Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

There is no other nation on the planet more associated with clubbing defenseless animals than Canada. Despite signs saying “baby on board the ice floes,” hundreds of uneducated East coast darlings of the public dole have this perverse fetish to inflict brutality on baby animals, most notably the baby harp seals.

Next month this pathetic group of sadistic pedophagophiles will troop to the ice at taxpayer expense to once again crush the skulls of helpless infant seals. There really is no market for sealskins or seal meat but the knuckle draggers from the Maganderthal Islands of Quebec and the archaic outposts of Newfie-land are desperate to satisfy their perverse lust to slaughter the helpless.

There are few animals on the planet as helpless and trusting as baby harp seals. Anyone can walk up to them, pet them, tickle them, photograph them, or bash in their brains and skin them alive.

And there are few men more brutally insensitive and more cowardly than the ignorant goons who torment them every spring.

The slaughter is so abhorrent that those who practice it indulge in disturbing rituals like drinking the blood from the still beating hearts of the first baby seal they kill, after which they then smear a crucifix in blood on their foreheads. They call it the “rites of spring,” and seem to take a bizarre pride in being cold-blooded killers of innocent and helpless creatures.

For sport, these fine examples of Canadian manhood decapitate a seal pup and then they use the bodies of four pups as goal posts in a game they call “head hockey” where they use a baby seals bloody head as a puck.

Of course they justify their bizarre behavior in the name of culture, but then so do the cannibals of Borneo, the cock-fighters of Hawaii, or the strange men who circumcise women in Ethiopia. Anything goes it seems if you tag the words “culture” or “tradition” to it.

Even more bizarre is the sealers insistence that they no longer kill baby seals. They stopped killing baby seals when they changed the definition of what a baby seal is: a seal over the age of three weeks.

The seal may be losing its white hair but it is still helpless on the ice, still suckling milk, and still has not learned how to swim.  They may be helpless seal pups but the Canadian government solved the problem by officially designating baby seals as adults.

And even if they were actually adults, the annual massacre of 325,000 seals has no place in the 21st Century.

But Canadian politicians just can’t let it go. They refuse to accept that in the 21st Century industries like whaling, seal killing, forest destroying, fish extermination, and beaver bashing no longer have a place in civilized society.

It’s downright embarrassing being a Canadian these days. Sure, we’re hosting the Winter Olympics, although we had to destroy thousands of trees and blow up a few mountains to build it so the world would come only to find a shortage of snow. The Harper government overlooked one thing in their on-going denial of global warming: lack of snow for their expensive winter five ring international sales promotion meeting at Whistler.

This is their second disappointment with the Olympics, the first being the rejection of sealskin uniforms by the “unpatriotic” Canadian Olympic team.

That was the brainchild of Gail Shea, the silly little Canadian Fishy Business Minister who was recently struck in the face by a tofu pie in protest of Canada’s rising national sport of seal clubbing. The pie thrower is now on the growing list of “terrorists” who oppose the slaughter of seals.

It’s not unusual for nations to seize events to rally patriotism and nationalistic fervor around. Americans rallied in the wake of the fall of the World Trade Towers. Australians rallied in the wake of the Indonesian nightclub bombing, Germans rallied to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Not wanting to be left in the dust of patriotic lust, Canadian politicians decided to rally to the demise of the seal slaughter boldly stating that it is un-Canadian, in fact treasonous to oppose the killing of baby seals.

You see, Canada’s reaction to dissent by the provinces is to give the whining province everything it wants. Quebec, the whiniest province of the ten, insisted on a language law that would make the province unilingual in a bilingual nation and they got it. The same law makes it a criminal offense to print menus in English only, although French only is okay, and the silly law was even cause to fine a Montreal restaurant for having a parrot in the lobby that spoke English but not a word of French.

The politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa are now doing the same with pathetic little Newfoundland. This easternmost offshore rock in the Atlantic has been Canada’s welfare province ever since it joined the Canadian Confederation in 1949. Canada offered the baby bonus as an enticement and the Newfie’s were onboard immediately for the chance to have kids for cash.

There is not much going on in Newfoundland these days. They used to have a thriving fishing industry until they killed the goose that laid the golden egg by wiping out the cod in an orgy of greed that would have made Wall Street embarrassed.

And now, with a mass exodus of Newfoundlanders seeking jobs in Alberta and Ontario, the government of Canada is trying desperately to make them stay home with enticements like a subsidized seal slaughter that earns enough work points to go on extended unemployment insurance benefits. Kill some seals, make a few bucks at the taxpayer’s expense, and then go on the dole, kick back, and watch American Idol with a six-pack of brewski’s- the primary ambition of the club swingers of the Great White North.

It is understandable of course that these brainless wonders get their kicks from skinning baby seals alive, but what is really strange is the incredible lengths that Canadian politicians are going to defend the baby bashers.

Some of these stunts are ridiculously embarrassing. Like the Governor General biting into a raw seal heart for a photo-op. Yep, there she was, the representative of her Britannic majesty Queen Elizabeth II with seal blood smeared on her lips and chin.

This of course was followed up by the Prime Minister feeling he could not be outdone by a woman, so he had to eat some raw seal meat to show he was just as barbaric as the politically correct Haitian prima donna with the seal blood on her fingers. And to top this off, he ordered the Parliamentary restaurant in Ottawa to put baby seal meat on the menu and patriotic points are scored by those who order it. Only in Canada can a ministerial appointment be denied for refusal to eat a seal burger.

Meanwhile, for us Canadians who have opposed the barbarism of the seal hunt, we are accused of being eco-terrorists and are regularly arrested under an Orwellian law called the Seal Protection Act that actually makes it illegal to witness or document the killing of a seal.

Despite the best efforts of Canadian politicians to coddle their seal clubbing little darlings, the nasty seal loving Europeans went and banned seal pelt imports into Europe. Overnight the market for seal pelts was wiped out.

But Canada is a welfare state and the government believes in supporting archaic industries with handouts, even when the industry no longer produces anything of value.

They tried to blame the seals for wiping out the cod, but only the most ignorant of Canadians believed that myth. Unfortunately for the seals, this low level IQ group is divided into two groups, the fishermen being the dumb ones and the politicians being the dumber.

This week Canada has sunk to an all time low by using the Inuit as pawns in hosting a G7 finance Ministers meeting in the small town of Iqaluit in the far north of Canada way up above the Arctic Circle.

What Canada wants to do is to have Inuit sealers berate and insult European Parliamentarians by accusing them of being insensitive and even racist for opposing the seal hunt. Never mind that the Inuit hunt for seals takes less than 5% of the seals killed in Canada overall. Never mind that Europe actually allowed an exemption for the Inuit.

What the wily Canadian politicians are trying to do is associate Northern poverty and economic hardships to a seal slaughter that does not even take place in Canada’s North but rather on the East Coast

“The Canadians are callously using the plight of traditional and indigenous communities to overturn the ban and in doing so allow Canada to continue to kill 300,000 baby seals a year,“ said Arlene McCarthey, a British member of the European Parliament who played a lead role in negotiating the EU ban.

“Instead of organizing stunts, Canadians should accept the fact that the EU has passed this law,” she told The Toronto Globe and Mail via e-mail.

Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak has publicly stated that that Nunavut officials involved in the Feb. 5-6 summit will wear sealskin, and the ministers will be treated to a country dinner on Saturday that will feature seal meat.

According to the Globe and Mail, the European Union office in Ottawa declined comment, as did several other embassies. Some European diplomats, speaking on condition they not be named, were bemused.

“Once we knew the venue, we kind of knew what would be on the menu,” said one diplomat. “It raises half an eyebrow.”

Diplomats from G7 countries said they were not informed of the provocative menu. Canada never really explained its reasons for holding a meeting of powerful finance ministers in a remote location where cell phone and Internet coverage is spotty and there are not enough hotel rooms for full-sized delegations.

Another European delegate said, “Why put that group up there? It eludes my logic, but we all have the delicacy not to ask that question too loudly.”

Diplomats may not wish to ask that question loudly, but I’m not a European diplomat. I’m a Canadian, originally from the Eastern Maritime province of New Brunswick, and I find it humiliating to see Canadian leaders groveling to appease the perversions of a few hundred baby killers who are just too damn lazy to get re-training for a real job, one that does not embarrass those of us who are Canadians and have no wish to see our great nation smeared with the innocent blood of hundreds of thousands of seal pups.