Down through the years, too many times we've gone with facts and numbers, and as I said, these people are not interested in facts; it's an emotional issue. It's the biggest fundraising for these protest groups. They have used and still are using the pictures of the whitecoats being killed, with the tears running out of their eyes. Of course, we haven't hunted whitecoat since 1982. That was stopped because of the protest groups. It had nothing to do with the market for whitecoats, or anything else; it was a perception thing.
I think we should be more aggressive. People are being lied to; the facts distributed by the protest groups are not the actual facts. I think the Canadian government should be more in the forefront in dealing with these protest groups.
For instance, in the United States we've had the Marine Mammal Protection Act now for a number of years, which put a ban on the importation of seal products into the United States; yet the Canadian government has done little if anything over the years to work on this issue. There's a huge market of 300 million people on our doorstep, and we are unable to access that market.
Also, there are the problems of logistics that it creates. As a company, we have lost product that was accidently trans-shipped through the United States and seized by U.S. Customs. We have to be very careful when we're shipping product now, so that the shipping line or whatever does not transship to the United States.
For instance, the main hub of all courier companies in North America is most likely in the United States. When we ship samples of our product to our parent, we have to disguise the description of what it is, because it may be seized by U.S. Customs. We have to disguise what we are shipping. Just recently I shipped samples of our seal oil for analysis and I termed it marine oil so that people looking at the document would not know whether it was lube oil or whatever. You have to do these things. It's unfortunate that we're selling a legal product, yet have to disguise it as something else.
We haven't presented the “good side” stories of the Canadian seal harvest; for instance, about seal oil. We haven't put out to the public the benefits to cardiovascular health and cholesterol levels, and things like this. You can use facts until the cows come home, as they say, but let's start telling the good side stories of the seal harvest, and not go just with facts, but go with the emotion that these people work on as well.
It's a very emotional issue for me. I've been involved with the sealing industry in Newfoundland now for almost 30 years and I'm very proud of what I do, very proud of my company, and very proud of the sealers who participate in this harvest. It's an emotional issue for me and emotional for people like Rene and Wilf. Rene was personally attacked last year. It's time that as a government we start to stand up for the citizens of Canada.
If you talk to sealers and ask them what this harvest means to them, they go back to the days of their father, when they were children and the seal hunt taking place in the spring of the year meant a lot to these people in terms of a livelihood. In, as we say, the long, cold, hungry month of March, when supplies were running low, all of a sudden there was an opportunity to put extra dollars in their pockets and meat on their tables. It's an emotional issue and it should be treated as such.