I reject this ill thought…

I reject this ill thought out proposal for a number of reasons.

1) It is not based on sufficient scientific data and knowledge.
a) current population levels are not known.
b) the Minister of MNRF stated on the radio (CBC) today that the cormorants are eating a lot of sport fish. This is untrue as they mainly eat species not directly sought as sport fish.
c) Newcastle disease virus (NDV) has wiped out thousands or tens of thousands of cormorants on the Great Lakes during the 1990s and may do so again. MNRF has no knowledge as to the number of cormorants eliminated from the Great Lakes in the last epizootic and it seems is unlikely to be taking this and other 'natural' controls of the Great lakes cormorant population into account in this proposal.

2) the proposal violates the basic tenets of conservation and hunting. Thus, as a hunter, I am strongly opposed to this proposal.
a)Game animals are sought after for consumption and as such are kept by the hunter taking the game into possession. To not do so with game animals is disrespectful of nature, demeaning of the sport of hunting and in violation of acceptable laws of conservation as supported by ethical hunters.
b)Making this proposal into law is a huge discredit to any and all of the hunters that I know and would wish to associate with and encourages the non-hunting citizens of Ontario to have an increasingly negative outlook toward the sport of hunting, toward hunters and towards firearms used legally for hunting. Perspectives on legitimate legal hunting are having a difficult time within much of the dominant urban populations of Ontario without the Minister of MNRF overtly making matters worse!
c) MNRF and Ontario citizens do not and should not support the harvesting of any game animals by hunters during the early period of the season of production of young of game species. It is despicable to think that the government, MNRF or anyone calling themselves hunters would choose to violate this basic tenet of conservation of game animals.

3)citizen concerns about defoliation and death of trees on a specific localized basis are understandable. However, this is no reason for the government of MNRF to endorse a cormorant hunt considering that the government and MNRF purposefully defoliate hundreds of square kilometres of deciduous trees on an annual basis in support of promoting coniferous trees for harvest by the forest industry and doing so despite the reliance on deciduous plants by a wide diversity of herbivores including but not restricted to moose, deer, beaver and many other species important to the people of Ontario.

4) The bag limit will not be enforceable for at least two reasons. This of critical importance as recognized by the late C.H.D. Clarke, the first 'father of game management' in the Department of Lands and Forests, the precursor to MNRF. Clarke wrote eloquently that we citizens should respect and follow regulations and that if regulations cannot be effectively enforced, then citizens will not respect the regulations and this disrespect of regulations will be transferred to perspectives on other regulations and encourage increased violation of regulations.

a) A 'bag limit' can only be established in two ways: a) checking the number, sex, species and other relevant features associated with the regulation if the hunter is in possession of the harvested game or b) if enforcement officers can trace specific hunters to specific abandoned game. Shooting and disposing (e,g, through burying or whatever) dead cormorants during a day of hunting does little to establish possible exceeding of bag limits.
b) there are insufficient funds to hire enough conservation officers to effectively enforce current fish and wildlife regulations without placing this added burden on them. Hopefully I am right in assuming that with our limited enforcement resources that there are higher priority species and regulations to be addressed than harvesting of cormorants.