No. What I said is that up until February...they go into their own private meetings, just like a cabinet. They go into their private meetings, the 27 countries in a working group, and they meet behind closed doors. There's no public record of what goes on, except what we hear from various sources. But we do know that after it met a number of times, the working group said, “We cannot get an agreement. We can't get the numbers we want”. So they basically passed it on to the next highest level, the highest level of those countries in Europe, at the COREPER level. That's their council of permanent representatives there, generally represented by an ambassador. They then meet, and they met on this issue, and they tried to get an agreement among themselves, the 27 countries.
From the unofficial reports we get on these meetings, as there is no official public reporting on what goes on behind closed doors, we knew they had problems getting this total. We do know there are a significant number of countries, enough to block it; and it's estimated by our count they didn't have 128 votes, and they can only afford to lose 90.
In March, and as it went on into April, they came together, and there were tremendous pressures to support it. You have the Nordic countries who are against the ban. You have some others against it. We went to every one of these and spoke to them, from the deputy prime minister to the minister, and said, there are no grounds to advance this; lobby hard on this.
But when it came to the final push, what lost it? When it came to the final push, in my view, what lost it was the tremendous pressure exerted by the European public. In Germany, while their departments of economics and justice, and others, might tell you it might be contrary to EU law, the elements in Germany driving this issue—the public—and the public driving it in Italy, France, and the U.K., drove those governments to make the decision that Europeans wanted, based on their desire to do it, while forgetting the legal arguments. They forgot the principal legal arguments on sustainability, and they made a political decision then, and a few fell off the fence, because the countries there would say, “It's an issue that means nothing to us, as we don't have seals. Basically, if there's a hill to die on, it's going to be over our own issue, not over somebody else's, like Canada's.”
That, in my view, is where it fell down at the eleventh hour from tremendous pressure.
