As quickly as I can, on the ground, we have to get at the fundamentals. Science is the fundamental function of where we need to go.
There was a milestone achieved in St. John's last November, not necessarily because the minister said, “Seals eat fish,” and I would hate to think that she said that under duress, by the way, but she did say it. Somewhere in the bureaucracy there's a problem. I don't think it's at the ministerial level, other than the accountability of it.
For years, it was purported that seals have no impact on the ecosystem. The chief scientist for DFO was the one who said that and was highly offended that somebody would suggest that. Now we have come out of this summit with a fundamental change in science, so we're going there. What we didn't achieve, though, at the summit was having a fundamental approach, strategically, to do the marketing. Some of the gateways to marketing are through our international agreements.
How could we allow the EU to pass morality clauses on the actions of fishermen engaged in a legitimate fishery? We allow that, but we have levers through some of our trade negotiations to do something about that. The WTO has clauses to protect that. It has never been properly challenged—through the North American Free Trade Agreements and so on—to try to see if we can leverage the species protection act that the United States has to prevent us from getting our seal products in.
These are the items that we certainly have to address. Clearly, doing proper science now that we're supposed to be doing—we'll have to wait and see on that—will allow us then to neuter some of the outrageous and vacuous arguments that the animal welfare people keep using on us.
Somewhere within that fundamental science, by the way, it has to be acknowledged that fish harvesters do have a few clues about the population of seals, and they have a few clues about what they eat. I think that's important.
We have to factor into that mosaic of science the idea of pure science, as well as the empirical knowledge provided by fish harvesters who are out on the ocean every day.