I don't know if I'm volunteering or not, but anyway I'll start it off. Somebody has to. I'm not a public speaker or anything like that.
I killed my first seal when I was only 12 years old, and sold pelts in 1980s when the price was only a dollar to try to keep the industry going. Now it's being taken away from me bit by bit. The seal hunt has become 75% of my income, which is very important to my enterprise. This has been gradually taken away from me year after year by regulations brought down by DFO. In a three-week period last year I had only three days of hunting due to so many government regulations. Two years ago I spent $50,000 on my vessel to make it safe for sealing, and the following year DFO brought in a new regulation that I could only kill 250 seals before returning to port. I would not have spent all that money if I had known that these regulations were coming down. I hunt seals from Bonavista Bay to Labrador.
I also think sealing income should be insurable earnings for EI.
I asked a DFO officer about the regulation on 250 seals plus 25 seals for speedboats prior to the 2004 hunt and where it came from. He told me that it was from the Canadian Sealers Association, the FFAW, and the small boat action committee in sealing area 6. Area 6 has the most licensed sealers in Newfoundland and Labrador. I inquired around and found out that there was no meeting in our area in 2004, or in Bonavista Bay. There was no voting done by sealers to have the regulations changed.
To be fair to DFO and not put all the blame on them, hopefully next time they will get their information from a reliable source. In the future, any proposal made to DFO concerning licence-holders should be made available to the fishing enterprises before it is made into a regulation. This way we will all know where the proposal originated. We have an aging population, and many of these fishermen are on the committees that advise DFO and make proposals that bring good fishermen or fishers in towns and areas down to their level of fishing, which is very little.
That's the end of that part. Can I continue?