Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for appearing. Some of you have been here before. We really appreciate you showing up.
Mr. Sopuck mentioned the seal population and its effect on salmon. The indication I got was that we really don't have the science to prove that they're a big predator on salmon, but they are a big predator on just about everything else, so I don't know why there wouldn't be a predation effect on the salmon.
To give you an example from my own riding, about a month or a month and a half ago, I happened to be driving past the actual mouth of a well-known salmon river in Salmonier in St. Mary's Bay, and two seals were there at the mouth of the river. I mean, they're not there for the nature of just being there. They're there for food. That's in an area that I'm very familiar with. My family comes from there. Years ago, you would never see seals in that area. It was unknown for a seal to be in that area, but now it's common to see seals there.
Obviously, to me, they are having an effect on the salmon population and other populations, but it seems that nobody will admit that they're a big problem for anything, because nobody wants to bite the bullet and actually say that we need a cull on seals. They're out there in the millions, but yet I think the take this year, or the quota, is somewhere around 400,000 to 425,000. That doesn't touch it. Nowhere near that gets taken, because there's no real value in it right now with the price of pelts and everything else.
When is DFO or the government going to take an aggressive approach to actually doing something about the seal population?