I appreciate your Passion Stizzla. We do need those younger to pass the Torch to and it is always a small dedicated few who carry the load for a great many and demonstrate leadership quality. I think you have that, but it is also a learning process. I hope you can make the Meeting tonight at the Prestige Hotel in Sooke at 7:00 pm. I have been through a number of fishery battles over the years and held picket signs outside MP constituency offices etc. My age and chemo drugs definitely slow me down now. We have won some of those battles over the years to various degrees and in some cases have limited or at least slowed further damage to our fishery. I hope you will stay involved.
For those who say nothing has worked and that nothing is being done, that is just not accurate. The dedicated few are even now working behind the scenes and not everything is talked about in public forms. We are lucky that this time we are going into a Federal Election in 2019. We used that very effectively during the Halibut Quota Wars and got a not insignificant concession out of the Harper Government.
My own view is that we are not going to reverse all of these recent attacks on small coastal communities, our economy and the opportunity to teach our children to fish, especially in the short term. We can I believe tweek them, if we make the Liberal Federal Government nervous. There are many ways we can do that which worked well in the past going into an election. We need to take them on in their riding's and energize our base in smaller communities all over the province, especially in the coastal communities. The NGO's are powerful and the Liberals are placating them by the recent attacks on coastal BC. Remember that the NGO's and the urban elites who support them are largely based in Vancouver and Victoria. We do not need to engage and go up against their strength directly. That does not mean that we cannot threaten the Liberal seats in those areas. Some of those Liberal seats were won by narrow margins. Our strengths is numbers and even in the lower mainland we have many who were harmed by this Liberal attack. We need to organize,, motivate and get out those voters and some of those Liberal seats are gone.
Hope you make it to the meeting tonight Stizzla and perhaps you would like to go out on my boat off Sooke sometime this summer and toss around some ideas.
PS I have noted a lot of DFO bashing in this and other related threads and I have done it myself in the past. I would suggest that we decrease doing that on this issue as it just insulates their bosses the Liberal Government from direct criticism and decreases their nervousness. On this issue we should direct our anger and criticism where it belongs and more importantly where it will do the most good. The message should be - If the liberal Government, does not support sport fishing, our quality of life and the economy of Coastal BC, we are going to do everything we can to harm your election chances everywhere we can. We will single issue vote and it will be anyone but a Liberal and perhaps the Greens. I don't think we can afford a protest vote for the Greens this time around.
