A Bit More Detail

Sable Island, a small island that’s literally nothing but a sand dune a couple hundred kilometres southeast of the Nova Scotian mainland, is–as I noted last May–set to become a national park. Writing in the Toronto Star, Alyshah Hasham notes the fears of many that the exceptional fragility of Sable Island–ostensible cause for the National Park designation–may lead to catastrophe when tourists come to visit the newest national park in large numbers.

“You can easily love the island to death,” said Mark Butler, policy director of the Ecological Action Centre.

He and other conservationists fear that the expected influx of tourists eager to see the stark beauty of the island for themselves could harm the fragile ecosystem.

The island usually gets between 50 to 250 visitors a year.

Parks Canada has not yet decided how they will open the national park to the public, says spokesperson Julie Tompa. As a site management plan is being developed to ensure the island is protected and the best visitor experience possible is provided.

Meanwhile the old restrictions for hopeful visitors remain the same — except that written requests must be submitted to Parks Canada rather than the director of Maritime Services.

If permission is granted, don’t feed the horses — a key point in the 2006 visitors guide drafted by Gerry Forbes, one of the island’s two permanent residents. Forbes works at the island’s meteorological centre run by Environment Canada.

Other stipulations: all garbage brought onto island must go off again. There is no camping permitted. And great care must be taken of the diverse wildlife — include the rare Ipswich sparrow.

The guide also requests that “should you find yourself under attack by a shark, please try to note identifying features. If you survive, researchers would like to know which shark species was responsible.”

This story from the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, in Nova Scotia, provides an example of the sort of effect that the robocalling referred to in the previous post had in some ridings in last year.

The riding of Sydney-Victoria is located on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, while South Shore—St. Margaret’s is located on the southern shore of mainland Nova Scotia, south of Halifax.

One of the ridings in question was Sydney-Victoria, where the Conservatives invested heavily in the hopes that Cecil Clarke would unseat Liberal incumbent Mark Eyking. Stephen Harper personally visited the riding twice during the campaign.

Eyking said Thursday his team knew something was wrong on election day when they started getting “disturbing” calls from supporters. Some voters were complaining about incessant phone calls, even though the Liberal communications team had only contacted them twice, as is routine.

Others said they were sent to polling stations that were incorrect or did not even exist.

“They were complaining to our office, saying why would you send me to the wrong place?” said Eyking.

“Our local offices new something was up. Somebody on the other side was playing a really nasty game here.”

Eyking ended up edging out Clarke by just 860 votes to hold onto the riding. His team never followed up on the suspicious calls.

[. . .]

NDP MP Pat Martin said the controversy raises doubts about whether the Conservatives fairly won the 2011 election or if they cheated their way to a majority.

“It’s outrageous, it’s disturbing, it’s as offensive as it can possibly be if you care a damn about the electoral system,” said Martin.

Martin accused the Conservatives of trying to steal eight ridings across the country wherein the NDP discovered suspicious activity tied to robo-calls. One of them was South Shore-St. Margaret’s, where NDP candidate Gordon Earle lost to Conservative Gerald Keddy.

NDP official agent Angus Fields said he remembers receiving “two or three calls” from supporters who were mysteriously directed to the wrong location to vote.

There was also an issue of some voters being deluged with pro-NDP robo-calls. Earle’s office was swamped with complaints for three days, but they were never able to rule out that it was an internal mix-up by NDP election headquarters. The party did not have a definitive answer by deadline Thursday.

NDP riding association president Wolfgang Ziemer conceded those issues would not have changed the final result. What was expected to be a tight race ended up being a comfortable win by almost 2,900 votes for Keddy.

Is the seal hunt in Atlantic Canada nearing an end? I’ve followed the evolution of the hunt here at A Bit More Detail for years, and the trajectory has–thankfully–been ever downward. Last year’s hunt was the worst season ever thanks to collapsing demand following European Union import bans, and the search for alternative markets–China, Russia, anywhere–has been to no avail.

In Nova Scotia, the Cape Breton Post was skeptical of the prospects for a local hunt this year. The situation of the seal hunt is almost as dire in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the provincial government has begun talking about stockpiling seal pelts or directly subsidizing seal hunters to keep it all afloat. One MP has even speculated that it may in the province’s best interests, economic and otherwise, to desist. He’s gotten a lot of hostile reaction, to be sure, from the usual suspects.

St. John’s South-Mount Pearl MP Ryan Cleary is facing criticism over comments he made this week questioning the future of the seal hunt.

In an interview with CBC’s Fisheries Broadcast, Cleary spoke about the viability of the hunt.

“We know that the world appetite is not there for seal meat, but the world appetite for seal products — I don’t know if it’s there,” Cleary said. “And you know what? I may be shot for talking about this, and for saying this, but it’s a question we all have to ask.”

A troika of federal Conservative cabinet ministers issued a joint statement Tuesday clubbing the rookie NDP MP for his remarks.

“For someone who ran supposedly to represent the interests of the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, MP Ryan Cleary’s comments seem to show that he’s giving up on supporting local sealers,” said the statement by Fisheries Minister Keith Ashfield, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue, and Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, who represents Nunavut.

“Unlike the whaling industry, there is no conservation reason to end the hunt. Though the industry continues to battle misinformation put forth by animal rights activists who try to close market access, our government sees no commercial reason to end the hunt.”

[. . .]

Dion Dakins of NuTan Furs in Catalina says the industry is already waging an external battle, and doesn’t need to be sidetracked by internal doubt.

“I certainly don’t think that it’s the most helpful in this debate to have that question posed by someone who’s supposedly the ‘Fighting Newfoundlander.’ That doesn’t sound much like the fighting Newfoundlander that certainly we think we need in this battle. We’re in a 40-year war on this seal issue.”

The seal hunt was worth about $1 million last year. Dakins says he’d like to hear Cleary voice stronger support for the seal fishery, rather than talk reflectively about it.

By way of comparison, the GDP of Newfoundland and Labrador last year was roughly 28 200 million dollars. Seal hunting just isn’t that economically renumerative, and many have pointed out that it also imposes significant economic costs on Newfoundland and Labrador, the cost of mobilizing coast guards in the case of emergencies, say, or the cost of tourist campaigns directed towards markets where Newfoundland’s very name is associated with a bloody hunt.

One prominent sealer has blamed the federal government for not doing more to change things.

The executive director of the Canadian Sealers Association (CSA) says the end of the seal hunt would be an economic disaster for rural Newfoundland.

He was reacting to comments made by St. John’s MP Ryan Cleary, who told CBC News it’s time to decide if the provincial seal hunt should end.

“We know that the world appetite is not there for seal meat, but the world appetite for seal products, I don’t know if it’s there,” said Cleary. “And you know what? I may be shot for talking about this, and for saying this, but it’s a question we all have to ask.”

Cleary said the province receives a lot of negative publicity for the seal hunt, and the $1 million in annual revenue it generates might not be worth it.

But Pinhorn — saying the New Democrat MP for St. John’s South-Mount Pearl “doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about” — said the reason the hunt is worth just $1 million a year is because the federal government isn’t doing enough to promote the industry or fight product bans in European markets.

“The CSA has al­ways maintained that the federal government’s attitude and efforts on sealing is extremely weak, and that’s why it’s only worth a million dollars,” he said. “The prices are low, and the Americans ran over the federal government in ’72 (when they brought in the Marine Mammal Protection Act), for no apparent reason. Then the Europeans walked all over Canada three years ago when they were over there dealing with the free trade agreement and they put seals on the back burner. And then they banned the importation of seals in Europe, and now the Russian federation is doing the same thing, so everybody internationally is walking over the federal government, and that is why there’s no market for seals.”

The sustained failure of the Canadian government to overturn American, European, and now Russian government policies on seal products is diagnostic. The past decades have not seen a weakening of environmentalism, or declining interest in animal rights, quite the contrary.

Unless China, say, becomes a major market for seal products, resisting trends in other potential world markets, the seal hunt won’t be economically viable. It will always dependent on extensive subsidies in a time of government austerity.

None of this lend itself to hopefulness for the seal hunt.

In any case, the very material basis for the seal hunt is falling apart inside Newfoundland. Rural Newfoundland, the Newfoundland of scattered small outports dependent on fishing and sealing that Pinhorn represents, is dying, its economic underpinnings wrecked by the collapse of the cod fisheries and its population fleeing, the working-age young leaving for more renumerative jobs elsewhere in Newfoundland or Canada generally. It may not be a coincidence that Cleary, the MP who talked about ending the seal hunt, represents the riding of St. John’s South-Mount Pearl that is one of the province’s urban ridings, including the southern half of the provincial capital of St. John’s and the province’s second-largest city of Mount Pearl. Cleary’s opinions may be unpopular now, but a glance at article comments suggests that they have an audience. As Newfoundland continues to urbanize and move away from its traditional industries, this audience is only going to grow.