Thank you.
Thank you all very much. I thank you for the invitation to be here. I'm very happy to see Senator Hervieux-Payette here. I got to know her during her term at the Senate of Canada, and I certainly want to thank her for bringing forward this bill to the House.
I'm here to say that I support the bill and to ask all of you, through your connections in the House of Commons, to support it as well. We are recognizing not only the cultural significance of the sealing industry but also the economic importance of the harvest to the indigenous and rural coastal communities across Canada who depend upon it. I think the bill is very consistent with our government's commitment to renewing its relationship with indigenous people, as was outlined in the throne speech and by the current government.
I want to remind everyone here that the seal industry and the harvest itself is humane. It is a well-regulated and sustainable industry. Regardless of the “anti” propaganda campaigns that have been espoused very actively since 1970, this industry has always been a sustainable industry for indigenous people and for rural and coastal people in Atlantic Canada and on the Quebec shore.
I also want to say that this industry has become a sustainable industry not only for indigenous communities in past decades and generations. It continues to be a sustainable and very necessary industry for us in northern Canada, especially in the eastern Arctic and northern regions. Here I refer to Labrador and all of the Inuit Nunangat regions, which I'm sure my colleague MP Tootoo will speak to as well.
Today I want to focus on three main pieces. One is the cultural aspect of the industry. I will talk a little bit about the experience of my family and I, and the people I represent today, as it relates to this industry. The second piece I'd like to talk about is the havoc that our ignorance of the sealing industry is having on our ocean ecosystem in rural, northern, and Inuit communities across Canada, and the reasons that we should support a sustainable seal industry from an ecosystem perspective. Third, I'll speak very briefly about promoting this sustainable, humane, and cultural industry to the world, and the role of Canada in doing that. I will make some recommendations for your consideration.
First of all, I want to acknowledge and say thank you to your committee. I know that when you did the study on the recovery and the abundance of the Atlantic salmon, you did recommend a cull of the grey seal. That was a very smart, very wise decision on your part. It was not the first time limits were set around the harvest of grey seals, but I will tell you that past recommendations around the grey seal failed. One in particular involved 70,000 grey seals that were designated to be taken in the Maritimes. It never happened, simply because the Sable Island area became a sanctuary—where the seal population is growing rapidly and spreading—and the harvest never got implemented.
I just hope your recommendations at a political level will not fall on deaf ears at a bureaucratic level. In my experience of dealing with recommendations in the seal industry—I go back more than 20 years in politics, including as a former fisheries minister for Newfoundland and Labrador—I can honestly tell you that politicians can have the greatest intentions and the best recommendations, but once it leaves here, it takes an awful lot of hard work to penetrate a bureaucratic system that in my opinion has really bought into the messaging of the IFAW and the animal rights groups across Canada.
Remember, these are anti-use groups. They're not animal rights groups.
Their whole campaigns are built around reasons why we should not use species such as seals. It's not about protecting; it's about discouraging, fearmongering, and promoting false information. That's what we have seen from the Humane Society internationally, from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and from PETA, whom we just had to deal with on another resolution in the House of Commons that once again would have been a direct attack upon the aboriginal people and the sealing industry in Canada.
We have to be very careful that we don't look at these groups as being animal welfare groups. They are really groups that are anti-use of animals. It doesn't matter how significant or culturally attached or historically attached that animal may be to our culture, their goal is to raise lots of money to pay themselves those half-million dollar salaries and to be able to fund a major wagon that spreads propaganda.
How do we counteract that? Most of us are small, rural, indigenous, isolated, northern communities that are trying to survive. We don't have the champions in governments to do this and to be a part of it. We are never going to be able to fight back.
I come from a family with a long history in the sealing industry. My grandfathers and my great-grandfathers were all part of the sealing industry. It was the one industry that sustained all of us. Today to have to grow up seeing that industry attacked has not been easy. I've been on the front lines of many protests against the IFAW, the Sea Shepherd, and all of those groups, both in Quebec and in Newfoundland and Labrador, because you do whatever you can to try to protect what is an inherent and cultural industry.
My father and my brothers continue—well, not my father; he has passed—but throughout their lives they continued to participate in the seal hunt as did generations of our family before, so did my mom and my grandparents. You can see the collar I'm wearing today. It was made by my mother, like all of her family members before her.
We had full utilization of the seal. Long before my time and Hunter's time, we burned oil in lamps. We know about that. Today the oil is here. We're not throwing away product. We wear the product. We use it. We market the seal oil. We eat the meat. Seal meat has become more and more a part of our diet as we've seen the loss of other animals like caribou, for instance. It has really taken over in our communities as the main source of protein. We're not going to change our diet because someone else tells us that we should not be killing seals.
These are the same people who will walk into the four o'clock cocktail reception and eat the hors d'oeuvres of chicken, veal, lamb, beef, and pork, and they think they just showed up on a tray. Well, they came from somewhere before they got on that tray. Those are the things that really bother me.
When I walk down the street, and I see a sign outside a store, as I did in Vancouver one day.... It was the Lush soap company, which I loved so much but which I boycott and will never shop at again. They had a sign outside that said, “Stop the seal hunt”, but the people walking in and out of that store were wearing leather shoes. They weren't all going in with runners. By the way, most runners are being made with leather too now, a lot of them. They were going in with leather shoes on, and this was the sign outside.
We used seal oil to make all of our soap for a very long time in our lives. We don't use it anymore because the oil is more valuable now in the capsule. By the way, these capsules—this is not just a product made in Hunter's riding or my riding or Scott Simms' riding. This product is made right across the country. The primary processing for seal is in Newfoundland and Labrador, and some of it is in Montreal, but the bleaching and deodorizing of all of it is done in Saskatchewan, and the capsulation is done in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario.
One of these oils is rendered in Montreal, by the way, and the other one is rendered in Ontario. Most all of them are capsuled in British Columbia now.
Am I running out of time already, because I haven't even started?