You're saying not to go to Italy.
Evidence of meeting #9 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was seals.
Evidence of meeting #9 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was seals.
10:35 a.m.
Bloc
10:35 a.m.
Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
Yes, because that's where—
10:35 a.m.
Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
It won't be happening there, because the greens are there. A number of them belong to the government that's just been re-elected to replace that of Mr. Berlusconi.
10:35 a.m.
Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
Mr. Berlusconi lost, and the new government has a lot of greens and anti-vivisectionists. I think it would be virtually impossible to make them change their minds.
In Germany, an agriculture commission has studied the issue. We sent an expert there from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and that went very well.
In my opinion, the strongest protests against the seal hunt took place in England. It was in England that the largest number of popular actions against Canadian products were organized.
10:35 a.m.
Bloc
10:35 a.m.
Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
Yes, because the Belgians are talking about a law that would affect Canadian products. We also sent an expert to the Netherlands to talk and explain the situation in Canada.
10:35 a.m.
Bloc
Raynald Blais Bloc Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC
You didn't mention certain countries like Norway. Don't you think that would be helpful?
10:35 a.m.
Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
Those people are on our side.
10:35 a.m.
Bloc
Raynald Blais Bloc Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC
That's correct.
I'd like to get a better understanding of what's going on in Belgium's Parliament. Is that a private member's bill? What exactly is going on?
10:35 a.m.
Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
I don't think it's a private member's bill, but rather a bill presented by the Minister of Trade.
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Bloc
Raynald Blais Bloc Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC
It's from the Minister of Trade! What are his arguments?
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Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
Generally, he says that it's a matter of public morality.
10:35 a.m.
NDP
Peter Stoffer NDP Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, gentlemen.
Do you get to interact with your American counterparts from time to time?
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Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
No, I don't. On this issue, no, not at all.
10:40 a.m.
NDP
Peter Stoffer NDP Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS
If I'm not mistaken, the United States invoked the Marine Mammal Protection Act a while ago--
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Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
In 1972.
10:40 a.m.
NDP
Peter Stoffer NDP Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS
--and it's still there. It restricts our seal exports from our Inuit in Nunavut, but it allows Alaskan aboriginals to send their seal products into the lower 48. Our governments, previous Liberal and previous Conservative, haven't been successful in any way in putting a stop to that.
If we can't even do it with our closest trading partner, how successful do you think we can be in Europe?
10:40 a.m.
Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
I think we can be successful. To my mind, in Europe there are two issues. One is the battle of public opinion that results in the protests every year of hunting season and that goes up and down. Sometimes it results in things like the year before last, when our embassy in the Hague was spray-painted red by Greenpeace, who had somehow managed to get a firetruck and make the water red. The embassy had received other threats, such as radio announcers saying that anybody walking past our embassy might consider throwing stones through the windows.
Things like that happen all the time. It's much worse in Italy this year. The details of these things are actually gruesome. That's one of the reasons we have put all of this effort, certainly in the four years I've been here, to help our missions counter and deal with these kinds of protests.
The other aspect is strictly a trade one. I could be wrong--I often am--but according to our trade lawyers and our judgments, the European Commission would not allow their member states to get away with the bans without actually launching legal proceedings against their own member states. So that's a situation that's completely different from that of the United States. There's nobody in the United States suing the Government of the United States for such an import ban, but that would happen in Europe. It would be done by the European Commission. In effect, you could call that a European government. They would sue the member states to get these bans lifted because they're illegal.
10:40 a.m.
NDP
Peter Stoffer NDP Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS
I have another question. I haven't heard you mention where countries like Portugal and Spain, the Baltic countries, or the Balkans are on this particular issue. Do we have support in those types of countries? I'm thinking Spain and Portugal because they're quite avid fishermen, I guess, for lack of a better term, and the Balkans.
Do we have support from those countries, or are they in the same pool as Belgium, Holland, and the others?
10:40 a.m.
Director General, European Union, North and West Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
No, the Baltics and the Nordic countries, such as Finland, produce fur. They produce a lot of mink. They produce fox fur. So those countries are not concerned. You wouldn't need to win them over, nor would you get any particularly good advice from them as to how to win over the rest of Europe. In my opinion, if you visited it might be interesting, but it wouldn't be particularly useful or effective.
With regard to Portugal and Spain, certainly in Portugal they haven't yet sufficiently evolved on these environmental issues as much as continental Europe and the U.K. have. They just don't have the same kinds of concerns.
I mean, if you look really deeply at where all this stuff is coming from, other than the aspects of perceived cruelty to animals, Europeans have a tendency to think of a country like Canada possessing what the Europeans got rid of a long time ago--that is, wild animals and big forests. So to some extent they see Canada as a repository of the environment that also belongs to them. In other words, they think it's theirs because it's global. They no longer have it in Europe. You need only go through northern Italy to see people lining up in long rows to go hunting very small birds in Tuscany.
So it's a completely different scene, and not all countries have the same concerns.
