Our Lips Are Sealed

Northern Exposures In Southern Lands

The photos showed exactly what the text said, with the last sentence expressing deep concern that I not share the photo with another living soul for the time being.

There was a video sent, too. The taker of the video filming with their phone from a boat on a hot morning spent fishing in the Ottawa River near downtown. I personally couldn’t imagine being out trolling for and seeing what this guy was seeing - a young harbor seal sunning itself on the shores of Victoria Island right behind Parliament. I’m no marine biologist but to me, it looked quite healthy, but then again, even a starving seal still appears fat, right?

It probably goes without saying, but for a seal to get that far up the Ottawa river, past the dams and locks systems, it almost certainly must have had help. Maybe not direct help, but all that would have needed to happen was for the young harbor seal to hitch a ride on the stern platform of any yacht travelling up the river from the St. Lawrence, all the while the owners of the craft being completely oblivious to their newly found stowaway, and you end up with a situation like this.

That might sound like I’m taking creative measures on the “how” here, but I’ve shot the shit with several folks who were far more in-the-know about this than I was, and that guesswork is more or less the agreed-upon theory.

Here’s the thing though, seals don’t see well in murky water. They need extremely clear water to hunt properly, so within days of its discovery - oh and by the way, no one seems to be able to agree on just how long the seal had been there - the seal died, it’s body allegedly winding up in a landfill.

There’s a massive discussion that this seal opens up, revolving around several different subjects, and no one is really talking about them. Our country of Canada is massive, and I’ll will be the first person in a room full of the guilty to stand up and admit that when I focus on topics relating to hunting and fishing, almost none of them are based in and around maritime Canada, nor at they centered toward the arctic circle, either.

One of those discussions is about dams. Now, let it be known that I really, really, really hate dams. Most of them are completely useless, and do more harm than good. I have to assume that if that seal had a clear line of unobstructed travel, it may very well have returned to the St Lawrence river. Then again, maybe not. But what’s interesting is that this seal isn’t overly special in the grand scheme of things, in fact it’s not the first seal to show up in the Ottawa River, nor will it be the last.

The Ottawa River is actually part of the harbor seals’ historic Canadian range, as is places like Montreal and as far into Lake Ontario as Amherst Island. For someone like me who lives very close to that island, this is nuts for me to even imagine, but from what I could dig up, seals were considered commonplace in the eastern basin of Lake Ontario up until the 1800’s…or, pretty much when we start large scale damming.

Go figure.

When you look at Canada and our species of seals, there are roughly five that show up on our shores regularly - Harbor seals, grey seals, harp seals, bearded seals, and ringed seals. A senate commission looking into our booming seal population and its affects on the coastal fish communities estimated that Canada’s harp seal population may be nearing seven million animals…and still growing.

When you try to swallow a number like that, it’s damn near impossible, and yet here’s this perfectly viable resource that indigenous cultures in the arctic, as well as the eastern coastal portion of our country have harvested and made good use of for hundreds, if not thousands of years…So,…why do we have so many goddamn seals?

Well, for starters, there was a ban on the trade and distribution of seal products in Europe around…I think the nineteen seventies, that pretty much crippled the Canadian seal industry, then it was topped with a ban on using large scale ships to hunt them with ( that’s a generalization - based on what I’m reading currently, the large scale ships were used initially for the slaughter of baby seals, but once that was made illegal, they were then used to harvest adults), Inuit cultures still were allowed to hunt, but that left a large majority of seal populations unchecked.

We, as Canadians, don’t hear a lot about this ongoing situation, but when you go back and consider the ever-increasing population of harp seals, without factoring in the other four species that are increasing in population size as well, something has to give, right?

Well, in this case, it’s our fish stocks off the east coast of Canada, and no one will raise the alarm better than the fishermen who have been fishing those grounds for a large majority of their lives.

The truth is that this all comes back to our Ottawa river harbor seal and its untimely death. This seal, in the opinion of many, represented a means to start a conversation - some folks thought the best way to do this was to take the dead seal and dump it right on the steps of parliament, which definitely would have made a serious statement - and that conversation needs to be that in the looming cloud of what our national economy currently looks like, and what resources we have an abundance of.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I am sitting in the comfort of my office chair and claiming that seals are the answer to Canada’s economic woes, because I’m not. More so, what I’m getting at is the fact that there is a wonderful opportunity to help our neighbors to the north, and help our country at the same time, yet all the while it seems as though we’re going in the opposite direction.

Now I don’t know if seal hunting is something that the provincial and federal governments should open up as a general hunt where participating hunters pay a fee and enter a lottery system, but it might be something to consider. I have no doubt that there are folks out there that would jump at the opportunity to hunt seals, but as far as what sort of challenge it would present to a hunter, this I’m not entirely sure of, either.

But here’s the thing, YOU can do a couple of quick online searches and find the historic range of said seals, and realize that dams have, for the most part, stopped them from reaching those areas in the Ottawa river as well as Lake Ontario, and there’s a lot of charter guides running operations on Lake Ontario that would say something along the lines of “good, we don’t need, or want, seals digging into our pacific salmon stocks out here”.

Valid, but now we’re diving into the subject of Great Lakes restoration, or the novelty of the matter, and…well…everything sort of gets muddied and heated.

I know, I know, this has been something of a rant. I know that no answers to the questions at hand were reached. What I do think we need to come to is a consensus though - Are we willing to start looking at what we’ve got and how we can use to better our country’s situation, or do we ignore it, and relegate seals to making back page news locally when they show up hundreds of miles away from where we’re told they actually belong?…