Thank you very much.
I'm curious about the numbers. For the first of the cull, the harvest levels weren't what the allocation allowed in terms of seals.
I'm looking at your statistics, Mr. Hammill, from the presentation you've put before us. You'd be about the third panel, I guess, to show the total population of grey seals during the period from about 1966 to about 1981 being less than 50,000--maybe around 30,000 until about 1981 plus--and gradually going over the 50,000 mark around 1983. I guess that's when the seal hunt was stopped. And you can see the numbers increasing exponentially from there to over 250,000.
That would sort of indicate that we have a huge shift in the population of seals, and our fishermen here are recording the effects on the stocks. How is it that we need science and science and science to produce evidence that there's actually a problem here, when it seems to me that it's quite clear that the populations were lower and the fisheries were better? I guess I'd like comment....
When we were on the Magdalen Islands, they don't call them, of course, seals there. They don't call them phoques. They use the word loup-marin, sea wolf. I look at these pictures that have been circulated of the halibut that have been visited by the seals and what's left of them, and it does sort of look like a wolf has worked them over. Some of the images have been around the table.
Then we hear our lobster fishermen talking about being stalked. They're going out to pick up their traps and having young ones.... Now, we're concerned about lobster fisheries. We have management protocols in place about size limits and so on. They're trying to be responsible and protect the stocks of lobster, and when they toss the little ones overboard, they're being eaten by the seals.
I know you just said that there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that that's a big part of their diet, but I imagine that if you had sampled one of those grey seals, you might have found something to change what you're finding in stomach contents, and so on, in favour of the lobster fishermen's observations.
What is holding us back from actually recognizing that there's a problem here and taking the necessary steps to remedy it?