Sorry about that; it's a habit from where I grew up.
We have a research institute in Alberta that does a lot of work on the humaneness of the various killing techniques used throughout the world. It's the world's leading research institute on this, particularly on leghold trap issues.
That's basically the situation of the Fur Institute and what it represents. It's interested in sealing because people throughout Canada in the fur-bearing industry realize that the sealing issue is the animal rights vehicle, the thin edge of the wedge. Today it's seals; tomorrow it's muskrat, fox, lynx, you have it.
Before we get any further into talking about what's going on in Europe, which is probably the key to our situation right now, we have a couple of questions we need to ask each other. What have we learned from Canada's failure to address the European set of directives on an import ban in 1982? Or conversely, what have we learned from our success in countering the EU's wildlife fur ban in 1988?
First, we know that the European Parliament has no power to initiate any legislation, but they can make a declaration, which they have recently done, through signatures of members of Parliament being submitted to the commission. The commission then acts on the declaration issued by the Parliament; the Parliament does not take action itself. Such declarations, as you are probably aware, are very, very rare, and even more rare.... As a matter of fact, only twice have they dealt with issues external to the EU. Both times the issue was wildlife harvesting in some other country, not in their own countries. Both times the proposed and accepted remedy for the problem was an import ban. In 1982 it was for seals; in 1988 it was for wild-caught fur.
Both parliamentary declarations resulted in draft legislation from the commission. Both times foreign wildlife management practices were the major target, and Canadian industries in particular. The 1982 directive called for an import ban on whitecoat and blueback seal products, and was all about conserving the endangered harp and hooded seals—or at least that's what they said. Concerns about humaneness were not mentioned.
Canada either misunderstood the role of political pressure on the commission to address the public, i.e., their constituents', concern about perceived cruelty in the harvest in bringing in a ban, or Canada heard the real message but failed to develop a successful counter-strategy. Either way, we went from record prices in 1981 for seal products to nada—zero, nothing—in 1983.
The 1988 declaration on wild-caught fur was promoted by the very same groups who had led the anti-sealing activities in Europe. They succeeded with the seal directive, so they thought, okay, we'll go after the wildlife. Again, they targeted species outside the EU, not within the EU. Eventually they succeeded and a regulation was passed, called 3554/91, which is still in place today, banning all import of products from 13 wild-caught species coming from countries that had either not banned all leghold traps or had not trapped in accordance with international humane trapping standards—which was rather difficult to do, because those standards didn't exist at that time.
This time the Canadian strategy—supported by Russia and the U.S.A.—was first to confirm that the EU did not see this either as a trade or a conservation issue, but rather one of animal welfare, and then they said, well, we'll welcome the EU's interest in complementing the work already being done in Canada. We were the leaders at the time in internationally concerned issues of leghold traps.
After three years of negotiation and lobbying, much of it coordinated by Canada and by the FIC, the result was the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards, or AIHTS, between Canada and the EU and the Russian Federation. The result of AIHTS is rather interesting. AIHTS guarantees market access for countries who are signatories. It commits the parties to carry out trap research; in other words, if you don't do the research and promote humane leghold traps, we can take action against you.
If you do follow the conventions of the treaty, you have guaranteed market access. That includes the EU countries that also use leghold traps. So this issue got turned back in on them, in essence. It's a very good lesson to learn, because right now all they're doing is looking at us as outsiders. They are imposing their views on us while they have no particular regulations or issues themselves.
From the day the EU ratified AIHTS, Canada enjoyed the guaranteed market, which is worth about $80 million a year. Equally importantly, it neutered all the negative comments that were going on among the EU parliamentarians and within the EU press media. It stopped the letters going to the Canadian embassies and all that good stuff that we know happens all the time.
So what's happening now in terms of our particular problem? That's what happened then. That worked. On the seal ban, the activities of the Government of Canada failed. So have we learned anything from our success or have we learned anything from our failure? Well, in September the European Parliament passed another declaration calling for the expansion of the current EU ban to include products from all harp and hooded seal species. By the way, a record number of parliamentarians signed that. The anti-sealing lobbyists have been very active.
The European Commission has to respond by November 5. Well, we're passed that. They have to respond; it doesn't say what they have to do.
For more than two years, the Belgian and Dutch governments have been considering draft legislation that will ban all seal imports. This is not based on conservation, not based on humane killing, but based on morality and ethics. In other words, there's something immoral and unethical about our behaviour because we kill seals while they kill muskrats and a bunch of other animals.
Also, we have the German situation, an all-party resolution in the Bundestag that passes an act through their system to ban the import of all products from harp and hooded seals. It was an all-party resolution sponsored primarily by the Green Party in the coalition forum. And we all know politicians understand how coalitions work, so that doesn't necessarily mean all the politicians in the German Bundestag support this issue. It simply means they had a political problem that they had to solve, which does nothing for us because the ban is in place.
The ban has, despite some of these things I've read in the media in Canada, very significant aspects. One, we don't sell much in the EU, but as we all know or as anybody who is in the export business knows, when you start shipping goods, the major shipping points for transshipment—because nothing goes from A to B, it all goes via C, D, E, and F—in Europe are Hamburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and so on. If you have bans on products in the EU, how do you move the product to your ultimate destination? That's a big problem for the exporters in Canada.
The second thing is equally, if not more significant. For years the EU Commission has asked the member states to be stand unified, to act as a single body through the EU. The German legislation breaks that tradition. With the existing fact that the Belgians, the Dutch, the Italians, and the British are all discussing individual actions within their parliaments, we now have the potential to have five or six actions passed against Canada based not on humane killing, not on conservation, but on immorality and unethical behaviour. When you have that happen, you are in effect saying the public is looking at this and is saying to themselves, wait a minute, these responsible politicians in responsible parliaments in western democracies have passed these acts on these grounds, thus legitimizing them. They are legitimizing the attacks on Canadian sealers on the grounds of morality and ethics. It's a very serious issue, because that then can be transported back to our own country.
As you all know, within Canada, the very best polls get you an answer of maybe 60% support within the country, and that's based on people's understanding of the hunt in terms of humane killing and conservation. You can imagine what may happen if the issue is presented as an ethical and moral issue. It's something to be very concerned about. So the German ban is a serious thing from two points of view: business and, more importantly, to us as a people.
The vast majority of Canada's pelts, as we all know, go outside the EU, to Russia and China. From that point of view, we don't have to worry. These guys are not really strong in Russia and China, and they probably won't be tomorrow morning. But it is a concern down the road.
Wildlife management in the EU is a really crazy kind of a situation. In Germany, they kill about 1.5 million deer a year. Their licensing regulations and hunting requirements are a lot less stringent than those in Canada. They kill about 500,000 wild boar, including something called “squeakers”, little squeakers, which are young boar. My gosh, that's terrible. An awful thing. But there it is. That's what they do while they castigate us.
In Belgium, Netherlands, and the Luxembourg area—the Benelux region, as they call it—they kill about a million muskrats annually. What do they do with them? Incinerate them. The pelt, the meat—nothing is used. That's illegal in Canada. And these are the people who are castigating us?
In the U.K., they have a deer hunt. One can quite easily argue that their deer hunting is not nearly as well regulated as ours, or as our moose hunt is, for that matter, or our caribou. The U.K. is now starting to put in culls in some places, primarily on squirrels, because they're getting out of hand and have threatened urban people. Do you know how they're going to take them? They're going to catch them in live traps so they don't hurt them. Then they take a stick and whack them over the head to kill them. Sound familiar? It's a mini hakapik. And these are the people who want to castigate us.
So I ask you how those practices are acceptable in Europe and unacceptable for Canadians, when our regulations are much more stringent, much more well observed, and are improving all the time. We do not take the status quo as being acceptable; we strive to improve it all the time.
What's next? Well, our sources, meaning the FIC, tell us that Canada's current strategy to head off these proposed bans is to educate European decision-makers about Canadian facts, in the hope that they will change their minds and withdraw their proposed bans. In other words, what we're going to do is the same thing we've been doing since 1982.
Our sources also tell us that the Department of Foreign Affairs has concluded that the current strategy has a “very low probability” of stopping any of these proposed import bans. It would appear that DFAIT has decided that this issue is unwinnable and is therefore not deserving of the energy and creativity of thought required to develop a strategy that may have a better chance of succeeding.
The Fur Institute of Canada, which has successfully coordinated a creative strategy that kept the European markets open to Canadian wild-caught fur, has created a new sealing committee to coordinate primary source messages to complement the management messages coming from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Yet DFO and DFAIT seem very reluctant to renew that successful partnership and to work with the FIC again. Letters to Minister Emerson asking to meet and offering assistance in developing a new Canadian strategy have gone unanswered. Therefore, I would like to ask the honourable members of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans three questions.
First, why has the Government of Canada not formally written to the European Commission to strongly protest their Parliament's call for an import ban? Is it because DFAIT secretly wants this embarrassing issue to go away? A repeat of the 1982 scenario might just succeed in doing that once and for all.
Secondly, what approaches has Canada made to other like-minded countries—in other words, other sealing countries like Norway, for example—or to countries with similar concerns? That would be countries like Greenland, which is very concerned about a potential market disappearing, as we are, and about the activities of the animal rights groups in both those cases. It's interesting that pretty well all these groups are banned in Norway, whereas in Canada we hand them out little permits to come and visit us.
Third, there is mounting political pressure on the European Commission and individual member states to do something, and the only something on the table is a ban. Canada hasn't presented any possible alternative visions, as they did with the leghold trap issue in 1988 through 1992, or 1991, whatever it was.
So recognizing that even if Canada took a WTO action, which is highly unlikely and a very expensive proposition at that, even if it succeeds, what do you gain? If I were a member of the EU and I had to face a WTO ban or response or conviction, I would simply pay the fine, because the sum total of a percentage of zero is zero. So what do I lose? I'd leave my ban in place and pay the fine.
What consideration has been given to shifting the international discussion to one looking at this as a wildlife management issue, where we can learn from the EU's humane wildlife harvesting practices, rather than continuing to educate them, as we're now trying to do? Remember that annually there are several times as many wild animals killed in the EU as there are in Canada, something most people don't realize. Yet they summarily disregard the facts and continue to castigate us.
Without a comprehensive strategy that effectively combines the talents and intelligence of DFAIT and DFO with independent fishers, biologists, veterinarians, hunters, both Inuit and east coast sealers, and those involved with the Fur Institute of Canada, who have seen this before, we fear we are choosing the course of action of 1982, not the course of action of 1988, and that resulted in failure, rather than the success of 1988.
I'm here today to urge you to recommend that the Government of Canada embrace a new, different, hopefully better strategy for dealing with the Canadian sealing issue.
Thank you very much. I'm sorry I took so long.
