Mr. Speaker, I will start by saying that I will be supporting the bill, as I support rural communities across this country. I also support the long history of well-managed traditional wildlife harvest that has been the lifeblood of many communities for centuries and even millennia.
I know that the seal hunt is controversial and that support for it varies widely in different parts of Canada and different parts of the world. I know this. I was born and raised in British Columbia, where there was considerable opposition to the Atlantic coast seal hunt, especially 30 or more years ago when whitecoats were still being harvested.
I lived in Newfoundland for a few years during that time and witnessed first-hand the hard feelings between Newfoundlanders and animal rights activists from away, but I also witnessed the excitement in the spring when the first boats returned from the front and seal flippers appeared in local grocery stores. Yes, I have eaten flipper pie. I also spent a summer in the northern Yukon in the early 1980s and witnessed traditional seal hunting while on Herschel Island with an Inuvialuit family.
While I was born in British Columbia, I have to mention that I have a long family history with the seal hunt. My great-great-great-great-grandfather Azariah Munden came to Brigus, Newfoundland, in 1759 and by 1768, he was a sealing captain out of that beautiful port. In 1798, I know his crew took 10,000 seals.
In 1819, his son, Captain William Munden, built the Four Brothers, the first Newfoundland-made sealing schooner weighing over 100 tons. By then, Brigus was one of the main centres of the seal fishery in Newfoundland and the Mundens and other Brigus masters were world famous for their exploits on the icy seas, including the Bartletts, who captained the ships that took Admiral Peary to the Arctic and eventually the North Pole.
In the middle of the 19th century, the Newfoundland seal fishery harvested between 400,000 and 500,000 seals per year and was a critical part of the annual wages for many men on the island. Today, the fishery is rather different, and not just because the age of sail gave way to steam and then to diesel. There are six species of seals in Atlantic Canada, but only three or four are hunted regularly. Ringed and bearded seals are hunted in the Arctic, primarily for subsistence purposes. A few grey seals are taken on the Atlantic coast.
However, it is the harp seal has always been the main focus of the hunt and is the most abundant marine mammal in the North Atlantic, probably one of the most abundant marine mammals in the world. They are hunted in Atlantic Canada, the Canadian Arctic, and Greenland. The harp seal population right now is around eight million individuals. I hear 7.4 million from some seal experts. I have heard as much as nine million, but that population has been more or less stable for the past decade and more than triple what it was back in the 1970s.
The harp seal hunt is one of the best-managed harvests of wildlife in the world. For one thing, it is relatively easy to count these animals, as the adult females haul out on the ice to give birth to their young in the spring. I have spent my life counting all sorts of animals and can only dream of such an easy census opportunity. I know there are a couple of fisheries biologists in the House today, who can appreciate trying to count fish underwater. These are dark animals hauled out on ice. One could fly over them and count the dots. The population estimates have a good level of confidence.
About 65,000 seals were harvested last year in the Atlantic hunt, well below the quota set by DFO at 400,000 animals per year. This quota is somewhat above the number that would be set for a precautionary approach, but that would only be used if there were some level of concern about the population trend, and there clearly is not. This management policy is considered one of the best in the world and has been copied by other sealing countries, such as Norway.
I would like to finish by commenting on another topic that often comes up in conversations around the seal fishery and seal populations, and that is the effect that seal predation might have on fish populations, particularly the populations of the endangered northern cod and Atlantic salmon.
Both grey seals and harp seals are mentioned in this regard, since their populations have risen as those fish stocks have declined. I know there was an annual cull of grey seals based on this belief until 1990 in an attempt to improve the recovery of cod populations.
However, without going into details here, I would just say that culling one species of animal to improve the numbers of another species, when it has been our actions that created the problem in the first place, is problematic both in terms of biology and logistics. Therefore, I just wanted to say that I would be hesitant to support a seal cull as an effort to improve fish populations, but I do support the commercial harvest of seals on the Atlantic coast and in the Arctic, which in modern times is both well managed and humane.
I support this bill to showcase seal products as I support the rural communities that depend on the traditional seal fishery as a source of income each and every year.