Thank you.
I've had a team with me on each of these occasions. On this last trip, for example, and on my previous trip I've asked to have experts with me. I personally requested Dr. Garry Stenson, a senior marine mammal scientist who spent 22 years on the file and who was consulted by EFSA as an expert in the world—probably more expert on the seal file in the north Atlantic, I would say, than perhaps anybody else in the world today—who accompanied me on these files.
I had people accompanying from DFAIT and also from Fisheries and Oceans. I wanted to get people around who, whether in resource management or in science, and in particularly in selling this, I think, on science, had a lot of credibility. We had a team of 16 who went to Europe last year, with Jean-Claude Lapierre—I think from your constituency—and Leo St. Onge, a Quebec sealer. Industry came; government representatives came. We went and looked at different aspects that each of us would touch on.
When something is started, to take the fireman analogy, you have to go to the core of it; not try to deal with the symptoms but deal with the cause. So we tried to go to the core of it, to the people in the process who intend to legislate, and to put it on the table with these people—the departments, the senior guys, the deputy minister equivalents who are going to advance it, and the parliamentarians and the ministries in those countries that are going to put it forth—to say, this is not correct. It's sustainable, it's humane, it has a very strong socio-economic value.
We do that. We have a team; we go as a team. I am not a lone person on these ever. I've always had a minimum of three and a high as a delegation of sixteen.
We look at it strategically, at what is most strategic. It's not always, I guess, best to publicly release strategies. We deal with NGOs and other people who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this issue.
But I will say we are looking very seriously at this file. We are looking at avenues whereby we can stop the train that started on this issue. If some firefighting has to be done, I call it putting accurate information in the forum of legislators and parliamentarians so that they can make an informed decision, not an emotional decision because their constituents tell them “this is what we want”.