Something Fishy (1)

In a clip from an interview with the CBC, aired this afternoon on the Fisheries Broadcast, the Premier said:

We don’t have enough scientific information of our own. We always depend on the federal scientific information, and what they have, and how much they want to give us to go look. I think as a province, and I’ve said it time and time again, that we need to be putting money into science, and we are going to do that. I’d love to see us also get our own vessel. I was in Iceland about six or eight months ago, and they have their own vessels up there, they go through their own research, and they make their decisions based on those findings. So if we could get our own research done, and tie the scientists to the fishermen, and the fishermen got the bulk of the knowledge, then I think we are going to be in an informed position to make informed decisions. I don’t like relying on other information or for me to make decisions, I like to get my own information and then make a decision on that basis, so that’s what I’m hoping to do.

The research vessel idea is curiously missing from the Tory platform document. You have to wonder whether he’s making things up as he goes along (again). Wacky. But Danny’s entire pronouncement is like one big wacky onion. You peel away one layer of wackiness, and there’s still more wackiness underneath.

How much information does the federal scientific establishment within DFO give to the province? How much do they “want to” give? And how much, and what, are they holding back?

“We” already do exactly what Iceland does. “We”, in Canada, are a country, just like Iceland is. Who else would Iceland, an independent, unitary state, “rely on” for scientific information but “their own vessels”?

The nationalist overtone to this bizarre pronouncement, let alone the fiscal implications, are rather disturbing. As Anton Chekhov wrote,

There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

There is nothing that Our Own Money Into Science, and Our Own Dear Research Vessel, can tell us from the point of view of marine biology and ecology, that DFO’s money and vessels can’t… assuming both sets of results generated by both pots of money and both ships are truly scientific.

Nothing.