November has been a cruel month for Canadian diplomacy. First there was Environment Minister Rosa Ambrose’s crass performance at the Nairobi conference on climate change. Bad enough she went there brandishing the shameful legislation that anoints our country’s worsening record on CO2 emissions, but she had to embarrass us further with a stump speech that should never have left the partisan confines of her riding association.

Next was the Prime Minister’s Office’s amateurish and all too public attempts to schedule a meeting with the Chinese President at the APEC meeting in Viet Nam, which only served to highlight how marginal our influence is on China.

And now, at the UN General Assembly in New York, Canada is lining up behind Spain, one of the world’s most rapacious fishing nations, in an attempt to block a resolution that would impose a moratorium on the highly destructive practice of dragging for fish on the high seas.

Coming on the heels of a study led by a Canadian fisheries scientist that made headlines around the world only two weeks ago by projecting that 90 per cent of the world’s fish stocks will collapse by 2048 unless immediate action is taken, the Canadian position is puzzling to say the least. It is all the more so when one considers that in 1995, Brian Tobin, our Fisheries Minister of the time, stood on a barge near the UN building in New York and hoisted a Spanish dragger net to denounce Spanish overfishing on the high seas.

What has happened in the interim? Has the Canadian position changed?

Not really.

The call for a moratorium on high seas dragging has merely brought to the fore a contradiction in Canadian fisheries policy. While on the international stage Canada has consistently adopted a progressive position and pushed for stronger multilateral conservation instruments, domestically the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has not wavered in its support for the destructive practice of dragging. Despite the incontrovertible evidence that dragging destroys critical fish habitat — in flagrant violation of the Fisheries Act — the Department has steadfastly stood behind the practice and the powerful economic interests that benefit from it.

The reasons for this are complex and part of an unresolved domestic debate about how we should be conducting our fisheries within our 200-mile jurisdictional limit. The debate has faded away since we imposed our own Atlantic groundfish moratorium and sold off our industrial groundfish dragger fleet but it will return with a vengeance if and when our cod stocks on the East Coast do recover.

In the meantime we should not let this unresolved domestic issue cloud our judgment and stop us from supporting responsible, conservation-based positions internationally.

Until recently the high seas were thought to be largely barren of commercially valuable fish species other than highly migratory tuna and squid. The vast majority of fish landings come from the continental shelves that are under coastal state jurisdiction.

But in recent years seamounts beyond national jurisdiction have been discovered on the high seas. These unique geo-marine formations provide the habitat for distinct and commercially valuable fish stocks that are being targeted by the distant water industrial draggers of the world’s major fishing nations. This fishing is completely un-regulated and beyond the jurisdiction of the very weak international fisheries management bodies that do exist. Its pace and impact is such that the world community will lose these precious resources even before it has an opportunity to scientifically identify and protect them.

The responsible and precautionary thing to do is to declare a moratorium on the type of fishing — dragging — that can both wipe out entire and genetically unique fish populations and destroy the habitat that would allow them to perhaps recover.

The precedents for taking such action already exist in the international ban on high seas drift nets, the so-called walls of death outlawed by UN General Assembly resolution in 1992.

Ironically our Minister of Fisheries, Loyola Hearn, an individual who understands all too well how rapidly dragger fishing can deplete a resource, and Department officials have taken the line that those in favour of an international moratorium — countries like the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, Chile — are somehow quixotic and that the Canadian approach, creating new international management instruments, is the practical one.

The Don Quixote here, however, is Canada.

Earlier this year, along with other responsible fishing nations, Canada took the lead in proposing a series of measures to strengthen the existing international instruments that govern high seas fishing. The proposals make sense and are worthy of support but they will take years of patient lobbying and international arm-twisting before any progress is seen.

Meanwhile, destructive and unregulated dragging will continue and the world will lose irreplaceable genetic resources and habitat in the process. The practical thing to do is to put a stop to the destructive practices until such time as proper management instruments can be put in place. That’s what moratoria are all about.

Canada should continue to push for reform of international fish management and conservation instruments, as quixotic as these efforts may be, but it must stop being an obstacle to immediate and practical measures that can make a difference now.

Enough of the embarrassment already.