Ralph, Anthony Molloy and Joshua Williams — were lost. Dressed only in T-shirt and underwear, Dyke survived by clinging to an overturned lifeboat. (His story is published below.) The search and rescue response times of the military’s Gander-based Cormorant helicopters are in the news again this week with parliamentary hearings being held in St. John’s. The story of the Melina and Keith II and an investigation into response times was covered in-depth by the now defunct Independent newspaper. The first coast guard vessel to arrive on scene was the Leonard J. Cowley — 9 hours and 45 minutes after it had been confirmed the vessel went down and
Read more

Nov. 7th, Telegram letter to the editor

Making this a better place I applaud Ryan Cleary’s letter in the Oct. 31 Weekend Telegram (“Time to act, not talk”) touting teamwork as the key to forging a future for rural Newfoundland: it was eerily reflective of the premier’s front-page interview. It’s a prime example on how we all could, and should, put partisan politics and prejudices aside to perpetuate the one commonality that binds us — passion for the promise of this place. The power of that unified front is visible with the government’s prioritizing the H1N1 vaccination roll-outs this week, in light of the international crisis for Newfoundland and Labrador with changes proposed to the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) convention, and the national crisis with Quebec and the Lower Churchill quagmire. The people of this place must come first and we personified that this week. Thus, there is hope for the future. Rise to the occasion Having said that, like the tide, we need to rise to the swell of occasion as well,
Read more