Today, David Johnston became the Governor General of Canada, and he’s got big shoes to fill — Michaëlle Jean’s time as the Queen’s representative in Canada was quite a trip, after all. On the occasion of her retirement, we decided to look back at some of the bumps along the way (and don’t worry, we only mention prorogation once).

1) She’s a separatist!
Not long after Paul Martin announced that Michaëlle Jean would be the country’s next GG did the rumours, allegations, hearsay and, um, videotapes that implied Jean was/is a separatist or married a separatist begin to emerge. The clincher: footage surfaced showing her talking with some separatists saying “Independence can’t be given, it must be taken.” (She said she was talking about Haiti.) It got ugly quick. At the first Remembrance Day ceremony that Jean participated in as GG some vets turned their backs on her, chattering classes chattered, hand wringers wrung hands, etc. Either way, the controversy died down but it clearly left an impression on the new viceroy: the motto on her new coat of arms was a none too thinly veiled “breaking down the solitudes” and in her first major speech (which happened to be at her swearing in ceremony) she declared the time of the two solitudes in Canadian history had passed.

2) She eats baby seal hearts!
It’s no secret that the European Parliament (not to mention many Europeans and, yes, Canadians) have issues with the seal hunt. Large issues. Shortly after the EU imposed an import ban on seal products, Jean caused a stir when she ate a piece of raw seal heart at an Inuit ceremony.  When asked whether there was any political significance to her culinary decisions she replied “Take from that what you will.”

3) She’s all about the war in Afghanistan!
If anyone thought Jean was going to be a peacenik as GG they were, well, wrong. Very wrong. Jean was the first Governor-General to wear a military uniform in over 15 years, despite the fact that, after Adrienne Clarkson, she was only the second not to have have been either a politician or formally connected in some way to the military. She made a habit of visiting troops in Afghanistan and, making a connection between the occupation and the advancement of women’s rights, was a strong advocate for the mission. In the last few days of her tenure she was photographed more than once obviously upset at military ceremonies.

4) She’s political (when she shouldn’t be)!
Shortly after Stephen Harper became Prime Minister he was having a conversation with the country’s top civil servant, Alex Himelfarb, about enacting the newly elected government’s agenda.  The discussion turned to barriers and, then, to the GG. “Prime Minister,” Himelfarb is alleged to have said, “your biggest problem is in Rideau Hall.” In this post-census/torture world we know he was being hyperbolic but back in the halcyon days of early 2006 when we worried about little things like daycare and sponsorship scandals it may have seemed that he had a point. Later, in 2007, Jean made a speech that contained a thinly-veiled attack against the decision to cut the Court Challenges Program and, of course, her vocal support for the Afghan war made more than a few legislators unhappy. But, of course, it was her involvement a very political procedural matter for which she will most be remembered: prorogation.  ‘Nuff said.

Aaju Peter. Illustration by David Donald.

A majority of the 27 member states of the European Union voted to ban the trade of seal product imports such as pelts, oil, and meat last July. The ban comes into effect in August 2010. Although the EU did allow a partial exemption for Inuit populations, the ban will nonetheless have devastating consequences for Canada’s northern indigenous people, according to Aaju Peter, an Inuk clothing designer, lawyer, and activist. We spoke with Peter in Ottawa, where she is pursuing an additional degree in international law.

This: What work do you do with sealskins?

Peter: I design contemporary clothes that are inspired by traditional Inuit designs.

This: Such as?

Peter: Everything from tank tops, vests, skirts, pants, jackets, to mittens and slippers.

This: What do they cost?

Peter: A sealskin bag I can make for $350. For a jacket it can be between $1,500 and $4,000.

This: Where do you sell them?

Peter: Mostly in Iqaluit [in Nunavut]. Or by special order. [Former] governor general Adrienne Clarkson has a coat.

This: Is sealskin difficult to work with?

Peter: If you have 10 or 20 years experience it’s not that difficult. It takes a long time to acquire the skills that are needed to work with it.

This: How is business?

Peter: It’s slow right now because I’m working on my degree. But if I did sealskin full time I could be very, very wealthy.

This: What is your reaction to the EU ban?

Peter: It will have a devastating effect. It already has on the hunters. They normally would get $60 to $90 for a skin. Now they get about $5. The cost of living is very high in the Arctic. They won’t be able to get enough money to sustain their families.

This: Won’t the Inuit exemption protect them?

Peter: The exemption is very restrictive and absolutely useless. I won’t be able to sell my clothes in Europe. If [the seal] is traditionally hunted and is used for cultural trading purposes only, then it’s okay. They want us to be like little stick Eskimos who are stuck on the land and go out in our little Eskimo clothes with a harpoon. They will not let us hunt with rifles and snow machines. They will not let us sell commercial products. It’s a form of cultural colonization. A journalist in the Netherlands called it the Bambification of the Inuit, like we’re in some Disney movie.

This: Can you understand the opposition to the seal hunt?

Peter: I don’t wish to understand it. I can explain it. It’s become a moral issue that it’s not right to kill animals. It stems from a society that lives in large urban areas that are totally detached from nature and detached from a subsistence economy where you go out and catch what you need and try to make money out of that. It’s a culture that is pushed by a people who have absolutely no connection to the people they are affecting because it’s not affecting them.

This: Any chance of changing people’s minds?

Peter: I always try to be positive, which is why I went to Europe [to fight against the ban]. But I’ve come to realize that people who are living on selling or eating seal don’t have the same amount of money that special interest groups have. For instance, the animal rights groups had a humongous truck outside [the European Parliament] with a humongous screen where they were showing films of seals being slaughtered. And they put pictures of a seal head with “Vote Yes,” for a ban and put them on the doors of all the 800 members of parliament. We couldn’t [afford] anything like that.

This: What would you have wanted the Parliamentarians to understand?

Peter: That this is an issue that is very, very important for Inuit survival. I travel with the courts to the smaller communities. In the winter you see a frame with sealskin on it outside every home. You can see the importance for these families, who have nothing else, no other form of economy, to be able to sell the skins for what they’re worth. I see the harm that is being done to the communities but they’re not able to communicate this. How can a group of people who know nothing about this pass legislation that can have such harmful effects on others? I have a hard time believing those 800 parliamentarians would be able to sleep at night if they knew the harm they are causing.

Image credit: Sgt Serge Gouin, Rideau Hall

By now, you’ve probably heard about the Queen’s representative eating the raw heart of a dead seal this week. But there is more going on here than just heating up the old debate over the Canadian seal hunt — the news event continued a tradition of misleading the Canadian public about this issue.

General Michaëlle Jean’s legitimized the Canadian seal hunt this week by participating in gutting and eating the artery of a seal with Inuit groups while on a visit to Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. Jean claims this culinary experience showcased in front of national media was to assert Inuits’ rights to their cultural heritage. But is this really about fostering our multiculturalism?

“It’s like Sushi,” Jean said at the time.

But unlike eating a piece of raw fish at your local Japanese restaurant, there is more at stake here than a cultural experience. In a month when the European Union has banned Canadian commercial seal hunt products, it seems like more than coincidental timing for Jean’s “good-will” gesture. If anything, this act was a political maneuver, legitimizing the Canadian seal hunt on the grounds of cultural autonomy for suffering Inuit groups.

However, there is significant blurring of the lines between two starkly different industries: the commercial seal hunt in the east coast of Canada and traditional Inuit hunts in the far north.

The east-coast hunt consists of targeting 300,000 baby Harp seals in Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence Gulf annually for seal products like furs, pelts and extracts for Omega-3 pills. It is a commercial industry that hires 6,000 off-season fishermen and earns $5.5 million. In contrast, the Inuit hunt that has been practiced for over 4,000 years kills 10,000 Ring seals (a mere 3 percent of the industrial seal hunt) in the Northern territories. It is mainly practiced for food and the local economy.

“There is a difference in an indigenous culture’s right to hunt for food and economic survival, and the non-indigenous Newfoundlander’s massive slaughter of defenceless animals for profit and vanity,” says Patrick Doyle, CEO of NativeRadio.com .

Furthermore, the Inuit have been exempt from the EU ban while the east-coast hunt hasn’t. However, Inuit were exempt in the ban by European countries in the 1980s, yet they were still negatively affected. Which is something surely to be taken into consideration, more so by Canada than Europe. Nevertheless, there are important distinctions to be made in the Canadian seal hunt.

Almost no animals-rights groups are condemning the Inuit hunt — they focus their campaigns on the east-coast commercial hunt. And to suggest otherwise, as Jean has in defending the Inuit seal hunt as if these things are equivalent, masks these important distinctions.

But few feel anyways GG’s political feast will have any affect in swaying European opinion in changing its pace to Canada’s banning.

“The fact that the Governor General in public is slashing and eating a seal, I don’t think really helps the cause and I’m convinced this will not change the minds of European citizens and politicians,” Barbara Slee, an activist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told the Toronto Star.

But what this gesture does do is continue a kind of blackout for Canadians. It dupes the public about one of Canada’s great shames in the international sphere (next to the Alberta tar sands). It mixes up one of the largest mass slaughters of mammals with a culturally unique and comparatively small traditional hunt. They’re not the same.

Yet this story is the same old story; Japan too claims to be defending its “culture” with its annual Southern Ocean whale hunt of nearly a thousand whales, including endangered ones.

Governments cannot hide behind culture in the face of their own eco-injustice.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

A whale being hauled up the slipway of the Japanese whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru. Photo by Joshua Gunn

It’s a sight I’ll never forget: a whale being hacked up in front of me, cut into tiny squares, its excess blood and guts discarded. One minute, it was a whole whale; 20 minutes later, nothing but a spinal cord and the harpoon that killed it.

It was February 6, 2009, and I had spent two months in the Antarctic Ocean with Sea Shepherd, the radical conservationist group. Sea Shepherd is notorious for the extreme tactics it uses to stop whaling in the southern oceans each year. Its ship, the M/Y Steve Irwin, had chased and harassed the Japanese whaling fleet for weeks to prevent them from hunting. But on this particular day, the whalers killed in front of us, and at first we could only watch from a distance. But it soon became a confrontation.

The Yushin Maru No. 3, a harpoon ship, attempted to transfer a dead whale to the mother ship, Japan’s whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru, the floating factory that processes whale meat at sea. The Irwin moved to block that transfer by manoeuvring into the Yushin Maru’s path. Within seconds, the boats collided with a loud crash and screeching noise that rang through our ears. The Irwin tipped 30 degrees on its side—it felt as if the ship was going belly-up. I was on the outside deck of the Irwin, hanging on to a railing watching the water approach from below. The Yushin was pushed down into the water by the force of the impact. I can only imagine the crew must have thought they would have to abandon ship. But 22 seconds later, when the two boats scraped apart, all had survived, with only minor damage to the vessels. It was a collision of two boats—but also a collision of worlds.

The Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo, along with many of its supporters, argue that the annual whale hunt by Japan is the country’s national heritage, and that efforts to end Japan’s whaling is colonial Western arrogance. The critics, such as Sea Shepherd, claim that the Japanese government is simply playing a “culture card” to stymie criticism. They believe that conservation—preserving wildlife—outweighs any such cultural differences.

However, are eco-issues, like whaling, really a simple matter of culture versus conservation? Are these two opposing sides? Can they be reconciled? And if they are in opposition, is it right for cultural concerns to trump environmental ones? I take the issue personally. In high school, I lived in Japan for a year on an exchange program. I lived with a Japanese host family, attended a Japanese-speaking high school, and grew to love the culture, country, and my new friends: Japan became a second home for me. But my first home is the environmental movement. My parents, Robert and Bobbi Hunter, were ecoactivists who had fought on the first anti-whaling campaigns against the Soviets in the North Pacific in the 1970s. My father co-founded Greenpeace, which has campaigned against the global whaling industry for decades.

So you can understand why, on one hand, I felt it was important to be part of the environmental battle for the whales. But on the other, I believe cross-cultural understanding and co-operation is vital. The issue is more complex than black and white. Japan claims that its annual whale hunt is for scientific purposes. The “research” hunt is run by the Institute of Cetacean Research, which is heavily subsidized by the government of Japan. The ICR studies whale-stock demography and health. To do this, the Japanese whaling fleet targets around 900 Minke whales annually. In addition, each year a different endangered species of whale is targeted, including humpback and fin whales.

Once the scientific data is collected, the whale meat is then sold for commercial use by Kyodo Senpaku, the same private firm that runs the fleet. Selling whale meat for commercial use after collecting it for scientific use is acceptable under current international whaling laws. Recently, however, the hunt has also been called “cultural” by the ICR, which says that Japan is simply continuing its centuries-old cultural practice of whaling. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace, among others, dismiss these claims as a smokescreen. If it is in fact commercial and not scientific, that would make the hunt illegal: there has been an international ban on commercial whaling since 1986.

Believing the law is on its side, Sea Shepherd was the lone group to oppose the Japanese whaling hunt in Antarctica this past winter. Sea Shepherd fights the whaling industry everywhere, whether Norwegian, Icelandic, or Japanese. Sea Shepherd’s members don’t buy the cultural basis of the hunt any more than they buy its scientific value. And so the group engages in radical direct action to stop the hunts, such as ramming ships at sea and sinking ships in port, which is why some governments have labelled Sea Shepherd “eco-terrorists.” Its activities have undoubtedly stopped or limited whaling activity around the world.

Some critics, such as Milton Freeman, a specialist in ecology and culture at the University of Alberta, view groups like Sea Shepherd as difficult cases. He worries that their anti-Japanesewhaling line leads to rhetoric that is simply anti-Japanese. Freeman views anti-whaling actions as not just an animal-rights issue, but also a type of cultural bullying. It’s Western ecogroups campaigning against the remaining whaling nations, such as Japan, demanding they cease their hunt and assimilate Western cultural beliefs about whales and conservation.

This is what’s increasingly known in academic circles as “political ecology”—essentially, the politics of nature and the different ways people understand and treat nature. For some, a whale is just another fish in the sea, a resource like any other to be harvested. Others put a different value on a whale, and see a socially complex, highly intelligent sentient being that deserves the chance for a full and healthy life.

Freeman argues that our own Western views on whaling don’t give us the right to attack Japanese beliefs about it: “Seeking to stop a culturally valued activity, in any society,” he says, “is to attack those people’s culture and identity.”

Jun Hoshikawa doesn’t feel attacked. “What is taking place in the Southern Ocean is not part of Japanese culture and traditions,” says Hoshikawa, director of Greenpeace Japan. “There is a difference between coastal whaling in Japan and the industrial hunt in the Southern Ocean. Coastal whaling has taken place for centuries and continues today on a small scale with boats and spears. That can be argued to be part of Japan’s culture and identity … The industrial hunt in the Antarctic was introduced by western countries post-World War II, and is run by the government of Japan today using a six-ship fleet with exploding harpoons and guns, and it kills whales on a mass scale. It was and is purely a commercial industry. I do not call that culture.”

Hoshikawa says 82 percent of people in Japan do not eat whale meat. The profits come mainly from delicacy food restaurants or “public provisions,” where whale meat is provided to high school cafeterias, jails and the military. Mainly, it “goes to people who cannot reject the whale meat,” Hoshikawa says in a phone interview from Tokyo.

In the past, the whale-meat industry regularly produced ¥7 billion annually (US$74 million) in profit. But in recent years, profits have dropped off due to decreasing demand in Japan and unfilled catch quotas because of interference from groups like Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. In 2007, the industry saw profits of just ¥5 million (US$51,000). The government of Japan has heavily subsidized the ICR’s whale program over the years to allow its work to continue, despite the financial loss. The real reason Japan persists with whaling, says Hoshikawa, is not because it is a profitable industry any longer, but because “the whaling issue has been framed through a lens of nationalism. It has less to do with whales or the industry and more to do with protecting the sovereign right of a country.” With so much negative international attention focused on Japan because of its whaling, the country is being pressured by other nations to stop the whaling project. In the last few years, nationalism has crept onto the scene: although the hunt is commercially unviable, countries like Japan that still run whaling hunts now see it as a political defeat to cave in to international pressure.

This is not an abstract issue for Canada: many of the same dynamics are at play when it comes to Canada’s annual seal hunt. On this issue, we are regarded with much the same contempt by the international community that Japan bears for its whaling.

“Every state is sovereign and can do whatever it wants” says Calestous Juma, former special advisor to the chair of the International Whaling Commission and professor of International Development Studies at Harvard University. “You can’t condemn sovereign states for exercising their rights because they will just go ahead and do it.” The International Whaling Commission is the international body that regulates whaling. Over the years, the IWC has sent letters of protest to Japan against the hunt in the Southern Ocean. In the IWC’s 2007 letter, it wrote that the lethal hunt of whales was unnecessary for Japan’s research, and called upon the government of Japan to suspend the whaling program.

But there are no real consequences for flouting the IWC rules, since as Juma says, there is no separate enforcement body for the treaty. The IWC comprises 84 member states that meet once a year to set quotas and regulations on whaling. But without an enforcement body, the regulations are toothless. Norway for example, works outside of the IWC and engages in commercial whaling despite the moratorium. Japan, in contrast, attempts to work within the framework by using the scientific loophole. This is because Japan has a real interest in doing things legally. “They want to be a good global citizen,” says Juma.

Ironically, the Japan Whaling Association states on its website that the purpose of the Japanese scientific research in whale stocks and health is to gather evidence that will lift the moratorium so that commercial whaling can resume. Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka, director-general of the Institute for Cetacean Research in Tokyo, says that because the ICR believes whale stocks to be plentiful and healthy, “there is no need or reason to prevent sustainable commercial whaling in the Antarctic under IWC management procedures.”

The international community has reacted, but so far the results have been lacklustre. Panama de-registered the whaling fleet’s cargo vessel late last year, but Japan re-registered it under its own national registration; the Australian and New Zealand governments toughened their stance against Japan’s whaling, threatening to take action legally in international courts. But so far, these diplomatic and legal actions have been unsuccessful or stalled. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in June 2008 that Australia and Japan would simply have to agree to disagree.

Over the winter, a small group of IWC countries have been working at negotiating an agreement with Japan that would gradually phase out whaling in the Southern Ocean by reducing the catch by 20 percent per year for five years. In exchange, Japan would get permission to kill an increased but yet-to-be-determined number of whales off Japan’s coasts in the Pacific Ocean.

The package was developed at the request of the American chairman, Bill Hogarth, a Bush administration appointee. It was intended to be a step forward in ending Southern Ocean whaling and break the deadlock with Japan. However, most environmental groups, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believe this was a compromise that would both allow Japan to continue its commercial hunt, and effectively lift the global moratorium on commercial whaling. But Japan refused the deal. Japan’s Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries minister Shigeru Ishiba said, “We cannot accept any proposal that would allow outside countries to prohibit Japan from continuing its research hunt.”

So the question becomes: is whaling simply a question of sovereignty? In this case, does diplomacy trump ethics, leaving the international community powerless to stop the killing? The Japanese whaling industry has cunningly used the term “culture” as a get-out-of-jail-free card—by framing this as an issue of culture or sovereignty, it aims to make any antiwhaling group look like they are colonialist and discriminatory. But the reality is that the hunt is senseless slaughter in service of fake science, a dead industry, and nationalist posturing. The whales should not bear the punishment for our foolishness.

How far are we willing to go—how much environmental damage are we willing to do—in the name of culture, heritage, national pride? None of these things will be of much use in an environmentally devastated land- and seascape.

More than 30 years ago, in 1977, my parents fought to end whaling in Australia. Their protest, in Albany, Western Australia, led to international attention, that culminated in the end of whaling in Australia. It is now one of the strongest anti-whaling nations in the world.

At the end of the anti-whaling campaign I went on this year with Sea Shepherd, I found myself in Australia and decided to visit Albany. What I found there was a miniature eco-haven: a dozen wind-power generators spinning on the horizon and organic crops in the fields. One of the old harpoon ships of the Australian whaling fleet, Cheynes IV, is now an on-land museum, and boats go out every day filled with tourists for whale-watching. The whale-watching industry has now surpassed the profitability of the whale-killing industry of 30 years ago.

I took a boat ride myself to see the whales. We got to see them up close, close enough that I could touch them. They played together in their pod, diving and chasing, waving their fins out of the water as they breached, tails in the air. It’s another sight I’ll never forget.