The comments of the Minister of Forests, Wildlife and Parks, Pierre Dufour, are increasingly confusing and disturbing. The moratorium on cod fishing was not decreed to “save the species at all costs”, as he claims. At the end of the 1980s, as has been widely demonstrated, cod stocks on the Canadian Atlantic coast were in major decline due to a situation of sustained overexploitation for many years. It was then necessary to provide an increasingly intense and costly fishing effort to capture fish that were smaller and smaller, fewer and fewer and less and less able to reproduce. And it is to try to rebuild sustainable and economically strong fisheries that this moratorium was introduced.
If there is a link to be made with the cod, it is with the forest that it must be made, and not with the caribou. Because what Mr. Dufour is currently proposing is to authorize, over the next few years, a timber harvest that exceeds the production capacity of the forest, as was done for cod with the result that the we know. What will the workers of the forest do when it is no longer in a condition to support a sustainable harvest and it will take decades before it regenerates? More than ten years after having adopted the majority of the conclusions of the Coulombe commission on the management of Quebec’s forests, it seems to me that we should all have understood that we must not go back, including, of course, the minister responsible for this management.
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