MPs pass first reading of bill to create National Seal Products Day

Nunavut MP Hunter Tootoo, wearing his sealskin tie, meets United States President Barack Obama last March in Washington, D.C. (FILE PHOTO)

Canada moved a step closer this week to designating a day to celebrate the seal hunt and its bounty.

Members of Parliament voted Nov. 2 to pass the first reading of Bill S-208, National Seal Products Day Act, a private members bill proposed by retired MP and Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette in the Senate. In the Commons, it’s sponsored by Scott Simms, a Liberal MP from Newfoundland and Labrador.

The bill will now be read a second time and referred to the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.

If adopted in the House of Commons, the bill would enact May 20 as a day to celebrate the country’s seal harvesters and those who make a living harvesting marine resources.

The day would also coincide with a European Union promotional day called “Maritime Day.”

Yvonne Jones, MP for Labrador, and an Inuk, called the seal hunt industry among the country’s most sustainable.

“I watched many times, as a young girl, as my father, my uncles, and my brothers all fought those great protestors who thought they were barbarians, that they were less than everyone else in the country because they were trying to provide for their family in a very sustainable way,” Jones said when she spoke to the bill Oct. 27.

“The sealing industry is one of the most humane industries in Canada today. Everything about the seal is humane: the way that it is harvested, the way that it is cured, the way that it is utilized.”

A Seal Products Day “would be an opportunity for us to reflect upon the seal, the cultural use of the seal, the sustainability of the seal in our lives, and how it maintains its strength for Canadians as a source of food, as a source for crafts, as a source of economic sustainability in many regions across the country,” Jones said.

Simms, the MP sponsoring the bill, said that, besides being a day to celebrate seal, the national day would make a statement about the role seal plays in many regions of the country.

European Parliament’s has had a ban on importing seal products into EU member nations in place since 2010.

Nunavut MP Hunter Tootoo did not speak to the bill, but Simms thanked Tootoo for supplying several members with seal skin ties, including the seal skin tie Tootoo wore to Washington, D.C. for a state dinner earlier this year when he met U.S. president Barack Obama.

“I think that is probably the first time that has ever happened with an American president, and hopefully not the last,” Simms told the House, wearing his own seal skin bowtie.

The only MPs who voted against the bill were Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, NDP MP Don Davies and Green Party leader Elizabeth May, who got an earful from Nunavummiut on social media afterwards.

Your stance on seal hunt ⇒ against social justice, UN human/indigenous rights, sustainable economic dvpmt, local resource mgmt @ElizabethMay

— Madeleine Redfern (@madinuk) November 3, 2016