SIGNS OF THE TIMES

By Barry Stagg

August 1995

TITLE: SEALING IN TORONTO

The Globe and Mail editorialists and celebrity lawyer Clayton Ruby wrote recently about the seal hunt. Their comments are not supportive in the least of sealers and the seal hunt. Thus it follows that in my self-appointed role as defender of this portion of our collective faith, I must write a response. It will be critical of these press kit environmentalists who dabble from their hammocks in matters that constitute the livelihood and reason for existence of many fishing people.

Criticism is something that Globe writers and Ruby hand out with zeal and panache. Their indictments of their opponents often go unchallenged in the milieu in which these people communicate. Perhaps some examination of the foundations of their platforms might erode the loftiness of their perches somewhat.

Ruby, who is a deservedly esteemed and successful Toronto defence lawyer, is the embodiment of the penthouse environmentalist who provides the underpinnings for the likes of Greenpeace. In fact he sits as a director of something named the Greenpeace Canada Charitable Foundation. His piece in the Toronto Star of July 12,1995 attacks Brian Tobin for daring to assert that seals eat cod. It seems that Ruby and his fellow travellers in the environmental "movement" want to exercise terminal caution in proceeding against the seal herds. Might the renowned defence counsel choose to invoke the requirement of " proof beyond a reasonable doubt"? That would be in keeping with the reasoning of others in the animal rights arena.

I recall a piece in the Star where one of the leading lights in the" save the seals" cause wrote of the lovely benefits of turning sealers into tourist handholders for these odious seal watching tours. I can report that my response to that learned gentleman's diatribe made "letter of the day' in the Star shortly after. The gist of my rebuttal was that these righteous activists advocate and believe in a form of cross-species democracy in which the rights of animals are on a level with humans. Implicit in that radical and misguided thought is that for having the audacity to kill and consume seals some humans such as sealers are a step below the animals and right thinking humans on the evolutionary scale. What drivel and arrogant urban nonsense comes from the pens and mouths of these advocates for "Alice in Wonderland" social equality.

The fundamentals of any criticism of the kind of urban activists panned here is that they choose in cowardly fashion to attack targets that are too remote and unorganized to effectively respond. Sealers are people who live in the country and who want to be left alone to harvest a natural resource. Their advocacy groups, although articulate and effective, are not sitting in downtown Toronto and so are ill-positioned to counter-punch the lazy ramblings of their sidewalk critics.

When the Globe braintrust fires up a barrage against the seal hunt on a quiet summer day it accuses the sealers and the sealers supporters of being less intelligent and realistic than the vast intelligentsia populating Globe headquarters and among the papers readership. It indicts sealers for daring to invite international criticism for pursuing the killing and selling of animals. The editors adopt the same combination of ignorance and arrogance that begat the infamous Globe editorial penned during the winter" Cod War" which unforgivably attributed Rupert Brooke's immortal poem " The Soldier" to fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon. Bad enough that the pompous writer was so ignorant that Brooke was mistaken for Sassoon but the ignoramus went on to coin a wretched doggerel parody of Brooke's most famous lines in ridiculing Brian Tobin's proclamation of the Grand Banks as Canadian territory. That literary blasphemy is gone but not forgotten. Here is the proper excerpt from Brooke's famous World War One poem :

"If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England."

Those words meant a lot to Newfoundlanders who fought in The Great War especially to those who lost a family member in the trenches of France and Belgium. Even eighty years after the fact they are not acceptable for parody . That they were is a ghastly breach of good taste by the unctuous lot at the Globe.

Ruby and Andrew Coyne of the Globe and their counterparts throughout the snobbish ranks of the Toronto chattering class have once again invoked their tired habit of imperialist condemnation of the lives and the work places of those who harvest the resources of the earth to provide sustenance for the human species. I wonder where their pets rank in relation to those people they condemn so righteously? Who votes for Fido and Rover over Morrisey and Abraham?


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