I'll give you a situation that just happened on Prince Edward Island in the last 10 days. We have a company that was making bait. They were using a by-product of seal, and within that first week, they were notified by the U.S., under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, that if any of that by-product was used for lobster bait, they would stop accepting lobsters shipped into the U.S. by Canada.
I think everybody around this table is on the same page on wanting to increase the seal harvest and wanting to find new markets and products, but the struggle here is how do we get to the next level with the United States? Is it through the fishers? Is it through additional trade negotiations? I think the Marine Mammal Protection Act is from 1972. It's obviously outdated, but it seems to be bulletproof to some extent. Are we just dealing with total politics here, as we were in the mid-2000s when there was an animal rights...and when there was possible collateral damage to other seafood exports into the U.S. and we were seeing a call for a ban on Canadian seafood products?
How do we overcome some of this situation? It sounds as though, in general, we're all on the same page in Canada. We want to see a seal harvest. We want to see it grow. We want to see new markets created, but we're running into a wall. Is it totally political in the U.S.? What's your opinion on that?