Okay, thank you.
I'll start just down the page.
The result has been that when the system is operational and running again, sealers have already, through no fault of their own, overrun sector quotas, and that in turn has led to quota transfers.
These transfers have penalized some sealers while being advantageous to others. The 2006 season is a prime example of this, in which sealers from the front zone were penalized because of overruns in the gulf zone.
I note as well, from the minutes of your meeting of June 15, 2006, that Mr. David Bevan, Assistant Deputy Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, alluded to the problems with the hails. He said:
They may have 100 animals on board and we may be told there's 50; they only upgrade it later on. We have to deal with that so that we can have a better handle on the number of animals being killed on a daily basis.
One of the main ways that DFO deals with this issue is to expect processors to provide them with their best estimates of the number of animals that have been landed at various locations. At this time of the year, processors are extremely busy with their own work, such as procuring animals, arranging transportation from port of landing to their processing plants, processing of animals, and paying sealers in a prompt manner.
Processors have been required to provide DFO with this information no later than 10 a.m. daily. Failure to do so will result in warnings or prosecution under the act for failure to provide requested information. To tabulate this information requires considerable person-hours, to the point where it has become necessary to have at least one employee dedicated to providing this information to DFO.
We have seen in the past that this information is often misinterpreted by DFO staff, such that numbers are double-counted, etc. The harvest is shut down because the quota has been reached, yet when the numbers are re-checked, it becomes obvious that there are considerable numbers of animals remaining to be taken.
DFO prides itself on having a well-managed sealing program, and maintaining adherence to the established quotas is paramount. Yet our experience has been that at critical times during the harvest the DFO hail system is shut down.
During the 2006 sealing season, harvesting on the front opened on April 12 at 0600 Newfoundland daylight time and closed at 1930 hours Newfoundland daylight time that same day. The TAC was not taken during that period, so the harvest reopened on Thursday, April 13 at 0600 and closed at 12 noon that same day. Sealers were advised that DFO would compile catch information and advise further whether the harvest would reopen.
The next day was Good Friday, April 14. DFO did not operate that day; nor did it operate on Saturday, April 15, Sunday, April 16, or Monday, April 17. A significant portion of the 2006 sealing activity on the front took place well north of Newfoundland, off the east coast of Labrador in Groswater Bay. The majority of sealers were not prepared to wait out this time for the possibility of the harvest reopening. Many would have waited until Saturday, but not until Tuesday.
We would recommend that for the upcoming season and for future sealing seasons, DFO have sufficient staff on hand to cover weekend and holiday periods to ensure that this kind of thing doesn't happen again. Alternatively to this, DFO could consider contracting out the handling of the hails and the tabulating of the results from the hails to the private sector.
Aside from being costly to sealers and processors alike, these overruns are often misrepresented to the media by animal rights groups and have played a negative role in the ongoing battle to establish that the Canadian seal harvest is well run and well managed.
Another aspect that deserves DFO's attention is the fact that the present “first come, first served” approach to taking the quota leads to a “race” mentality, as each sealer tries to ensure he or she gets a fair share of seals. This race mentality can lead to less than careful attention being paid to proper killing procedures, and that in turn leads to misrepresentations of the humaneness of the harvest.
We need to consider ways in which we can eliminate or reduce the effects of the race mentality to ensure that all proper procedures are adhered to. One possible way would be to follow up on the veterinarians' suggestion, that following the killing of a seal by either rifle or hakapik, all sealers be required—and this is especially when the hakapik is used—to palpate the skull to ensure that the skull is completely crushed and that the animal is rendered irrevocably unconscious, and then to “bleed out“ the animal. This procedure would have the effect of slowing things down; as well, it would vastly improve the quality of both the meat and the pelt.
Obviously, the concept of boat quotas could be a way to ensure that the race mentality would be eliminated, but there are a number of problems with this solution. Trying to implement boat quotas that are fair and equitable to all sealers would be very difficult.
With a TAC that would have to be subdivided among so many sealers or boats, the number of animals each sealer or boat would be permitted to take may be too small to make it economically viable to participate at all. Subdividing the TAC into many small components may very well lead to many seasons when the entire TAC will not be taken. Industry assumes and expects that the entire TAC is going to be taken during a particular harvest.
Sadly, I do not have the perfect solution to this problem, but we all know that the race mentality is a problem for the sealing industry, and we should all give serious thought to it with the goal of finding a solution that ensures that both the conservation goals and the humaneness of the harvest are maintained.
The second area I would like to address is the continuing efforts of the animal rights groups to end the harvest through their campaigns of misinformation, misleading facts, and, equally important to most in the sealing community, the portrayal of us as a people who are somehow barbaric and subhuman because we kill seals.
For decades, the Government of Canada has waged a losing battle with these groups because it--the government--has consistently tried to fight using facts and logic to counter emotion, and has consistently taken the approach that it is the role of DFO and DFAIT to simply defend our management practices. They consistently emphasize that it is not their role to defend the sealers and sealing per se. The ban in the early 1980s showed us this tactic does not work. The recent ban passed by the German parliament only reinforces this truth. And you must realize that this ban was passed subsequent to an address to the German parliamentarians by one of DFO's very best experts in which he presented all the Government of Canada's arguments to no avail.
This ban has major implications for the Canadian sealing industry in two ways. It was passed despite the fact that the EU Commission has asked the member states not to pass unilateral bans, and therefore opens the doors for the Dutch, Belgian, British, and Italians, all of whom have ongoing ban discussions in their parliaments, to take their own unilateral actions. A series of bans like this only legitimizes the animal rights arguments and makes it easier for them to sell their viewpoint to others, including Canadians. In terms of business, these kinds of bans make the logistics of moving seal products to market more difficult and more expensive. Why? Because most of the major transportation lines go through various points in Europe, thus forcing us to find more expensive and more difficult ways to get the product to the buyers.
We in the industry have understood for years that European politicians and citizens are not interested in the facts. They do not care if we are right or wrong in terms of conservation and humane killing. Their politicians only care that they have been told there is a constituency in their ridings that will vote for them if they take action against the dastardly Canadians. Their citizens recoil in horror when presented with the falsehoods spread by the animal rights groups. These are emotional issues, and the only way to fight this kind of attack is to undertake an aggressive campaign, aimed at showing all those in the EU, U.S.A., and Canada that they are being misled, misinformed, and downright lied to. In other words, we must back up our facts with emotion.
Proposed bans being put forward by EU governments oppose a commercial harvest, yet do not condemn the harvesting of seals by aboriginal peoples. We should demand that the EU government not be racist in the seal issue. Instead of putting forward a ban on the importation of seal products, they should put forward what they would consider proper killing methods. After all, there are many animals being killed inside EU countries, as well.
In the past we have all seen films showing what may well be staged incidents of seals not being killed in proper ways. It is also worth noting, from the minutes of your meeting of June 15, that during Mr. David Bevan's presentation he indicated there were approximately 14,000 sealing licences, but only 50 charges for non-compliance to the regulations in 2005, and about 30 charges in 2006, with 37 warnings. He also stated:
In addition, we have seal hunt observation licences. There were 73 licences issued this year from 97 applications. We declined to offer licences to 24 applicants. There were 60 licences issued in 2005, and 42 in 2004, so the interest is obviously going up.
He went on to state:
In 2006, seven Humane Society of the United States members and a Reuters freelance photographer were arrested. The investigation on that is ongoing. Charges have not yet been laid. That remains an open investigation.
In 2005, 12 unlicensed observers were fined $1,000 each after being charged and convicted. It is obvious that the main focus of such protesters is to bring attention to their cause by disrupting the harvest and being arrested and charged by Canadian authorities.
Protest groups and the media should not be issued permits to visit the annual seal harvest.
The animal rights movement is a huge, multi-million-dollar business on an international scale, and none of us should be naive enough to think that they are going to abandon the single biggest fundraiser they have--sealing. To think that we can win them over with facts is more than naive; it is tantamount to abandoning the Canadian seal industry and all Canadian sealers and leaving the sealing families of Quebec, Nunavut, and Newfoundland and Labrador with the epitaph that the animal rights movement has written for them--that sealers are subhuman barbarians.
The October 30, 2004, issue of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, published in Hamburg, Germany, contained a story on Greenpeace written by Sebastian Knauer. This story goes into various facets of Greenpeace, from their finances, reported to be 170 million euros worldwide in 2004, to their proposed areas of protest.
One item of interest concerns Greenpeace Canada. The article states:
In the founding country of Greenpeace, a fundamental argument about the seal hunt is being held. According to Greenpeace campaigner Steven Guilbeault, these marine mammals are no longer a “threatened species”. Therefore, up to 350,000 of them should be permitted to be clubbed annually. The international management ultimately demands, however, that for the coming season, massive protest campaigns on the ice are to be prepared. “This is using up our credit”, German Greenpeace spokesman Fouad Hamdan, says, “We are becoming incredible if we watch the slaughter without acting. The seals may no longer be threatened, but the pet-like creatures are good for the image.” ln order to cajole the Canadians back into line, manager Leiopold will be tough: “We cannot tolerate our principles not being adhered to.”
To achieve their goals, the animal rights movement does not simply attack the sealing industry; they attack many different aspects of Canadian life, from fishing to tourism through boycott campaigns targeting purchases of Canadian fish products and the Canadian tourism industry in Canada, the United States, the U.K., and Europe. If the experience in these countries is anything to go by, their next goal will be to eliminate otter-trawling in Canadian waters through similar types of boycotts.
Animal rights, posing either as conservation-based or ecological-based actions, are the single biggest threat to the economic well-being of rural coastal communities in Canada. In forty years these people have gone from the lunatic fringe to being the centre of attention. They have successfully created a divide between rural and urban people. They have created the illusion that they are the greenies and we are the barbarians. The issue at its most fundamental is not about sealing; it's about the rights of Canadian citizens to act within the laws of Canada, and that is what the Canadian government and Canadian politicians should always remember.
Surely the Government of Canada and the provincial governments have seen that their tactics over the last forty years have been a dismal failure. Yet from the meetings we have attended we see that they are reinventing the wheel and simply doing new versions of what did not work and spending a lot of money doing it. The dignity of Canadian citizens in Quebec, Nunavut, and Newfoundland and Labrador deserves better.
During the Cuban crisis in the 1960s, Bobby Kennedy, then Attorney General of the United States--and I have to paraphrase here--said that you can count on Canadians for all possible support, short from actual help. If the Government of Canada and the provincial governments involved do not change their tactics, Canadian sealers and the Canadian sealing industry will, sadly, have to say the same thing.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
