Anyway, this is the whole problem. You guys can go back and say, yes, there should be a harvest of grey seals. But if you're not going to take down the areas and allow us where the seals are, you can set whatever quotas you want, open it up, but if you aren't allowed where the product is, what's the good of it? You can't harvest it. It's ridiculous.
We have an allocation of 10,000 now. The reason there's only a small amount of it harvested is because we aren't allowed where the seals are. You can't harvest them any time of the year; the juveniles can only be harvested in a two- to three-week window, and it's in February and March. Otherwise it's impossible.
We've worked at this for 12 to 15 years at the North of Smokey Fisherman's Association and with sealers in Cape Breton. We've harvested seals; we've sent meat overseas. We even made a trip one time over there to look for markets, and so on.
It's a touchy issue when it comes to the areas that we go into, but I don't know what other way we could do it. There's definitely a problem with the seals, and something has to be done. But to go out and, say, fire up another 1,000 licences or whatever into history, it's really over capacity right now. We have 117 licences, we have the manpower to do it, but we're not allowed where the product is. That's the problem.
Everybody's calling for a harvest. There is a harvest, we have allocation, but we can't do it. That is one issue.
I know the issue here today is about the grey seals. But since it's the committee, I have to inform you about the share of the harp seals that was given to Nova Scotia.
Last year Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and New Brunswick had an allocation of 1,800 animals for the three provinces. With 92,000 animals for the gulf harvested right off our doorstep, it was an insult to give us 1,800. We were licensed sealers walking around with thousands of animals at our doorstep, and we couldn't harvest them because the allocation for harp seals was stuck.
Anyway, thanks for your time.