By SILVER DONALD CAMERON / First Words

Paul Watson, having delivered his lecture, is running down a staircase in the Dalhousie Student Union building, hotly pursued by the police. Escaping to the street, he squirrels himself away in a nearby building and watches the police searching for him, a paddy wagon standing by. When they leave, he slips away into the night.

This is Captain Paul Watson, who was in Nova Scotia for a joint board meeting of the Sierra Clubs of Canada and the United States. Founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a founding member of Greenpeace, skipper of the 180-foot long-range, ice-class conservation ship Farley Mowat, Watson is - in Mowat's words - "the world's most aggressive, most determined, most active and most effective defender of wildlife."

So why was he on the lam?

Watson didn't really know. All he knew was that the police were waiting for him. When a cop called out to him, he ran - and the cop ran after him. Seeing the paddy wagon, Watson concluded that he was probably facing arrest for something like "conspiracy to violate the Seal Protection Regulations."

Did you know about these fork-tongued regulations? They "protect" seals by prohibiting protesters from coming within half a mile of the people who are smashing in the seals' heads. Only licensed "observers" can go to the hunt, and observation licences cannot be granted to anyone likely to impede the killing.

As Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente notes, no matter how you feel about the seal hunt - she believes that most Canadians oppose it - "it is a terrible black eye for Canada." The only thing many foreigners know about Canada is that "we kill defenseless baby animals so that a bunch of rich women can wear seal-fur coats."

The seal kill - which is neither a "hunt," nor a "harvest" - is reputedly the largest mass slaughter of wildlife in the world, and the government of Canada vigorously supports it. The Department of Former Fisheries and Empty Oceans set a quota of 320,000 seals this spring, one of the largest quotas in history - did you know that? - and annually sends out a whole task force of Coast Guard icebreakers, DFO officials, mounted policemen and helicopters to support the hunt and subvert the protests.

Last March, Paul Watson took an international team of animal rights activists aboard the Farley Mowat, and sailed to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On the ice, 18 protesters were attacked by sealers brandishing hakapiks, the steel-spiked clubs used to kill seals. The attack was videotaped; you can see it at www.seashepherd.org. With this evidence, the protesters laid assault complaints with the RCMP.

Instead of arresting the sealers, however, the Horsemen brought charges against the protesters for contravening the Seal Protection Regulations - using the protesters' own videotape to show that the protesters were within half a mile of the sealers. The regulations, of course, say nothing about a situation in which the sealers go after the protesters, only the other way around. The matter goes to trial in September.

This is not law enforcement: this is outright persecution. Winking at violence and crafting regulations designed to pulverize dissent is not merely an illegitimate reaction to opposition; it is a Stalinist insult to democracy.

Not in my name, Minister.

And Paul Watson? He couldn't be charged under the regulations, since he was on the ship, and not within half a mile of the affray. But he has been charged with conspiracy before, and he believed that was the charge on which he was to be arrested at Dalhousie.

In fact it wasn't; the cops were there to serve him a summons for operating in Canadian waters without a Canadian-certified captain or first mate. This is clearly a technicality, since Watson has 30 years of experience operating vessels both in and out of Canada, and in places like Labrador and Antarctica. This spring, the Watson's ship uneventfully weathered storms which sank two sealing vessels and seriously damaged others. The government is once again using the law to persecute its opponents.

That's contemptible. The government may find Watson intemperate, discomfiting and uncompromising - but he is a citizen of this country with the right to express his convictions in actions as well as in words. The government has no business treating such citizens as enemies.

The over-arching issue of our time, said the late Bob Hunter, Watson's friend and fellow Greenpeace founder, is "whether or not we come to terms with the politics of Earth and sky, evolution and transformation, God and nature. Otherwise, in our lifetimes, we shall suffer the enactment of the saga of Genesis, our expulsion from paradise and the fall of nature itself."

That's Paul Watson's message, too. We are making war on nature, and if we win, we die. We persecute such prophets at our peril.

Silver Donald Cameron lives in D'Escousse Cape Breton