The author of the report, Pierre-Yves Daoust, is a board member and a director of the Fur Institute of Canada, which is a fur lobby group. I don't trust the report or the people who've been involved in it.
What you haven't heard from is a veterinary group that also attended the seal hunt in the same year, 2001. They observed the hunt when sealers didn't know they were being observed. They conducted post-mortems on seal carcasses on the ice, and their report concluded that the seal hunt results in considerable and unacceptable suffering. They also found that in 42% of the cases they studied, there wasn't enough cranial injury in the seals that had been clubbed to even guarantee unconsciousness at the time of skinning.
I note that none of the authors of that report have been invited to present to this committee. I believe there are several who would be happy to present to you.
I have observed the seal hunt far more than any of the authors of that report. Veterinarians have been attending and observing the commercial hunt for four decades. And to this day, the latest report, if you will, on the commercial seal hunt still contains recommendation after recommendation after recommendation about how to make this hunt more humane.
The fact is that we go up there and film this each and every year because it has never been made humane, despite 40 years of trying. It never will be made humane because of where it operates, how it operates, and how fast it operates.