Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses who are here.
First I want to thank Mr. Hardy for sending the videos that he did. I enjoyed them while eating my dinner the other night. They were very informative, so thank you for that.
I want to make this clear, and I know members around the table have heard me say this a million times. I just want to reiterate that I am very much in support of a sustainable seal harvest. In my family, we were talking about the cod moratorium. We moved from the east coast to the west after the cod moratorium, because of the impacts on the community there.
I recently visited Nunavut and was speaking with indigenous people in the fishing communities there about the importance of a sustainable seal harvest. We know there's no denying that we need to be taking timely action around this.
I want to see if I can play a bit of a devil's advocate here, Mr. Hardy. I think it's always good when we call out things that we're seeing and get other thoughts on it.
In the media today I was reading that “seal diets vary according to seasons, ages, sexes, and among areas and years.” In context, this was speaking to the complexity of the issue of seal predation and its impacts on cod. I'm wondering if you can speak to that quote and provide some of your thoughts.