Mr. Speaker, I am certainly pleased to speak to this motion, and I am in support of it. To be clear, the enactment of this act would require the Governor in Council to amend the marine mammal regulations to increase the distance that a person must maintain from another person who is fishing for seals from a half nautical mile to a full nautical mile, except under the authority of a seal fishery observation licence.
As I have said, the Liberal Party of Canada fully supports the Canadian seal hunt and the sealing industry, and we do place a high priority on the safety and well-being of all those who are involved in the seal hunt. What this motion really gets at is that this is a safety issue. Anti-sealing protestors have become more aggressive in recent years, and these activities that they are involved in not only endanger the lives of sealers trying to earn a living in a very tough and difficult fishery and in a way that is traditional to a lot of areas in this country but they also endanger their own lives.
My experience on this issue and the seal hunt and the fishery goes back some time. In fact, I was involved in a fisheries committee that did a study on a sustainable seal herd and the fishery in 1999. I can remember then fighting or arguing and debating with some of the anti-seal hunt people.
At that time in 1999, the anti-seal hunt folks would use that little white seal pup that is awfully endearing, a beautiful little animal. I remember vividly that they were using the white seal pup in the advertising for the anti-seal hunt, and it had been killed brutally, or they claimed it was being killed brutally. It was illegal at that time to kill white seal pups and it still is. Those are not the animals that are being slaughtered, if they want to say, or harvested, which would be a better word. However, what some of those anti-sealing folks were doing at the time, and still are, is using the advertisement of the white seal pup in their anti-sealing profession and spreading falsehoods in Europe and a lot of other places around the world. They are using it as a way to finance their organization, of which about 70% of the money goes to administration. It is quite a job creation program, and the result of that job creation program, by which they have convinced some Europeans to not buy seal products and to be anti-seal hunt, is that it is taking away jobs and opportunities for Canadians whose traditional fishery was the seal hunt.
When that report was written, the sustainable seal population of the harp seal herd was two million. Information provided by Fisheries and Oceans recently indicates that the northwest Atlantic harp seal population now is nearly ten million, up from that two million in the 1970s.
Imagine how much cod 10 million harp seals eat. That was a fact in the 1999 report.
I want to read a couple of sections of that report. Under the heading “Predation by Seals and the Impact on Cod”, it states:
One of the most controversial aspects of the debate on seals is whether predation by harp seals is impeding the recovery of cod stocks. None of the witnesses who appeared before the Committee claimed that seals were the cause of the collapse of cod stocks, which they clearly attributed to both foreign and domestic overfishing. However, it was noted by the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council in their April 1999 report “that the single cod stock in the Northwest Atlantic considered recovered, namely, the southern Newfoundland/St-Pierre Bank stock (3Ps cod), is the only stock that does not have a large number of seals occurring within its stock range.”
What it is saying is that seals do have an impact on cod stock.
The report goes on to specifically indicate how serious that impact on cod stock is:
According to DFO information, an average adult harp seal consumes between 1.0 and 1.4 tonnes of food a year. DFO estimates that the proportion of commercial species, particularly cod, is about 1 to 2%.
This figure is low because of the lack of data.
When we are talking about the seal hunt and cod and the anti-sealers, which the motion is trying to move further away from the seal herd itself, part of the problem is that little white seal pup, which is a lot more cuddly than a codfish. We do not see those anti-sealing folks out there saying, “My golly, these seals should not be eating all these beautiful little codfish”. I would accuse them directly. They used that little white seal pup. They still use that little white seal pup. It is not legal to slaughter that pup, but they are using it for fundraising purposes and are creating consequences in the lives of people involved in the seal industry.
To put it bluntly, the Canadian seal hunt is a humane and sustainable practice that provides jobs and food. It is also a traditional way of life for many people in Atlantic Canada, coastal communities in Quebec, and the northern regions of the Inuit.
While I support the motion, I believe that the government could have done more to protect the Canadian sealing industry, especially by trying to insert something into CETA, the Canada-European trade agreement, to prevent the Europeans from taking the measures they have taken against the Canadian seal hunt.
I do not want to spend a lot of time on that, but the bottom line in terms of the motion is whether it is really a safety measure.
I have outlined a number of areas where anti-sealers are using misinformation to promote their cause. They are using it to create jobs and income for themselves. They will go to any length to promote their cause and use misinformation to do so. All this motion would do is move those demonstrators a little further back from the seal herd.
I congratulate the member for West Nova for introducing the motion. It would put in place regulations that would ensure the safety of both those involved in the seal hunt and the protesters themselves.