I'm the furthest thing possible from a PETA-supporting animal rights extremist, but even as a carnivore and seafood-lover I realize what a cruel and barbaric practice shark finning is. Polls show that
81% of Canadians support a ban on shark fins. Making shark fin imports illegal (finning in Canadian waters is already banned) should be a clear bi-partisan issue that all MPs can get behind, right?
Wrong. The Conservatives just defeated a private member's bill to ban shark fin imports by a margin of 143-138. Why? Because they're cynically trying to appeal to older Chinese voters. Shameful.
Read more:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/...nadian-values/
Quote:
Shark finning already is banned in Canadian waters. But a private member’s bill put forward this week by NDP MP Fin Donnelly would have gone further, banning the importation of foreign shark fins into Canada, where they end up in soup served at Chinatown restaurants. An estimated 100 tons of shark find are brought into our country every year — a harvest that corresponds to thousands of dead sharks, many of them trafficked by criminal gangs in Central America and elsewhere.
The bill seemed like a no-brainer: After all, we have a majority Conservative government that regularly (and properly) insists that Canadian immigrants adapt themselves to our values. Jason Kenney even put out a new citizenship study guide in 2011 to ensure that newcomers adopt “values and institutions that are rooted in Canada’s history.”
Unfortunately, Conservative MPs defeated Mr. Donnelly’s bill by the narrow margin of 143-138. And the reason is simple and crass: ethno-politics. Many older Chinese immigrants in this country still eat shark-fin soup. Just a few months ago, in fact, the government’s Minister of State, Alice Wong, made a deliberate spectacle of eating the dish at a restaurant in her B.C. riding, an event broadcast on Chinese-language television.
I have it on good authority that young staffers within the Conservative Party — who take animal cruelty a lot more seriously than ethnic votes — are appalled by this. A while ago, before the current controversy, one Tory staffer friend of mine even had the courage to post his support for a shark-fin ban on a private blog. He got a call within hours from the party’s social-media police, angrily demanding that the post be taken down.
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The full voting record on this bill can be found here:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublicati...&DocId=6066281
I don't have time to look up the party affiliation of each MP to see if it was only Conservatives who opposed the ban, but the list of Nays reads like a who's who of CPC members and ministers (Harper, Kenney, Ambrose, MacKay, Baird, Paradis, Toews, Van Loan, and, of course, Anders).