Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for the question, Ms. Barron. I'm glad you were able to go to Nunavut. I wish everybody could come up and share some seal the way the former Governor General did.
In terms of the exemption, I was so against it when it was being talked about, because the Europeans think they can define who's Inuit and what is traditional and what is sustainable. However, under our Nunavut Land Claims Agreement within Canada, we define who we are and what our tradition is. That patronizing attitude has made it very hard for us, because it becomes administrative. We have to come up with the money in order to defend ourselves in court. We have to prove that the seal was caught in this particular way. At the end of the day, as we know, it's up to the European Commission, even after we've proven everything, to decide that the sealskin is not hunted properly or not in the way that the regulations are stating.
The other very negative impact it has had over time has been that, even for our young men and our young women, the imagery put on television about sealing and seal hunting, and about how bad sealing is, sticks with people. It's an image that we are having a really hard time fighting. Rather than going on and on about the imagery, what we need to do, and what we've been saying in the sealing industry that we need to do, is put the human face on the sealing issue: This is our life. You are impacting us. You are making a harsh life even harsher.
It's about education and then putting our stories out there about our traditions—5,000-year-old traditions, the lost hunting culture, the blue economy and you name it. As the other speakers have said, we need to turn the dialogue around to our dialogue, to our Canadian dialogue,