As harvesters, our role is to harvest the resource. We are fishermen. Well, I'm not a fisherman; I represent fishermen. I work with fishermen, and I represent the fishing industry.
It is our responsibility to harvest whatever marine resources are commercially viable in the ocean to support our communities, to support our families. It's our role to do that responsibly. We look to science for a biomass that says, “This is the level that you can harvest safely, based on scientific datasets.” We have them in tenfold. Then, it's the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' responsibility to develop the policy, to develop the IFMPs, to develop the management scheme around this biomass. Then the federal and provincial governments' responsibility is to market...and to ensure that these fisheries are completed safely and humanely—in relation to seals or any animal that you're harvesting.
The role of the environmental groups is to ensure that what we are harvesting is not putting any one species, or the food web that's attached to that species, at risk. I don't really see any risk for pinnipeds.