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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: May 2008

Swinging Canadian elections keeps the sealers swinging clubs

Commentary by Merritt Clifton

 

Thirty years ago, when I first wrote about the Atlantic Canadian seal hunt as a rural Quebec newspaper reporter, both the hunt and protests against it already seemed to have gone on forever--but I had hopes that the efforts of Brigitte Bardot and Paul Watson would soon end it. Bardot brought global celebrity status to the campaign; Watson had just introduced the then new tactic of actually confronting the sealers on the ice, as cameras rolled.

I had known about the hunt and the protests for close to 10 years, first hearing of it soon after Brian Davies moved his Save The Seals Fund to the U.S. from New Brunswick and retitled it the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

When the U.S. Postal Service introduced nonprofit bulk mail discounts in 1969, the seal hunt was among the topics that built IFAW, the Animal Protection Institute, Greenpeace, and the Fund for Animals. The seal hunt was already a cause celebré before Bardot gave up acting to start the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, before Watson formed the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society while Greenpeace retreated from the sealing issue.

I was on Parliament Hill asking Canadian political leaders for their views on the seal hunt before the formation of PETA, or any of the other animal rights groups that emerged in the early 1980s--and already, their answers were long rehearsed. Sea of Slaughter author Farley Mowat and my late Townships Sun and Sherbrooke Record colleague Bernard Epps, among others, had been to Ottawa asking the same questions well before I got there.

Though I knew the seal hunt was among the older issues on my beat, I had no idea how long protest against the seal hunt had been waged until a few years ago ANIMAL PEOPLE inherited old humane literature that documents antisealing campaigns being waged as far back as 1900.

Allowing for technological change, the protest tactics of 100 years ago differed little from those of today. Europeans sought to ban seal pelt imports. Scientists testified, activists wrote to newspapers, witnesses distributed images of the killing, and some of the largest and most prominent humane societies of the day tried to launch consumer boycotts.

None of this succeeded. The seal hunt was interrupted only by World War I, World War II, some years of scarce seals, and most recently by the tenure of Brian Mulroney as prime minister of Canada, 1983-1994. Mulroney in 1984 imposed a moratorium on the offshore phases of the hunt, which held until 1995.

At the time, and to this day, seal hunt opponents have asserted that the suspension under Mulroney was due to a boycott of Atlantic Canadian fish products. In truth, the Atlantic Canada cod and salmon populations were already in collapse. Fishers could barely catch enough to fulfill the export contracts they already had.

What had actually happened was than Mulroney, a Progressive-Conservative from Baie Como, Quebec, was the first and only prime minister ever to hold majorities in both Quebec, traditionally Liberal territory, and Ontario, the traditional Progressive-Conservative bastion. Winning majorities in both Quebec and Ontario, Mulroney enjoyed a wide majority in Parliament regardless of how his party fared in the four Maritime provinces--and the Mulroney government may have been the only government in Canadian history that could afford to shrug off Maritime opposition.

The Maritime provinces are New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. With a small part of Quebec, they surround the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where the first phase of the seal hunt each year is conducted. The second phase occurs along the Labrador Front, north of Newfoundland, the province in which the sealing tradition is oldest and strongest.

The Maritime provinces actually have little representation in Parliament, yet usually have furnished the swing votes that determined which party would govern the nation.

Much has changed since Mulroney left office. The Progressive-Conservatives split into two parties, then rejoined as the present Conservatives. Quebec tipped from the Liberals toward the Bloc Quebecois, descended from a political alliance-of-convenience between Mulroney supporters and Quebec separatists. The left-leaning New Democratic Party, strong a generation ago, has all but collapsed.

The balance of power

Yet the Maritime provinces still hold the swing votes, in a nation in which only three prime ministers in 40 years have held clear Parliamentary majorities, one of whom was Mulroney, while another, Pierre Trudeau, governed for part of his tenure from a minority position.

Among the 305 current Members of Parliament, there are now 127 Conservatives, 96 Liberals, 48 Bloc Quebecois, 30 NDP, and four independents.

Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper holds office only by keeping the support of the entire Conservative delegation plus at least 26 other Members.

In practical terms, this means placating the eight Conservatives from the Maritimes, including three from Newfoundland, plus the Bloc Quebecois. The Bloc Quebecois, strongest in rural areas, holds the one seat representing the part of Quebec where seals are hunted.

As politicians usually do what keeps them in power, Harper outspokenly favors sealing.

The Liberals are almost as close to bringing down the Conservative government as the Conservatives are to forming a majority, and could do it with NDP and independent help--but only if they keep their 21 Maritime members, who have been elected in part because of the Liberal legacy of unbroken support of the seal hunt.

Even if 90% of Parliament opposed the seal hunt, as up to 70% of all Canadians have said they do in opinion polls, sealing might continue because the 10% of Parliament who represent sealing regions possess the balance of power.

If either the Conservatives or the Liberals moved to stop the seal hunt, the opposition would swiftly take advantage of Maritime discontent. Voters elsewhere in Canada, with their own issues to consider, cannot be expected to make their feelings about the seal hunt pivotal in a national election.

Neither do threats of boycott make a positive impression on voters who in Montreal are more than 800 miles from anywhere that seals are hunted, in Toronto are 1,100 miles away, in Winnipeg are 2,200 miles away, in Calgary and Edmonton are more than 3,000 miles away, and in Vancouver are 3,600 miles away.

Yet huge opportunities are open to sealing opponents, if appropriate tactics are used.

National Institute for Animal Advocacy founder Julie Lewin wrote her 2007 book Get Political for Animals and win the laws they need for U.S. animal advocates. Much of the book outlines how American government works, and where political opportunities exist within U.S. electoral politics. Lewin freely admits to knowing little about Canadian politics and the Parliamentary system. Much of her advice, however, is directly applicable to the politics that keep the heavily subsidized and protected seal hunt going.

One of Lewin's first lessons: "Ignorance of political dynamics leads to repeated, avoidable failures." Thus far, no anti-seal hunt campaign has even tried to influence the Parliamentary balance of power. Everything Lewin teaches about how the mere 4% of Americans who hunt retain dominance over U.S. wildlife and habitat management could be said about the sealing industry too, except that the sealing industry has just a fraction of the economic strength of sport hunting, and has fewer participants than there are deer hunters in almost any state.

The Atlantic Canadian seal hunt will end when the political cost--not the economic cost--of continuing it is greater to the governing party than the cost of opposing it. The present Canadian balance of power is so precarious that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals can afford to lose support anywhere, but losses in the Maritimes would be most critical.

If animal advocates could defeat even a few incumbent Members of Parliament, especially in the Maritimes, pro-animal concerns would begin to be taken seriously. Even if a pro-sealing Member was replaced by a pro-sealer of a different party, while pro-animal votes went to a losing candidate, the turnover could profoundly influence Canadian national political party strategy. To either win or hold a secure majority, a party would have to court pro-animal voters, which could make further courting sealers a risky gambit.

In many ridings, as Canadians call electoral districts, tipping the political balance could require influencing only a few thousand votes--and in some, just a few hundred. The funding needed to do it should be much less than is annually invested in confrontational campaigns on the ice.

Canadian election law, like U.S. election law, limits the ability of non-citizens to influence voting with financial contributions. Yet more than half of the total Canadian population lives within broadcast range of U.S. television and radio stations, which are often more watched in nearby parts of Canada than either of the two Canadian national networks, the CBC and CTV. U.S. pro-animal organizations need only air educational ads affirming positive Canadian values in contrast to the behavior of sealers, helping to build a supportive climate for grassroots Canadian electioneering.

Between 25 and 30 years ago, in separate conversations, several then-and-future Canadian cabinet ministers, of all three of the then largest political parties, outlined to me--off the record and strictly hypothetically--what they thought ending the seal hunt would take. The short answer was always that it would happen only when and if protest matured into grassroots political mobilization. They never imagined that animal advocates could demonstrate the needed level of tactical skill. I never imagined it would take this long.