TfieTlTherman
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HAL GRIFFIN, Editor
Authorised as second class mail by Post Office Department. Ottawa, and for payment of postage in cash. Published by the Fisherman Publishing Society every Friday except the last Friday of the month. Deadline: Wednesday prior to publication.
Davis Opportunity
APPOINTMENT of Jack Davis as minister of fisheries and forestry in Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau's new cabinet will be welcomed by fishermen on this coast as meeting their demand for a fisheries minister "fully conversant with the Pacific fishery resource," as UFAWU business agent Jack Nichol wrote Prime Minister Trudeau last week.
It's sufficient commentary on former fisheries minister H. J. Robichaud's departure for the Senate that no one in any section of the B.C. fishing industry has voiced any regret at his going or had a word of commendation for his performance in office.
As the member for Coast-Capilano, Davis must know that he inherits a long list of problems his predecessor did nothing to resolve. At the same time, he has the opportunity to prove himself in the office, as did James Sinclair, the last B.C. Liberal to hold the portfolio, by asserting this country's sovereign rights in Pacific waters and responding to fishermen's needs.
These heeds have been stated so often as scarcely to require reiteration — a realistic salmon licence limitation scheme coupled with a bold program to rehabilitate the fishery; declaration of headlandao headland baselines to give substance to the 12 mile limit; Canadian initiative to bring all countries fishing the North Pacific into a new fisheries treaty; development of Pacific offshore fisheries by Canadian vessels manned by Canadian fishermen. All these problems and more await Davis' attention.
Addition of forestry to the fisheries portfolio might be more practical if the federal government held the power, now vested in the province, to regulate the lumber and pulp monopolies whose practices, whether cutting in spawning areas or log driving and booming on salmon rivers, constitute a grave threat to the industry. In view of our long tradition as a fishing nation and the nature of the present problems retarding our potential role in world fisheries, the fisheries portfolio in itself would seem to be responsibility enough.
HARRY RANKIN
Housing Only Answer to Ftret raps
THE fire which swept through the 75-year-old Clarence Hotel, killing five people last month, should be a warning to Vancouver City Council.
There are scores of such old tenements and rooming houses on Vancouver's Skid Road and in other slum districts. Each is a potential death trap. In the event of fire, more people will lose their lives.
These hotels and rooming houses do not even begin to meet city safety and health standards. They
are cramped, over-crowded and dirty. For a long time, many have been completely unfit for human habitation. They pay little taxes and their owners spend next to nothing on repairs. They should be condemned, and until they are torn down, they should be abandoned to the rats, cockroaches and bedbugs that infest them now.
In the inquiry into the Clarence Hotel fire, the coroner's jury was informed that even the fire alarm wasn't in working order. Had it been functioning, some lives might have been saved.
★ * *
WHY SHOULD CITY COUN-
cil continue to tolerate such fire and death traps? Why are they "overlooked" in the enforcement of the city's safety and health regulations? Is it because some of the owners of these slum tenements are among our most wealthy and respectable citizens? Council banned the so called
illegal suites, giving health and safety as reasons. Anyone who has gone through some of the old tenements as I have will agree with me, I am sure, that they are a thousand times worse. Yet council turns a blind eye on them.
Are the human being in these tenements expendable because they are old, poor and down and out? Must we continue to have a double standard in enforcing our own bylaws? We had the Beacon Hotel fire in May when four people perished; last month we had the Clarence Hotel fire with five dead. How many more fires and deaths are required to move council to act?
The coroner's jury in the Clarence Hotel case recommended that older buildings be compelled to install fire alarms and fire doors. This is the very minimum that should be done. ★ * *
I WOULD RECOMMEND that council order an immediate investigation into all old tenement and rooming houses in the city, starting with the big ones in the downtown and Skid Road areas. Our object should be:
—Where a building can be cleaned up and made safe, set a time limit for this to be done.
—Where the buildings are just too old, condemn them and close them up.
—To undertake without delay the building of low rental accommodation for the unfortunate people who now must live in these tenements. Under the terms of the National Housing Act, this can be done without cost to the city because Ottawa pays 75 percent of the capital costs and the province pays the other 25 per cent.
"<3"n *"*
• Echo sounders had only recently been adopted for use in the fishery when Charlie Clarke's Western Girl made the near record herring set of 1,050 tons pictured here. February 5, 1945, was the date and Surf Inlet the location. Clarke, contemporary and longtime friend of recently deceased seine skipper Norman Gunderson, estimates as many fish got away as were taken in this set. Western Girl, built at W. R. Menchions Ltd. in 1942, was still painted naval grey at the time.
FISH and SHIPS
THE FISHERMAN — JULY 12, 1968
rOTHING better illustrates the credibility gap than two reports appearing in the daily press across the North American continent toward the end of last month.
The first, from Saigon, announced that South Vietnamese forces had shot down 12 Soviet-made North Vietnamese helicopters below the demilitarized zone, three on June 15 and nine on June 16. Military experts immediately speculated on the significance of this appearance of North Vietnamese helicopters so far south.
But a week later it transpired that the 12 helicopters shot down by the South Vietnamese were in reality the U.S. cruiser Boston, the Australian destroyer Hobart, two U.S. Navy patrol boats and one U.S. Coast Guard cutter, all of which had been fired upon by U.S. artillery when they were picked up by radar and wrongly identified as low-flying helicopters.
The second, arising from a study made by Prof. E. J. Sternglass of the radiology -department at University of Pittsburgh, was his well substantiated claim that leukemia in children aged one to 10 doubled in an eight year period following radioactive fallout over the Albany-Troy, New York area, during a rainstorm in 1953. The radioactive debris, said Stern-glass, came from a 43 kiloton nuclear weapons test in Nevada in April 1953.
Sternglass presented his findings in a paper given to the annual meeting of the Health Physics Society attended by physicists from many countries and among his conclusions was a questioning of the validity of U.S. civil defence estimates of tolerable radiation limits, 100 to 200 roentgens, when even one-tenth of one roentgen could double the incidence rate of leukemia in children.
Predictably, the New York state health department issued a release calculated to discredit Prof. Sternglass, asserting there was no evidence to support his findings.
As Edward Bellamy said in his Looking Backward, "The inequalities of men and the lust of acquisition are a constant premium on lying."
★ * ★
We had further word this week of longliner Barney Bing, who was in St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver when we last mentioned him in this department. Since then he has been in St. Mary's Hospital and he is now back at his home in Se-chelt, "still very ill," according to his wife Bena.
"It would be nice if he could hear from a few fishermen," she wrote. "Dan Morgan phoned him, and Lars Olsen, but he
has gone out for three months." The address is R.R. 1, Sechelt,
★ * ★
We also had word this week that Sverre Nordhus, skipper of the Robert B, is in Prince Rupert General Hospital recovering, we hope, from double pneumonia.
★ * *
In a note last week from Prince Rupert General Hospital, UFAWU member Bob Millette told us he was expecting to be discharged in a day or two after being treated for ulcers. Bob collapsed at sea earlier aboard the seiner Sea Fury and initially was suspected to have been victim of a heart attack.
He had words of thanks for Dr. G. Currie and Nelson Bros., whose plane flew him in to Prince Rupert from Whale Channel, and for UFAWU organizers Florence Greenwood and George Hewison for their help while he was in hospital.
★ ★ ★
With last week's obituary on veteran seine skipper Richter Iverson, victim of a tragic accident at Port Renfrew on June 24, The Fisherman carried a picture showing Iverson aboard an unidentified vessel 30 years or more ago with the late Olaf Anderson and another man.
This week, Mrs. Constance Anderson, widow of the longtime fisherman who died last August, telephoned us with details on the picture which, apparently, had brought back many memories.
She told us that the boat was the old Tatchu, which her husband skippered for several years on the west coast. "The young deer shown in the photo-
• Some names were spelled incorrectly when we published this picture, taken at Sunnyside Cannery, in our last issue. With UFAWU acting president T. (Buck) Suzuki (right) are (left to right) Pete Takasaki, K. Ham-aoka and 82 year old I. Nakatani.
graph had been picked up out of the water near Ceepeecee by the crew," she said. "I remember well hearing about it from my husband at the time."
Identification of the third man in the photograph is made virtually impossible because of blurring but he must have been one of the men named by Mrs. Anderson as sailing with her late husband and Iverson on the Tatchu at that time: Robert Car-ruthers, Dave Robertson, Ole Berg, Peter (Big Pete) Davidson, Louis Larsen and one other fisherman whose first name was Andy.
★ ★ ★
The Kodiak Daily Mirror carries a note in its June 18 edition that "the Canadian halibut-ter Nanceda is being towed in following an engine breakdown by the Coast Guard cutter Citrus."
★ * ★
New associate editor of the Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada is 59 year old Dr. L. W. Billingsley, formerly scientific editor and head of the Defence Research Board's publishing section. He is also a former editor of the Canadian Journal of Research.
He succeeds 37 year old Dr. G. Ian Pritchard, who has been appointed technological consultant to board chairman Dr. F. Ronald Hayes.
★ * ★ Vancouver Public Aquarium,
we are informed, has a fine new collecting boat, built by Kris Frostad of Frostad Boat Works to the design of Ray Bardsnes and launched by Mrs. Kathy Newman last month.
The whimsies of fishermen in naming their boats give us enough trouble as it is and the Aquarium's choice, Nautichthys, though scientifically appropriate, is not calculated to lessen them.
Built of laminated plywood with a fibreglass skin around heavy wood keels, frames and other members, the new collecting boat has a 27 foot length and a nine foot one inch beam. The Aquarium's newsletter describes her as being "very sturdy and compact and specially fitted out to enable Aquarium staff collectors to harvest live fishes and invertebrates of many types . . .
"For holding the captured specimens, a fibreglassed 270 gallon livewell is built into the work deck. The tank can be constantly flushed with external water or the water can be recirculated and filtered from within the boat . . .
"To facilitate diving, we have a folding swim grid on the-transom and racks to hold scuba tanks and gear . . ."
Bardsnes' design for the boat, incidentally, is a modification of a high speed one man gillnetter.