Thank you for your question.
I speak to customers day in and day out throughout all of Canada and in Asia. When I'm not speaking to customers, I'm thinking about speaking to customers.
I need to go back to one point, because it's sticking in my head. It's about marketing to Canadians. This ties back to the perception and the social licence around sealing. As I stated, I'm chair of Canadian Seal Products. Through Canadian Seal Products, in April of 2020 we used Abacus Data to do a national survey of Canadians to look at opinions with regard to the sealing industry. With the funding we had through the CFSOF program, the Canadian fish and seafood opportunities fund, we spent a year building marketing materials, and then we spent about six months marketing this to specific target markets in Montreal as an urban centre and in Toronto as another urban centre. With the budget we had, we had to really streamline and be very targeted on who we were messaging. About six months later, we did another survey, so we had two data sources to compare.
We saw a growth of 6% in the number of Canadians.... We moved from 23% of Canadians who were open to buying seal products to 29% of Canadians who were open to buying seal products just by explaining to them the sustainability of seals and the humane harvesting of seals, and also by focusing on the benefits of the actual products, whether it's fur, meat or oil.
With regard to the indigenous aspect, the EU has a ban on seal products, but they have an indigenous exemption. However, in order to access that exemption, we have to become a recognized body to the EU. The cost of doing that is incredible.
With regard to the social licence, obviously we need to make sure that the indigenous are at the front of this because, at the end of the day, this is culturally important to them. The sharing of the goodness that seals can bring to people is incredibly important. As for the products themselves, there's nothing like it in the market. When I have a product that is completely different from any product that exists in the world, it really gets the salesperson in me revved up to be able to speak to as many customers as I can.
The main issue that comes back from customers is not the fear of the product or sustainability; it's the fear of the animal rights groups. Again, some of the responses I've had historically include whether Canadians support this product. After two years of marketing and building marketing materials that focus on experts.... We originally started by trying to justify the harvest, but we realized that was not having the impact we wanted.
When it comes to creating and having—I'm trying to think of the word here—protocols or management items in place to make sure things are being done properly and humanely, we as Canadians look at it in terms of knowing we're going to follow them. We always go over and above what the recommendations are to make sure we have a sustainable and humane harvest. This is one of the messages we got back.
If we can grow the Canadian market, that's great, but we do need to get market access to countries where it's currently banned. The United States has a ban under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It's hard.
In regard to pet food companies, we can't get certain seal meat-based pet products made because they also have customers in the U.S., which means they can't have any seal in their value chain.
I don't know if that answered your question, but for some of the stuff that was going on before, I needed to get it out. I think it's important to know that the more we educate Canadians, the more we're going to be able to make seals a Canadian product.
