Has a ban against the Canadian seal hunt reached its tipping point?   Earlier this week, after many years of rhetoric and posturing, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to ban Canadian seal products.   The move follows increasingly negative press directed toward the seal hunt over the past number of years.  

Yet while protests against the Canadian seal hunt are nothing new, the kind of people involved in the protests are.   For long, this was a “cause” driven by animal rights activists, environmentalists and vegetarians.   Not so any more.   Today, even those most ardent advocates of the seal hunt are beginning to change their position.   In an honest and unusually confessional piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, even conservative-learning columnist Margaret Wente advised an end to the hunt.   According to Wente, the hunt has become “an embarrassment, and nothing short of banning it will change that”.

For long, the argument that Canadians with an interest in the seal hunt made was less of a defense of the hunt, and more of an argument against those who sought to confuse and distort what it actually was.   A prime example that evoked the ire of many was the picture of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills posed next to a baby, white-coat seal.   Of course what the ex-rocker failed to mention was that neither baby seals nor white coat seals are hunted anymore.   You didn’t need to be a seal hunt advocate to be irritated by this gross distortion of the facts.

Yet today, even those who have less of a stake in the seal hunt and more of an interest in factual information seem to be tipping toward a permanent ban on the hunt.   If the seal hunt hasn’t become an international embarrassment to Canada, then it certainly has become an irritant: sucking up precious political capital when we have limited to begin with.  

Yet, while Canadian politicians of all stripes will fight (if only limply) to reverse the ban- less they risk votes in Eastern Canada- the EU ban may be a good thing over the long term.   Rather than a Canadian Prime Minister having to make the difficult, but likely inevitable, decision to ban the seal hunt him or herself, a precedent for that decision has already been established.   Of course, no politician will let on to this.   However, in the future, Canadian political leaders may look back favorably on the day that a ban on the seal hunt reached its tipping point.