It would seem to me that the licensed observer intention really should be that qualified, experienced, and capable observation group and the licences should really be handed out in that regard. The intention and focus should be squarely on the market and the social confidence and validation that you would gain through transparency. As you mentioned earlier, that needs to come from an objective, unbiased position, and it needs to come from a position of experience, people actually having the skills, knowledge, and ability to assess that. I'd be inclined to be looking more towards a regulation that said the way in which licences are administered and handed out should be more carefully crafted than the distance at which you put those people and that the revocation and enforcement of obstruction should be something that should be fully focused on.
I can tell you, as a former conservation officer in Yukon Territory, that we have regulations about impeding or obstructing a hunt. We also have regulations around the safe distance to discharge a firearm. In that territory it's one kilometre from a dwelling house, whether it's occupied or not, because of the obvious safety concerns with centrefire rifles and the distance at which they can be deadly.
In that respect, in the safety angle, you're pushing on an open door of people who truly know the safety and security things around that. As regulators, typically we focus on ethics, safety, and the sustainability of both of the species being hunted and, as you've heard in the questioning by parliamentarians today, the sustainability of other species that are impacted by the growth of a particular population.
When we're talking about the issue of having folks at a distance, and you want that validation, you did mention that even though cameras can shoot up to five nautical miles, would there not be some value to having high-quality, licensed, unbiased observers with skills, knowledge, and ability there working jointly with the sealers to help provide that confidence? In doing so, five miles or three miles or even 500 metres, at times, as you say, it's hard to pick apart whether or not that video is producing the transparency that the industry's asking for.