By Barry Stagg
April 1999
BRIAN DAVIES OR BRIAN TOBIN
A lot of hot air has been circulated by Brian Tobin's cheerleaders about how the career politician learned his lessons from the brash Americans who supposedly surrounded him while he grew up near the two American military bases in Stephenville and Goose Bay. To my mind Tobin owes much of his technique to the original anti-sealer, Brian Davies. Davies is the Welshman who, from a land base in New Brunswick, began his guerilla attacks against the Newfoundland seal fishery back in the early seventies. His ability to attract a naive, urban and careless media to the seal hunt was instrumental in arousing a tide of uninformed and economically vicious opposition to the then viable seal hunt.
It was Davies' use of media, celebrity and celebrities that made the fight against the seal hunt into an international media spectacle. Crass, selfish media manipulation accomplished what earnest anti-vivisectionists had not done in a century. The seal hunt as a viable independent industry was killed, to be replaced by an all too typical government-subsidized boondoggle. Brian Davies and his set of sophisticated, international fundraisers created a new industry--anti-sealing fundraising--that replaced the seal hunt as an economic entity with the spoils of the hunt going to the fundraisers rather than to the sealers.
When Brian Tobin jumped in front of the political pack and ordered the seizure of the Spanish fishing trawler, Estai, he was playing the same celebrity media game that Davies had brought to the Atlantic provinces twenty years ago. Getting the attention of the international media and motivating a mostly uninformed and uncaring audience showed the same gift for media sleight-of-hand that Davies had visited upon Newfoundlanders.
As a result, the media success of Davies and of Tobin have startling similarities. Both sought and received extreme public adulation through their self -promotional efforts. Both converted real, substantive economic issues into celebrity events with themselves in the role of star performer and director.
The anti-sealing industry is now as permanent a fixture in this world as the sealing industry was fifty years ago. Likewise the "Save the Fishery" industry is now more entrenched as a business enterprise in Newfoundland than the fishery ever was. Brian Tobin as Premier looks to his fundraisers in the Federal Cabinet in Ottawa for successful inputs of cash to this very necessary Newfoundland political industry. Davies looks to little old ladies in London, England for his source of lucre.
Davies has apparently negotiated a retirement buyout with the International Fund for Animal Welfare which will pay him some $2.5 million for the use of his name in fundraising tasks. Tobin's source of income supplements are more obtuse. He already has qualified for and collects a federal pension from his career as a Member of Parliament and federal cabinet minister. He earns a salary as Premier of Newfoundland. If he dares to leave the Premier's chair to ooze back to the Liberal caucus in Ottawa to run for the party leadership, then he will be looking at collecting a pension from the Newfoundland government. Apparently Tobin is in no need of such a structured buyout as that negotiated by his putative mentor, Mr. Davies. Tobin deals in government money, then and now.