Environment committee  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the opportunity to sit in front of you and talk to you. For me, it's an honour to be able to come here to put a face on a trapper. You probably don't know a lot of trappers. If you're lucky, you might. I know that Robert knows a

Environment committee  I'd like to take a shot at it. Over the last 30 years the federal government has put a lot of money into trap research. I get the other end of the stick when I'm talking to my trapper buddies and they ask why they have to change a tool and why they have to continuously keep upgr

Environment committee  I think it was in my presentation. Right now one of the funding sources we get is from the Ministry of Environment for trap research in our facility in Vegreville, Alberta. I think it's roughly $300,000. The other thing that's critical for us—

Environment committee  I would like to also add the fact that we have the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards by our federal government. It's probably one of the smartest trade agreements we've ever had because it allows us to have access to markets in the world. Without those markets,

Environment committee  I will give you part of an answer here, anyway. Because there are people who are opposed to what you do, if you put up a sign saying that you're trapping someplace, it invites a lot of problems. I have two dogs of my own, so I'm a dog lover, but the first thing that happens wh

Environment committee  That causes a lot of problems, because there are other users out on the land, hunting, fishing, trapping. When a dog gets caught in a trap.... Society has said to the trappers that it wants the traps to be lethal; it doesn't want the animal to suffer. I can honestly tell you that

Environment committee  I can speak very definitely about the tagging business in Ontario. I have three registered traplines that I trap on in Ontario. It takes about five minutes if you contact a conservation officer to know exactly who traps there. So that's not an issue. Where we run into a lot of

Environment committee  I know that specifically in the Northwest Territories, there's money provided to trappers for turning in carcasses of wolverines and wolves for study. They're doing population studies and so on, especially with the problems they're having with the caribou populations in NWT. I kn

Environment committee  In just about every jurisdiction that has banned trapping, that decision has morphed into nuisance wildlife control work. One way or the other the animals are going to be caught. As I said earlier, the biggest problem happens when ordinary people take into their own hands how the

Environment committee  A coyote, absolutely, that's what I mean. People will take things into their own hands and shoot, shovel, and shut up, that sort of thing. Sometimes the racoon gets caught and runs away, or a cat gets caught and it makes the front page of the paper. Legal legitimate trapping hel

Environment committee  From a harvester's point of view, the seal hunt in Iqaluit and in Nunavut is a food harvest. The skins are a byproduct. For a number of years they would harvest the seal, skin it, and throw the skin away because there was no commercial value to it. That, to me, is a total disgrac

Environment committee  Let me use a slightly different but still relevant example, that of polar bears. You see these gooey commercials right now with Coke featuring polar bears. I mean, their aim is to sell Coke—that's what they're after. But it gives the Inuit a bad image. Polar bear conservation did