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January/February 2000 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Seal wars Curious by nature

In 1972, Smallwood’s grip on Newfoundland was finally broken by Frank Moores, a federal MP before becoming leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party. Moores’ answer to the failure of Smallwood’s modernization drive was to reverse directions. What was old was good again. It was time to turn back to the future.

The course was never sharply defined but phrases such as "our precious heritage," "our fine old traditions," and, especially, a return to the fishery as "the backbone of this province" were well drummed home. Even the seal hunt was rediscovered by Moores’ administration.

By this time, Davies’ fledgling organization had tapped into a reservoir of international animal-rights supporters which, by his own account, astonished and inspired him to radical and reckless publicity tactics. In Europe, Atlantic Canadians were portrayed by ifaw and the press as bloody barbarians. The whitecoat, with its wide lustrous eyes and fluffy white fur, became an animal-rights symbol. Its "murderers" were thoroughly demonized. Moores, in turn, dipped into a reservoir of insular chauvinism. For most of the 1970s, it became us against them, a political tactic well-proven by Smallwood to be a useful diversion when the provincial treasury grew low.

A ritual from half a century before was resurrected in which the province’s religious leaders proceeded to the St. John’s waterfront in early March for the Blessing of the Sealing Fleet. When that died out again after a few years, Moores’ main promotional tactic was to collect members of the local press and selected cabinet ministers and fiy off in a government jet to lobby in Frankfurt, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and all points between.

Bob Wakeham, now a regional CBC executive producer, went on two of those jaunts and says this official Newfoundland pro-sealing campaign was notable for its well-liquored bonhomie. He also admits that reports back home invariably told of "the team’s tremendous reception in Munich Cincinnati Birmingham yesterday."

IN CHARLOTTETOWN last March for its annual presentation of sealing barbarities to the international press, IFAW has booked me a room in a Great George Street hotel where a bedside pamphlet suggests the place was a knocking shop for the assembled and bibulous Fathers of Confederation.

I head off immediately to a small conference room at the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) building where Rick Smith, IFAW’s Canadian director, and a group of IFAW officers are, by turns, bantering and blustering with some DFO official at the other end of the speaker phone. It is a long wrangle over the minutiae of federal regulations and IFAW’s seal watch: how many per helicopter, exactly where, exactly when, exactly how.

This is the intense, week-long highlight of the group’s Canadian activities. I sense a strange mixture of zeal and mischief, and more than a small dash of overall paranoia. The ifaw contingent is mostly under 30 and gender-balanced.

Smith, tall and with a slightly sardonic air as well as a doctorate in marine biology, receives the personal message John Efford has given me for him: that Smith’s Newfoundland granny is turning in her grave "like a whirling dervish" because of his anti-sealing gambits. Smith replies that Efford’s turn to spin in his grave will come, at which time a spinning Efford might be harnessed for electricity. Next evening, there’s a briefing at the hotel for a fresh load of international press. Many of them are nodding with jet lag as marine mammal biologist David Lavigne finishes his slide show demonstrating how restoring the North Atlantic cod involves many complexities, the diet of seals being but a small part.

It is hard to tell who is really press and who is not. Someone introduced as a British TV cameraman turns out to be under contract to shoot the hunt for IFAW; a purported Dutch journalist is actually a writer for ifaw in Holland. But Helmut of Die Welt seems legitimate, as does James of The Scotsman.

"Isn’t sealing the main economic activity of this part of Canada?" Helmut asks.

"About the same as cuckoo clocks are the main economic activity of Germany," I answer.

"Ah, but cuckoo clocks bring joy and happiness into the world, don’t they?" says Smith, hovering. I ask James of The Scotsman if he had spoken at all to the other side.

"What ’other side’ do you mean?"

"The government of Canada," I say.

"Facts, scientific facts, have no sides and we have them all here," Smith adds.

IN 1983, the European Community banned products derived from seal pups. In Trafalgar Square, a huge animated figure of a brutish sealer repeatedly clubbed an ersatz whitecoat while dozens of IFAW supporters in fuzzy white seal suits squirmed and keened on the pavement. British supermarket chains Tesco and Safeway swept Canadian fish products from their shelves.

The threat to Canada’s $1.5-billion fish exports sent Ottawa into a tizzy. DFO, backed by members of Parliament from the Atlantic Provinces, was at loggerheads with the departments of trade and commerce and foreign affairs. Regulations were introduced to make the seal hunt more humane, but also to keep protesters and the press well away from scenes of blood on the ice.

In 1987, it became illegal to kill whitecoats, the newborn harp seals. This had some propaganda benefit, but it merely gave the young seals another week or so of life. Within three weeks, the pup sheds its white coat and is then fair game for sealers. By this time, Norway had voluntarily pulled its large ice-breaking sealing ships from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the seal hunt was being conducted from shore or from smaller Canadian fishing boats, with the Canadian Coast Guard breaking paths through the ice. A depot was set up at Dildo on Trinity Bay to collect and process pelts in abandoned buildings where, years before, Smallwood had established a plant to turn whales into mink food. The back-to-the-future policies of Frank Moores and his successors eventually contributed to the overfishing and collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery. Offshore gas and oil, Voisey’s Bay nickel (CG Sept/Oct 1995) and Labrador hydro (CG Nov/Dec 1998) are the current concerns of the Liberal administration.

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