Note: This is one of a series of articles on this topic. You may find them by clicking “Conservation Issues” in the column on the right. Rod
UPDATE:
Mike Dobbie ran across Ron Zajac’s outstanding editorial in the Brockville Recorder and Times.
http://recorder.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=992227&auth=Ronald+Zajac
——————————————————————————————-
To my mind Raymond Zee and Bill Thake stood out among the many voices at Saturday’s forum on the issue of illegal fishing in Westport. Towards the end of the meeting a comment from an Asian lady at the back of the hall also stuck in my mind, so I decided to see what I could find about how members of the Toronto Chinese community view the situation in Westport by looking at postings on the website of their fishing association.
Once I got past the lines of Chinese characters and was able to select “English” I found http://www.ocaa.smartanglers.com to be a good-natured site dedicated to sharing the enjoyment of fishing. Many of the pictures were of sunrises, great river and lake scenes, family picnics and committee members, pretty much the same mix any other fishing site would have, though with less emphasis upon pictures of boats and fish and more on smiling family groups.
The crappies have started biting, though the author of that message seems to have neglected to tell us where. In a photo he looked cold but happy, holding the first fish of the year.
Apart from a widely-ignored press release from Barbara Hall’s office tossing compliments around to various near-Toronto ridings, the only political activity on the site was a request to participate in a CITY TV phone-in poll to vote against a Canadian boycott of the Olympic Games. It’s interesting that the note anticipated the reader’s shyness when it stressed that callers would not be required to say anything: merely making the call would count as a vote against the boycott.
Six hours after the meeting in Westport an extensive, well-balanced report by a member named Blinky appeared on the site. 96 viewers had read the posting a day later, and Wasabi added the following comment to the article:
“Well written article. Hope this will put an end to violence against fisherman. The locals at Westport were fed up with illegal fishing activities in fish sanctuaries by a selected group of people. There is still a lot to be done to educate newcomers to Canada about the regulations. The Chinese version of the fishing regulations will certainly help and people will have no excuse for not knowing the regulations because they don’t speak or read English.”
The most revealing article on the site, however, is a three-day-old editorial by Jim Etherington entitled “Let’s All Welcome Our Chinese Anglers.” Members of the association have obviously bought into Etherington’s ideas, because Raymond Zee summarized many of its points when he spoke in Westport on Saturday.
One point from Etherington’s article which Zee did not touch upon took me back to my early days as a hunter when I heard someone say, “The No Trespassing signs in Essex County are printed in Italian.” Etherington commented that the problem of “Indiscriminate hunting … no longer exists as the Italians became “Canadianized”, and successive generations became educated in our schools and our societal customs and beliefs. The same thing will happen with the Chinese anglers and their families, as many of them make their fishing forays a family event.”
Etherington goes on to suggest ways “to bring the Chinese community into our responsible angler fold:
- Approach them in a friendly manner. Ask them how they are doing and if they are having any luck.
- Ask them if they have fishing licences. Explain the need for licences and the two types available to them, including the conservation licence.
- Ask to see their catch. If they have out-of-season fish, point that out to them, and if the fish are still alive encourage them to release them.
- If garbage is a problem, ask them to take it home with them and dispose of it in a proper manner.
- If they are noisy and the hour is late, point out they may be intruding on someone else’s privacy, and they should keep the noise down to a minimum.
- Encourage them to join an organization such as the OCAA and the OFAH.
- Should you see incidents of harassment, do not ignore them. Approach the perpetrators and if you don’t get cooperation, then notify the local authorities.
- The most important thing is to be non-confrontational. Be friendly and helpful. These people are Ontario residents, the same as we are, and as such, must be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.
Etherington concludes: “No one wants this problem to continue or get worse. We can do a lot to alleviate the problem through being involved in the educational process. Yes, the problem is theirs, but is also ours if we persist in letting it continue. Both tolerance and understanding of cultural differences is necessary. It’s really up to us to help our new neighbours.”
What’s clear on the website is that leading members of the Chinese angling community are willing to take ownership of the problem of illegal fishing. Raymond Zee’s “bad apples” comment at the meeting reflected this attitude. In his closing remarks he suggested that if the night-time fishing incidents continue, local residents should take photographs and send them to him for publication on the website and within the Chinese community. I’m inclined to take him at his word.
The lady at the back of the hall explained to us on Saturday that in her view the lack of effective law enforcement by the Ministry of Natural Resources led to the crisis of last September; nevertheless, the assaults on Asian fishermen caused Westport to lose face. It’s clear from the website that the Chinese angling community shares this loss.
The Ontario Chinese Anglers Association
550 Hwy 7 E Bldg E Unit 325
(416)930-8287
Planing American Chestnut
April 7, 2008
I’ve always been most reluctant to run used or recovered lumber through my woodworking machines. Why save ten dollars on a board and wreck a $2000. machine?
Time and opportunity may have changed that attitude. Last winter I recovered a 7 X 36′ granary wall from a barn we were demolishing. The wood looked like a cross between white ash and clear pine. It was light and stiff and obviously very resistant to rot, so I carefully piled it away from the mayhem created by the backhoe.
My new drum sander plugs its belts in about 8′ of sanding on a pine board. Then I need to clean the grit by holding a crepe block to the spinning drums until they are ready for more. Baseboards for the house will typically involve the use of sixteen-foot material, and runs of pine of that length could pose an obvious problem. The expensive new sander and dust collection system did a great job on a few pieces of red oak for a door casing, though, so I looked around the barn for a supply of clear, wide boards which would sand well.
The mystery wood from the old barn certainly filled the bill, so I gritted my teeth, cut the ends off the wide, clear boards, and meticulously removed all metal remnants that I could find. So far the planer knives have survived well and the chestnut has proven very easy to machine.
For the doubters (American chestnut has been extinct as a timber tree since 1904, eh?) I have posted a number of photos with captions if you’d care to click on the link entitled “Recovered American chestnut” at the side of this page.
I’d be very interested to hear your comments about the photos, particularly if you have had some experience with chestnut.
UPDATE: At the end of the first day I had planed nine, 14′ boards and eight shorter lengths, all with the 30 degree bevel intact. Most are about 14″ wide, so I should be able to trim them to produce an 11″ baseboard with no trouble. So far there are no nicks on the knives and the planer still cuts well, notwithstanding the inevitable exposure to grit in the old wood. I think there are four long boards remaining, but perhaps I should quit while I’m ahead.
FURTHER UPDATE: I added a review of my new drum sander. You can find it under the heading “Pages” in the column to the right of this article.
Incontinence in a skunk is never a good thing.
April 4, 2008
Visitors to the farm have often encountered the nervous skunk who denned last summer in a pile of rails near the barn. This unseen critter must have been an emotional wreck by fall, because every time anyone went by it let go with a scent-bomb.
Fortunately I rather like a hint of skunk on a spring breeze. There are lots of worse smells: diesel fuel, for example. With the amount of mowing I had to do around the little trees last summer, the two frequently combined.
Having a resident skunk has not been without its compensations. For one, it provided a useful landmark. Last August the Northern Nut Growers Association paid a visit to the Woodlot as part of their annual conference field trip. The elegant tour bus arrived in our barnyard, trailed by a fleet of a dozen Toyotas of various descriptions. It seems a couple of years ago the auto maker donated a new Prius to the NNGA, and the members appreciated the gesture.
As soon as the bus door opened the passengers scattered like a herd of cats. Turns out that after two days of lectures at Carleton and a wild-goose chase through Hull traffic, the members were ready to look at just about anything, as long as it was real and they were free to walk around.
Organizer Neil Thomas strapped a loud-hailer to my shoulder and left it to me to round up the straying visitors. It was easy to give directions: all I had to do was tell them to walk past the barn until they smelled skunk, then turn left and head for the tall walnut tree.
Everyone made the turn at first whiff except for one dignified, barefoot gentleman, who had to investigate further. By the time I caught up to him he was peering under a large rail at the base of the pile, looking for the source of the fumes. At my urging he joined me for the remainder of the tour and the skunk was able to retain its dignity.
Mr. Tucker Hill proved a most engaging and informed companion. A later look at one of their annual reports revealed that Tucker for several decades has been one of the key members of the Northern Nut Growers Association and is currently in charge of the foundation which controls their research endowment.
You can find the Northern Nut Growers Association at http://www.icserv.com/nnga/.
The members followed me on a tour through the walnut grove. Ernie Grimo, a walnut and heartnut grower from Niagara-on-the-Lake, approved of one southward-facing area as a potential site for more walnut plantings. He told me that a drumlin is the ideal location for a nut grove. His plantation in Southern Ontario is on a similar structure, though the land is a little rockier near the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Ernie actually hugged one of the trees, a particularly fine specimen.
As we neared the end of the tour we disturbed a large flight of monarch butterflies. Individually the orange critters don’t look all that impressive, but when the air is full of them all the way up to the top of the canopy a hundred feet above you, it produces a feeling of awe: it’s impossible not to be happy when looking up at a rabble of monarchs.
I couldn’t resist a quip into the microphone: “Sorry, I ordered horseflies, and this is what they sent.”
Neil’s truck brought lunch, and seventy of us feasted at the corner of the walnut grove. I don’t recall a bit of litter on the ground at any time during the picnic. These people certainly knew how to act in a woodlot. In response to my questions, a couple of members politely offered advice on the new plantings. Three weeks later I was still watering…
Back to the skunk:
Anyway, since the thaw has begun the barn has been full of this character’s perfume. At first I suspected that he had come into contact with the larger of the coyotes, who seems to have taught himself to pick roosting pigeons off the main beam in the stable. The snow around their den is littered with pigeon wings.
Then I realized that likely the pigeons themselves were the culprits. They make a lot of noise when coming in and leaving, and this is one easily-startled critter.
The funny thing is that I’ve never met this fellow. The only skunk I have encountered in recent years was a beautiful, placid creature who breakfasted on a can of sardines in a box trap two summers ago. Since we carefully parted company I haven’t seen him again.
Now with the bee guy bringing hives to the property the skunk has become a potential nuisance, rather than just an amusing mouser. Paul Wainick told me that skunks do far more damage than bears because they eat enormous quantities of worker bees as they leave the hives. He didn’t explain how a skunk could do that and yet never be seen during daylight, so I’ll hold off a bit on the live trap.
The Bridge to Goat Island
March 27, 2008
I remember the day in 1961 when the truck inched past my grandparent’s house on Concession Street in Westport with this enormous concrete arch straddled between two trailers behind it. I watched in awe. Without a connecting tongue, how can you control that back trailer? Won’t it twist and run the arch into the ditch?
Then came the corner of Concession and Spring Streets, where they had to turn the rig about 130 degrees in order to get to the lake. I remember that they spent a long time on that corner, and I believe they had to turn the trailers to get around it. Perhaps they used the crane to help with the turn. For some reason that’s as far as I get in my memory of the bridge’s installation. Perhaps my parents decided I’d be better off elsewhere.
That summer and for the next several years The Bridge became the focal point of our lives. It was the meeting place for swims, the trysting place of young love, the place where we challenged our demons with death-defying leaps from the top.
We delighted in spooking boaters in runabouts. Hey, we were kids, and we had developed our cannonball techniques to a fine pitch while routinely sinking the Reverend Ross’s green cedar strip canoe.
Many of us discovered the ultimate in low-cost personal mobility on the water, the inner tube. With flippers we could putter around the harbour and even down to Jake’s Bay in fine style, regardless of our various levels of swimming skill.
The boaters who congregated on the new Goat Island docks enjoyed a way of life which looked pretty good: spend the summer loafing on a dock much like us on the tubes, only with more expensive toys. Boaters were by and large without other transportation, so kids on bicycles often went off to run errands for them in return for tips.
I often wonder if those boaters understood the influence their generosity and good humour had upon the urchins hanging around the docks?
Years later Bet and I bought an old wooden cruiser on Toronto Island, and after a harrowing trip down Lake Ontario, fetched up in Westport. Captain Jack Hearn was most hospitable to novice boaters and we spent a lot of time on the docks before a permanent slip at Indian Lake Marina opened up. Needless to say a pair of jumbo inner tubes rode on the roof. The improvised floats made for pleasant afternoons with three-year-old Charlie and a spaniel puppy named Grover, who learned how to ride the tube with me. Clad in life jacket and hat, Charlie rode with Bet.
Our antics with the tubes produced some amusement for the other boaters, such as the time Charlie and I proudly hauled a substantial chunk of rose quartz by tube out to the anchored boat, but it wasn’t until I mentioned in conversation that we used to jump off the bridge into our tubes that Tony, a rather aloof sort up to that point, showed an interest.
“You mean to tell me you used to jump off that bridge into an inner tube?”
“Yeah, we did it all the time,” I answered.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Want me to show you?”
“This I have to see!”
Quite a crowd lined the bridge as I climbed up onto the railing, oversized inner tube in hand. I explained to my challenger: “The idea is to toss the tube down cleanly onto the water, and then jump so as to brush the forward edge of the tube with your heels, then reach down, grab the sides, and pull yourself down into it before you hit the water. Then you just hang on. Oh yeah, and make sure the valve is pointed down.” Privately I wondered if this would work. I had put on about a hundred pounds since the last time I had tried this, but my wife, son and friends were watching, so I had to make good on my brag.
I dropped the tube correctly, so I waited until the valve had rotated to 9:00, then followed it into the water. My heels brushed the far side of the tube just right; I grabbed on and splashed down without mishap. Applause erupted from the rather surprised crew in the gallery.
“Give me that.” Before I could even get up the ladder Tony had the tube from me and was marching up the bridge.
“Be sure to toss it flat, so that it doesn’t roll!” He sailed a beauty down to the water, then climbed up and jumped. That’s when things went a bit wrong. I don’t know if he missed with his heels or he had forgotten the instructions, but he jumped right through the tube. He came up scraped and bleeding.
That’s when I remembered the valve stem, a long, vicious brass thing.
That valve stem left Tony with some spectacular vertical scratches, but in the twenty-four years since he has emerged as about as good a friend as a guy could have.
Ski Doo Alpine: 2 Ez-Go Golf Cart: 3
March 21, 2008
This morning dawned clear and cold, with a strong wind from the north. If ever there would be a day this year for running on the crust, this would have to be it. As soon as I got to the farm I took the Ez-Go out on the rock-hard snow. Great. A quick tour of the property located a couple of dodgy areas where I fell through but had enough momentum to get out again. It looked as though the cart could see some action today.
The first chore was to deliver gas to the stranded Alpine back in the woods. That done, I backed out on my track to the safer fields, then headed north to visit the maple orchard. The cold forced me back to the house for a helmet with visor, but then I did a one-mile circuit of the farm at a great rate.
Play comes before work, but the next task was to take four 55 gallon drums of accumulated sawdust and wood scraps back to the pile at the edge of the property. These had accumulated over the winter and seriously cramped my style, so I was glad to have the drums empty, even if I found the trip out very cold in each case.
A trip to the gas station for fuel for the cart, and I was ready to play in full snowmobile attire. Charlie had shown up by this time and he snapped the action shot above.
Off to the woodlot.
That looks ominous on the page, and I should have known better. Fifty feet along the first trail and I felt the back tires break through the crust. Then I made my second dumb decision: I decided to push the cart ahead, speed up, and hope the crust got better. Three hundred feet further into the woods (and further from the house) I dropped my visor and jammed the cart through the dead branches of an overhanging tree, but it was for naught. All four wheels dropped into the suddenly-weak snow. Oops!
On the brighter side, I was quite close to the abandoned Alpine, so I gassed it up and the engine caught on the first pull. That refurbished primer makes all of the difference. It warmed up readily, but wouldn’t move. The front ski was frozen to the ground, about two feet below the back of the machine, which was sitting pretty on the crust. I raided a nearby rail fence and jammed, prodded and pried until the front tip came free. I thought I’d try it at that, so I fired up, dropped the Alpine into forward, and eased it out of its mid-winter burrow.
The single ski proved to steer very well on the crust. That was odd. I don’t recall ever driving the thing when it was easy to steer. Anyway, I swung around and picked up the Ez-Go’s track, then eased by it and backed in front. I tied a short length of rope from the towing eye on the cart to the hitch on the Alpine, then fired up and eased ahead.
Mistakes travel in threes, right? The Ez-Go pulled much harder than I expected, but the Alpine has lots of torque and so the driverless cart soon popped up on the crust, tried to overtake the Ski-Doo, then veered into a tree, stopping with a crash. It’s a credit to the cart’s design that it wasn’t damaged (see below)*. The polycarbonate fender bent out of the way and the front tire took the impact. My pal J.P. once told me, “The golf cart is the only motor vehicle ever designed to be driven by drunks.” Perhaps I should add “fools” to his definition.
Once it had shaken off the odd bit of tree bark the cart was fine, so I drove it around the remainder of the trail and back to the house in disgrace, collected Charlie, and returned for the Alpine. Charlie’s a little more cautious than I when it comes to crust, and he made me jump out of the cart as he did a loop close to the Alpine, then booted it out of there.
So I brought the Alpine in from the cold after its prolonged session in the woods. All in all, I guess it was the better vehicle today, though the Ez-Go certainly did its best.
UPDATE: March 22, 2008
Today it was still cold and the crust proved more reliable for the Ez-Go. With it I took a tour of the farm and exposed many pixels on the digital camera. The Alpine stayed where it sat. For a photo shoot the golf cart wins, hands down.
Alpine: 1 Ez-Go: 1
UPDATE: March 24, 2008
The crust is still holding well in the cold weather. After a tour of the southern half of the farm, today the Ez-Go earned its keep moving wood for the renovation project from the barn to the house. Boards too long to ride in the truck can be balanced across the Ez-Go’s dash board and the sweater basket for quick transportation when the trailers are all frozen in.
Once again the golf cart keeps finding uses in all seasons, now that its cold-weather fuel supply problem has settled down.
Today I also used the trailer hitch and a tie-down strap to yank two 18′ boards out of the bottom of a lumber pile. The cart offers good low-end torque in a confined area. I can’t see the Alpine doing this.
The papers today are full of the story of the guy who rigged his electric golf cart with a snowplow and remote controls. He clears his driveway from a standing position in his living room window. I don’t know about that, but the Ez-Go is definitely the sanding vehicle of choice on the farm. Put a plastic tub of sand on the back, fill it, add a shovel and away you go. The advantage over the tractor and loader is that it is much easier to get on and off to move the vehicle. The advantage of the cart over boot leather is that it’s much healthier to skid on the ice than to fall on it.
Alpine: 1 Ez-Go:4
* May 25th, 2008. I spoke too soon about the lack of damage from the impact with the tree. The front axle bent a bit. The left front wheel now tows out, and the suspension sits a bit lower on it than the others. This has caused some binding of the suspension on short turns, and it has reduced the turning circle to the right by a foot or two. Apart from that the cart has still worked normally in the many hours of operation this spring. I guess Alpines handle crashes into trees more readily than do Ez-Go’s.
Alpine: 2 Ez-Go: 4
The unbearable attraction of crusted snow
March 15, 2008
Saturday afternoon the fine weather lured me out on the crust with snowshoes. As I marched along, camera in hand, surrounded by exquisite March beauty, I kept yearning for a good freeze. If this snow were hard I could drive the golf cart in a straight line all the way to Kingston.
Alas, I have a fatal attraction for crust, starting in my early years in Westport with expeditions on mountain and lake, and I’ve never lost the urge. It’s a magical time of year when the whole world turns hard and you can travel anywhere, over lakes, fences, thickets, beaver ponds – it’s all under a heavy layer of crust.
It was a particularly fine March afternoon when Don, Bob, John and I borrowed a ski-tow rope from Ansley Green, tied it behind my old VW Beetle, and went skiing on the Little Rideau.
I was first up because they were my skis and I had had one lesson. Don Goodfellow drove. The Beetle would only do forty-five on the crust, so after a round of the bay I tried to get a bit more speed by cutting side to side behind my tow. I found I could jerk the light car sideways if I came up beside the driver, braced myself and pulled.
The vibration from the rough surface made it feel as though every bone in my feet had come loose and was pinging around inside the boots, but apart from that it was a thrilling ride on the vast, icy surface. I swung to the right, checked on Bob Conroy in the passenger seat, ignored John Wing making faces at me through the narrow back window, then whipped all the way around to Don’s side and gave a massive tug. The rope broke.
I still can’t believe I did this, but I kept my balance in that sideways slide for a very, very long time, until I stopped. After that I didn’t want to ski anymore, and no one else wanted to try it either.
Next weekend John had access to his dad’s favourite toy, a very fine military-surplus Ford Jeep. Again it was a cold March day, but the series of thaws and freezes during the week had reduced the snow pack to an asphalt-hard crust, while smoothing the landscape out just enough that we thought we’d try to explore the Upper Mountain by Jeep. There’s a campground on the site now, but at the time it was just granite and brush, and the Jeep picked its way over the large mounds with little difficulty. There’s no thrill quite like driving on the crust.
Then we hit the frost hole. It was just a small flat area of snow, but John’s Ford dropped through into this big puddle and sank to the axles in a heartbeat. It didn’t stop there, but slowly oozed its way down into the mud until the goo topped the seats. We’d been stuck before, but never anything like this. Now what?
I remembered hearing a local tale about a crew who had laid railway track across a sink hole filled with gravel back in the railroad era. The chief forgot to move their locomotive to harder ground overnight. All that was left in the morning was bent track on both sides of the hole. They never saw their engine again. We needed to do something fast.
I’d remembered seeing Floyd Snider and his bulldozer at the dump as we drove by, and Floyd was the sort who would help us out, so we hiked the half-mile across country to ask him what we should do.
“O.K., Boys, I’ll just finish up this little bit. Then I’ll come over and give you a hand.” Surely enough, Floyd soon left his work and walked the dozer back on our tracks to the stranded Jeep. “You dropped into a frost hole, Boys,” he chuckled heartily. Floyd positioned the dozer and sent John into the muck with the heavy winch cable.
Fortunately the Jeep still had all of its military towing equipment in place. John felt around in the waist-deep mud until he snagged Floyd’s cable onto the nearest hook. The three of us leaned over and with some effort dragged John free.
The dozer stretched the cable a bit, but then the Jeep reluctantly slurped its way free of the massive suction of the mud. It was one sorry looking Ford sitting there in the muddy slush when Floyd reeled up his winch cable, left us two shovels, and returned, singing, to his work.
He had made it clear that we had to clean the mud out of the Jeep’s running gear before we started it. We appreciated the help and the advice, and worked frantically to get the engine compartment clear before everything froze into a block. Then the tough little beast started right up, apparently none the worse for its adventure. Another hour with a hose in Wing’s garage and it was as good as new.
We stayed on the roads for the rest of our explorations that spring.
About the upcoming meeting in Westport on fishing
March 10, 2008
Be it the problem of unlicensed drivers in California or illegal fishermen in Ontario, a troubling issue in North America is the emergence of an underclass of immigrants cut off from the benefits and obligations of citizenship. Decisions by bureaucrats and law-enforcement personnel have allowed the decay. Cheap Mexican labour means big profits, so officials wink at the underground society. So what do van-loads of night-time fishermen offer to Ontario legislators? An Asian voting block may very well control the balance of power in Ontario in the next election, and the current government seems unwilling to do anything about the illegal fishing issue except play it for political gain.
Let’s get back to fishing and how it affects the rule of law.
1. The foundation of Ontario sport-fishing is the absolute requirement that all fishermen be licensed and informed of the game regulations, and that they willingly adhere to these regulations and expect others to adhere to them also.
Ontario society cannot afford digressions from this code. If the law is not enforced, then pressure falls on others to fill the gap. This leads to breakdowns in the social order which no group or individual wants.
2. If we are to hold all fishermen to a high standard, the Ministry of Natural Resources must improve its communications with its clients. The annual fishing regulations booklet is difficult for a reader without a strong background in English. What’s more, the website version of the regulations is unusable. A forward-looking ministry would reach out to the Asian community with a website and information packages which met the needs of its changing clientele.
3. The quality of game and fisheries law enforcement in Ontario has deteriorated because of budget constraints and mismanagement, and this trend must be reversed.
The Auditor-General of Ontario’s Annual Report, 2007, p. 153:
The majority of conservation officers work eight-hour shifts that normally conclude before six in the evening, and there are generally few overnight shifts. According to ministry staff, most public complaints during the night do not need immediate attention, even though almost 20% of the calls to the Ministry’s TIPS reporting hotline occur during overnight hours. We were informed that enforcement staff cannot respond to complaints in off hours without supervisory approval because the costs of overtime must be balanced with the severity of the complaint and concerns about staff safety. We were also informed that extensive off-hours work could diminish the staff’s ability to carry out regular day patrols. However, failure to respond to complaints on a timely basis may increase the risk of illegal activity going undetected.
On p. 151:
The Ministry allocates operational support funding to the Enforcement Branch that averages approximately $9,000 per conservation officer to carry out field-enforcement activities. From our review of the enforcement activities in the districts that we visited, and discussions with enforcement supervisors and officers, we noted the following:
– For the four units reviewed, the funds budgeted were insufficient to carry out the planned enforcement activities…. As a result, conservation officer patrol hours had been reduced from planned levels by between 15% and 60%…. If there was a shortfall in funding, district offices were not allowed to reallocate funds from other activities to the enforcement units, as was the case in prior years.
-For the enforcement units reviewed, conservation officers were unable to carry out additional harvest monitoring because of resource constraints. In this regard they were restricted to spending between $75 and $125 a week for operating costs such as meals, gas, vehicle repairs and maintenance, and travel. At this level of funding, we noted that conservation officers carried out regular patrols an average of one or two days a week during the 2006/7 fiscal year, compared to an average three or four days a week the previous fiscal year. In the case of one unit, we noted that regular patrols were suspended by mid-November 2006 for lack of funds, even though the deer hunting season still had another 10 days to run.
4. We must do all we can to maintain the social contract among citizens of Ontario to respect and conserve our fisheries by obeying the law.
The government must tread very carefully here. The Toronto Asian vote may be at stake, but winking at violations creates an underclass of outlaws.
Canadian history is full of ignoble actions by legislators toward people of Asian origin whom they courted for their numbers, but considered beneath the law. The railway was pushed through the Rockies by Chinese laborers, but the railway pioneers wanted only their labour, with no interest in their lives as citizens of the growing nation. Sir John A. Macdonald spoke in Parliament about “these magnificent human machines” which they could rent to do the hardest labour in the Rockies. Little wonder that several hundred of these “machines” were left to die of starvation and exposure in an isolated camp one winter.
In 1942 Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry lost their homes and livelihoods to legislators and few spoke out for them. In the current case the politicians seem to want votes, but again I fear they have little interest in the lives and needs of individual Asian-Canadians.
I suggest that we must hold all fishermen to the same high standard of behaviour, without exception, regardless of their language or place of birth. Effective law enforcement is the most viable way to ensure that society’s norms are adhered to, and we must make sure that no one in Ontario is below or above the law.
In my book if he’s a good fisherman, he’s welcome.
Waiting for the other shoe…
March 8, 2008
If you were hit by the last snowstorm, the following passage is just more of the same, and you may ignore it. If you hail from somewhere warm and dry, however, you may wish to read it 1) to affirm your decision to flee winter 2) to give an idea of what a lot of snow is like or 3) because you are the one person who enjoyed the CBC’s The Week the Women Went and just can’t get enough of Canadian reality media.
—————————————————————-
The Weather Channel has shown a red screen for two days in anticipation of the main event, the Storm of the Winter, or the Storm of the Decade, depending upon who was speaking. They predicted a major snowfall, potentially crippling the district with more than a half-metre of accumulation. They promised high winds, mixed rain, ice pellets and snow, the whole thing coming in a series of waves over two days or more.
This one was different. We knew it by the evil wind which blew the snow back in our faces this morning as we worked to clear six inches of fine, dense powder from the driveways. We knew it in the deeper tone of the snowblower’s engine as it worked its way through a wind-hardened drift. This was not the powder of gentle snows. We knew it by the frenetic activity around the bird feeders this day, by the sudden bravery of a grey squirrel shopping in the feeder for an emergency supply of seed instead of languidly trimming buds off the elms.
When the deck at the rear of the farm house needed another four inches of snow cleared after two hours so that the birds could be fed again, and three cardinals sat waiting for the emergency food delivery, we knew this was a bad one.
So I was ready for the drive back to Smiths Falls on the deserted highway. A snow-covered road should hold no terrors for the driver of a well-equipped 4X4 in late winter, right? Yet when the wind gusted from unfamiliar directions and wiggled the front wheels loose from their tracks, I felt fear. This wasn’t normal snow-pack on the road. There was a layer of grease under it.
So I arrived at home, parked on the street, blew out the driveway again, and put the truck safely away in the garage. Exhausted, I fell asleep for a few hours, and awakened to another six inches of snow, and no traffic on the streets. So far I have removed about a foot of snow, there’s another six inches on the ground, and the storm’s not yet half over.
The hush that has settled over the town? We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.
7:00 a.m., Sunday, March 9, 2008
I’m in Smiths Falls, a town of 10,000 in Eastern Ontario. As of 7:00 a.m. nothing is plowed; nothing is moving. The Weather Channel says that the O.P.P. have switched to snowmobiles and are warning drivers to stay off the roads. The first image I saw on the screen was film of a fire crew evacuating the passengers (all unhurt) from a Greyhound bus on its side in a ditch.
It may be tricky to get to the farm to do the snow removal today.
8:45 a.m., Sunday, March 9, 2008
That other shoe has landed pretty hard. My blower could handle the snow, but it was usually up to the top of the hopper in the regular running on the paths around the house. In the driveway I moved an even 12″ of firm powder. The wind seems to have done me a favour there, because the pack on the streets seems considerably deeper than that.
The first vehicle I saw this morning was a heavy duty Dodge Ram 4X4, stuck in front of our house. He couldn’t make it up a slight rise on the main street, and he had all four wheels at work, pounding up and down like pile drivers. It seems that whatever’s under the snow offers very little traction. The driver eventually escaped by turning down a slight slope on a side street. This enabled him to gain some momentum, and he was off.
A plow truck weighted with a full load of sand has made a couple of passes through on George Street and now a Pontiac/Matrix-clone is stuck facing downhill, unable to breach the snowbank left by the truck. Another Dodge 4X4 backed up to the Pontiac and offered a tow, but there’s nowhere to hook a rope on that generation of vehicles, so the guy has gone back to work with a little red shovel.
9:08
While I watch a GMC pickup hopelessly mired in snow in the middle of Church Street, a telephone conversation with my mother at the farm reveals that the door to the balcony off her kitchen is frozen shut. That’s where the bird feeders are, and they need attention. The alternate entrance from the wing we are renovating is also snowed in by about a foot, even though it’s up an 8″ step from the balcony. She bent the door enough to toss some feed out, but we worked out a compromise that she establish a new feeding station outside an upstairs bathroom window which I think will open and close with relative ease. The birds and the squirrel are boldly demanding more food, so this crisis must be dealt with immediately.
Heat and hydro, more mundane matters in the short term, seem to be operating normally.
10:30
Two road graders attack the street grid in this area, and they shortly have paths through so that people can get out, once they have cleared their driveways again. We nudge out of the garage only to back directly into a deluge from my neighbour’s snowblower. I had suggested that he might as well blow his snow onto my driveway and then send it along south, because if he tried to blow it north over an eight-foot bank it would just drift south with the wind again, anyway. So he was at it, but his glasses were so fogged and he was in such misery from blowback that he didn’t notice a black pickup truck inching by ten feet to his right.
The drive out of Smiths Falls was on cleanly-scraped glare ice. Hwy 15 offered more of the same, though it seemed less slippery. Bet let me out on Young’s Hill at the farm and left me to snowshoe in the lane to the tractor while she bided her time with the truck at the Forfar Cheese Factory. The Massey-Ferguson 35’s blower had little trouble with the drifted snow on the driveway, though there was a lot of it. Before long the lane was clear and a call to her cell reeled Bet and the truck in. I decided not to plow to the barn, as the drifts out there are huge and I might break the blower while we still need it to clear the driveway.
12:00
The back deck was a chore. Mom’s door was blocked by a two-foot drift. On the rest of the deck nearly a foot of soft snow combined with ice from dripping eaves to produce a half-hour of heavy shoveling. But that was it. By 2:00 the sun was out and we were well into a lovely spring day with pristine snow all around.
2:30
Back in Smiths Falls the banks were high, the driving lanes narrow, but everything had pretty well returned to normal.
Dolly, the Belgian Mare
February 27, 2008
If you were to believe the photos on the stairway of my mother’s house you would swear that I could ride a horse before I walked. While this is not an inaccurate impression, it fails to take into account the forty-five year gap in my equestrian exploits after a series of disasters with a mean little pinto stallion named Tony that my dad figured I would somehow grow into.
The bites and bruises eventually became too much, and the homicidal little maniac went to a riding stable where he apparently settled down nicely. By my sixth year I had decided that dogs were more trustworthy, and that was that.
Of course everyone else in my family loves horses. My dad’s Belgians made great moving wallpaper, I’ll grant them that. They were beautiful, placid animals, and if you treated them like large, dull-witted golden retrievers they weren’t hard to get along with at all.
I had come up with a variety of methods of gathering sap from my two dozen buckets when the maple syrup run began each year. The first season there was no snow, so the golf cart did the job quickly and efficiently. The next year I upended the oil drum on the back of a vintage Ski Doo Alpine purchased for the purpose. As long as it sat and idled willingly while I gathered the sap it was fine, but with twenty-five gallons of product on the back it was hard to steer, even though the ride was much improved. When it stalled there was always some question if I would have the strength to restart its huge, high-compression motor.
The year after that the Alpine was in pieces and my tractor and trailer had the sap-gathering job. One morning after a heavy snowfall I needed to go back and look at the buckets and see if the little covers had kept the snow out, or if I would need to dump them before the next run.
The snow was too deep for the tractor, so I put the bridle on an amazed Dolly and led her out of the stable. The next hour was quite an education for me on the thinking patterns of a kindly Belgian mare.
I knew she’d be careful to protect me from harm if I climbed onto her back, so I mounted up off a nearby fence. Dolly didn’t mind, but my pelvis sent out an urgent distress call as soon as I straddled her broad back. I could put my legs over all right, but my hip joints felt as though they were being torn apart. There must be a more comfortable way to do this. Sidesaddle?
As a kid I sat right on the horse’s neck and dug my fingers into the mane to stay on, then kicked like crazy with my feet to direct the horse, but somehow as an adult it didn’t seem right to sit on top of the horse’s shoulders. She might stop for a bite to eat and I’d be down around her ears. I settled in over the saddle area and hoped numbness would come quickly. The ride was nice and warm, though.
Dolly agreed to go for a walk, but when she got about two hundred feet from the barn she stopped, gently turned around, and walked back. Huh? Mom later told me that my dad had trained her to walk that route with the many kids over the years who had come to the farm for a ride.
Now Dolly was my friend, but this wouldn’t do, so the next circuit out I used the bit and my heels to make it clear to her that we’d venture a little further afield this time. A snort and some head-shaking, and Dolly reluctantly plugged back the lane through the deep snow. I noticed that without her partner, Duke, Dolly walked exactly in the middle of whatever lane she faced.
This posed a problem in the woods. I wanted to look into the sap buckets without getting off the horse, so I tried to persuade Dolly to move over closer to the trees. No way. She just wouldn’t do it, for fear of scraping her rider off on a tree, I guess. Whatever I tried by way of backing her up, turning at ninety degrees to the trail, stopping, speeding up – they all ended with Dolly, whatever direction she ended up facing, standing exactly in the middle of the logging road.
Eventually I gave up and headed Dolly back to the stable, but because the snow drifts were very deep I thought I’d cut out into the field to find easier walking for the horse. That’s where we hit the frozen puddles. They happen often in spring. The water drains away from beneath an inch of ice. This day they were covered by snow and invisible to both horse and rider.
Poor Dolly. Every time she cracked the ice the horse thought she was going to die. She didn’t start or buck or balk, she just internalized the panic, but I could feel the shudder slowly run down her neck, along her spine, through her ribs and back to her tail — every time she took a step which cracked ice. And we had a great deal of ice to crack: it was a ten-acre field. It made no difference to her that she had pastured this field every day of her life and had come to no harm, or that the previous dozen crunches underfoot hadn’t actually hurt her. Nope, she was going to drown, she just knew it, and yet she nobly shivered her way across the field to the barn.
She was a glum and tired horse by the time she regained her stall. When I landed on the ground I discovered I could hardly walk for bowleggedness, but my hip joints recovered fairly quickly.
I immediately got to work on the ailing snowmobile. It has always been more than willing to run into trees, and I had had enough of getting out-thought by my vehicle. There was no danger of the Alpine doing that.
the Walnut Diary 