I want to thank you very much.
You made a number of comments in there and I will try to answer some of them. This has been a longstanding dispute with Europe, as you know. The sealing issue did not just come up this year, and it's something that has long been a revenue generator, I guess, for the special interest groups who have made it their issue.
When you talked about whether or not we should jeopardize free trade talks or if this should become part of the talks, one of the reasons the WTO exists is to help resolve disputes such as this, and that's where we would go with our complaint. When you talked about a free trade deal with the European Union, I do believe there are many opportunities for Canada, and many opportunities for Newfoundland for a lot of your products to enter the European Union without the high tariffs they currently experience. So I think there are a lot of benefits to both sides, aside from this dispute. That's why the WTO exists, to take care of disputes such as this.
I just want to go back a minute and talk about.... And I don't want to be political about this. I know it was a senator who took it upon himself to, I guess, have his moment of glory and to get his name in the paper, because he didn't support the Canadian seal hunt. But what he did was to have a very aggressive campaign against the Canadian seal hunt. If he had stood up and said, “I don't agree with the Canadian seal hunt”, that would have been fine. But he set out specifically to damage the work we had done in support of the Canadian seal hunt. He sent letters to every parliamentarian in Europe. So this was not any help. If I were a European parliamentarian, my reaction would be, well, I guess not everybody in Canada supports the seal hunt; I guess not everybody in the Parliament of Canada supports the seal hunt. So this made it easier for them to do this.
My answer to you is that we weren't there on voting day. As you heard in my opening remarks, we were there many other days. We talked to as many people as we could. The people will tell you privately: this is a political issue, and you guys are absolutely right that you do have a humane seal hunt. Because of the work that was done by the special interest groups in etching that picture of the baby white seal in their mind and somebody clubbing it, their constituents are calling for a ban on the Canadian seal hunt. So the politicians are going to do what their constituents want. Usually that's a good idea. Sometimes it's a good idea to make a decision based on facts, and this is very unfortunate.