Dear Senator Harb,

After reading your factually misleading diatribe against Canadian sealing, which - as is normal for those supporting the multi-million dollar USA headquartered “animal rights” groups - distorts, though “cherry picking”, poll results, quotes, statistics, public policy and the reality of the lives of Canadian sealers from Quebec, Nunavut, Nova Scotia and other provinces I have come to the conclusion that you might be better off resigning from the Canadian Taxpayer’s payroll and earn your income directly from one of the American animal rights groups whose propaganda and lobbying you so ardently support: for reasons I can only speculate on.

The seals we hunt in Canada have never, ever been on any endangered species list and Canadian management policies have seen a tripling of the Harp seal populations and increases in all the other species involved. This is not now nor ever has been a question of “conservation”. It has always been a question of targeting a “cuddly” species by American animal rights groups to raise funds to further their agenda of “ending man’s use of animals”: all uses of animal including as pets. Sealing is merely the tactic and not the goal.

Every major Aboriginal group including the ITK, the ICC and various Inuit  governments have rejected time and time again the concept, fostered by EU and USA governments and the animal rights movement, of “Aboriginal exclusions” on the grounds that they both ignore the realities of the market place, are inherently racist and also represent the continued “colonial mentality” of “we know what is best for you”.

Your comments on employment reflect the continued propaganda of animal rights groups, going back decades, that there are other viable job opportunities for coastal Canadians, whether they be Aboriginal or not, in their home communities when the facts have shown, again for decades, that aside from giving us all Government jobs - like your own - it is very, very difficult to develop alternative employment. The vast majority of coastal Canadians earn their living from a variety of sources - fishing, trapping, farming, logging and a host of other employments, including sealing - and it is the sum total of all their various jobs that provide them with the wages that allows them to earn a “decent” income: they do not, like you, have a defined job and income attached to it.

The bans you refer to have been put in place by “politicians” who have “bought into”  the animal rights “propaganda” disseminated, at great cost, in Europe and the USA: politicians who have been co-opted by the multi-million dollar “lobbying” efforts. Lobbying efforts based upon “quasi-facts”, vilification of sealers through the use of dehuminising language, slander and the anthropomorphising of the animal in question. Urbanites, who are the main source of funds for the animal rights movement, live in a “Disney world” and real world killing of animals is beyond their comprehension and thus an “easy sell” which the animal rights movement has successfully tapped for eons.

As an individual who has been attacked (verbally, physically and through the written word), as have many others of us, I find your actions in the Canadian Senate an insult to all of us and our desire to live productive lives in our own communities, whether they be in my province, or any other, and whether we be Inuit of not.

Your attacks - which are unfounded in fact and which accept the EU/USA condemnation of us as “immoral” because we kill animals - upon Canadian sealers and Canadian sealing further the agenda of American based animal rights groups and threaten the continued economic viability of the Canadian fur industry, the Canadian pork industry, the Canadian cattle industry and any other Canadian industry, or individual, utilising animal products to make either a corporate or personal profit: neither companies nor people can survive without a positive cash-flow.

I do not pretend to understand your acceptance of the animal rights movement's propaganda, nor your endorsing of their lobbying effort but I can assure you the neither I nor any other Canadian involved in sealing, is an “immoral” person and I find it offensive that you use your seat in the Canadian Senate as a tool in your ongoing attacks upon Canadian citizens to further the ends of the foreign based multi-million dollar animal rights movement: a movement that holds sway over less than 4 percent of of western populations and even less than that on a worldwide basis.

I find it quite strange that as a member of the Liberal Party you defy that party’s long standing endorsement of “Canadian Sealing” and attempt to make sealing a partisan issue by attacking the present government when in reality it is your own party, based upon its number of years in power, that has been the main supporter of Canadian sealing for almost a half century.

If you were merely articulating a view espoused by rational people I would simply ignore your ridiculous,  slanderous  comments but since you are avidly supporting the American based animal rights movement that has maliciously attacked Canadian citizens - historically in Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec and more recently in Nunavut - who have, and continue to, act within the laws of Canada, as determined by the House of Commons over the years, I must, on behalf of all of us, protest your foisting your propaganda upon the Canadian people. 

Sincerely,

Jim Winter

Founding President: Canadian Sealers Association