Geography lesson (II)

Gus Etchegary tells Randy Simms this afternoon:

A week before last, there was a transfer of 2,000 tonnes of turbot from the northern Labrador and Baffin Land, from an operator in Newfoundland who has decided, presumably, to get out of the ground fishery, to, of all people in the world, John Risley in Nova Scotia.

This would be the transfer referred to in this February 20 report by CBC North:

The Seafreez quota is for a fishing zone located off the southeast coast of Baffin Island. The allowable catch for the zone, known as Division 0B, is 5,500 tonnes of turbot. Of that, Nunavut has a 1,500-tonne share, and Seafreez had a 1,900-tonne share before the transfer was approved.

For the information of Gus Etchegary, this map shows where Division 0B is.

(For bonus points, it also puts Labrador and Newfoundland in proper context and at, within the limits of a Mercator-type projection, a comparable scale.)

Division 0B is no more off northern Labrador than 4W is off southern Newfoundland.

But it’s heartwarming to see Gus Etchegary’s concern for quotas being transferred “out of the province”, even if the quota being caught isn’t actually adjacent to it.

Perhaps, if he thinks long and hard about it, he’ll realize the inherent hypocrisy involved in Newfoundland interests who complain about their “adjacency” being violated, even as they happily violate that of others; and who, simultaneously, claim “historical attachment” to areas like 0B, even as they deny anyone else’s “historical attachment” in waters adjacent to Newfoundland (where “adjacency”, of course, takes precedence).