11 February 2010

Up the Creek with Jackman and Rideout

And neither had a paddle to get anyone out of the mess which is the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Latest word is the Sullivan family – close Tory ties there or what? – cannot do any better a job running the fish plants they got from the smash-up of Fishery Products International than the crowd who ran FPI.

There is nothing new in any of the latest demands.  The Sullivans want to ship yellow-tail flounder to China because it can’t be processed profitably in this province. 

Mind you this is exactly what FPI did to subsidise the plants it used to own. Last going off, the fisheries minister of the day undertook a prosecution of FPI under the fish export regulations which  - like so much of government policy toward FPI - certainly had the stink of being politically-motivated and insubstantial all over it. 

Rather than bother commenting on the current demand from the company, let’s just review some of the recent history on this via some old posts. 

What you’ll quickly discover is that the current problems are essentially the same as the old ones.  In other words, fish minister Clyde Jackman is dead wrong if he thinks the problems fish minister Tom Rideout faced were different from the ones Jackman is facing today. 

You’ll also find their solutions today are going to look all too familiar as well. They are both up the same creek without anything that even looks like a paddle. The fish plant workers and fishermen who suffer as a result are farther up the same creek and they don’t even have a canoe.

And of course nothing at all will happen with any of it because the only man who apparently is allowed to make a decision in the current administration is currently laid up in hospital for another few weeks.

-srbp-