CKNW Editorial
for July 12, 2001

Two quite unrelated matters today.

Yesterday I suggested that Preston Manning may be the only man suitable to lead the Canadian Alliance after Stockwell Day realizes that the jig is up. I also suggested that in a curious irony, the failure of his successor to do what he couldn’t do, namely win Ontario, might have actually enhanced Mr Manning’s image there. I believe that there is a constituency in Ontario – perhaps two constituencies – that would support a reborn Preston Manning. First there are those who are right wingers, for want of a better phrase, who just cannot support Joe Clark. It must be remembered that Ontario split right down the middle on the Charlottetown Accord, which represented Mr Clark’s view of Canada, and tossed out all its Tories the following year too. Those people need somewhere to go. Then there are the Ontarians who feel that Ottawa has done very badly by them – sort of like Albertans and British Columbians do. They haven’t supported Mr Manning before because they never saw him for what he was. After all, Mr Manning only looked and spoke like a fine man until last year when he lost the leadership race …thereafter he demonstrated that he is a man of character.

What about the image that he laid in the weeds and sandbagged Mr Day? The fact is he didn’t. And if he did, he recognized the lesson of history that demonstrates that the man who actually stabs the leader never gets the prize – that message started with Brutus over 2000 years ago and needs no proof. Besides, who cares? It was clear in the 80s that for all he protestations of loyalty and love, Brian Mulroney had his assassins out after Joe Clark and Mulroney ended up with the prize plus the biggest majority in history.

But the bottom line is as I had it yesterday – if not Preston Manning, who? He or she has to come from outside that nest of vipers in or once in the federal Alliance caucus ... none of them with the exception of Mr Manning has any credibility left.

There is another possibility, of course. The Alliance might just go away with a few straggling MPs joining Joe Clark. But I doubt it – I think the creator and the saviour are the same person … Preston Manning.

What a sorry lot our five Liberal MPs are. Given the chance to support the private members bill tabled by James Moore which would have given BC leaky condo owners the same treatment as those in Montreal and they walked out of the House. You see, they all know where their constituents really are – in the Liberal Whip’s Office and the Prime Minister’s Office. Any who live in their real constituencies who think they come first must be smoking something illegal.

The lower mainland has two cabinet ministers if you include Hedy Fry. At least the Prime Minister has the sense not to give this yappy nit wit any real work to do. But there’s also Herb Dhaliwal, It defies all the odds that British Columbia could have three cabinet ministers, the other being David Anderson, and have two of them probably the worst cabinet ministers in the country’s history.

Herb Dhaliwal is the Minister of Fisheries and he is getting tough on polluters, he says. Why if you’re a municipality or a cruise ship that dumps crud in the ocean, you’re for it. And that’s the way it ought to be. But at the same time Mr Dhaliwal is 100% on side with fish farmers who grossly pollute the ocean that is ours not theirs, bring disease to our waters, allow a foreign species, the Atlantic Salmon to take hold in rivers now, thanks to his ministry, almost devoid of native salmon, and utterly ignore the clear evidence of the devastating problem of sea lice caused by penned fish.

If Atlantic Salmon, about to enter their home rivers in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec, were smothered by and dying from sea lice from fish farms, how long do you think those fish farms would last?

What is happening is that the almighty dollar is winning again. Our native fish, whether caught commercially or by sports fishermen are just not worth the bucks the fish farming industry can bring in. And mark my words, the fact that Alcan, in connivance with the federal government. has never restored the Nechako, a river we all fought so hard to save, will mean the end of the Stuart sockeye runs and pave the way for a dam across the Fraser at Lytton.

What is so appalling is the gutlessness of this government and this minister. Instead of saying look, we cannot restore much less maintain our native salmon stocks because it’s too expensive compared to what we can get out of farmed fish, they have, since day one, lied to us. No other word for it. And by opening the industry even further, they compound the lie.

Everything environmentalists like the David Suzuki Foundation said would happen, has happened – in spades.

I lay down this challenge to Herb Dhaliwal – come on this show and handle the questions. You know what they are. But you’re scared Herb –Why are you abandoning your province’s birthright to foreign owned fish farms? Why are you permitting an exotic species to force out our native salmon? Why do you ignore all the evidence from Norway, Scotland and Ireland? What is it that the fish farmers have got on you guys anyway? How much did they donate to your campaign and that of the party? Why isn’t the onus, and a heavy one, on them to demonstrate that they will do no harm instead of on us to prove they’re harmful?

Or is it that you just don’t care?