| Anti-sealing protest comes to Calgary
Animal rights activist Anthony Marr is bringing his "funeral motorcade for the seals" to Calgary on Saturday, July 15.
Marr plans to travel to 35 states and six provinces in his "seal mobile," which will be covered in anti-seal hunt posters and banners, to protest against the Canadian seal hunt. The Calgary chapter of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society plans to participate in the Banff-to-Calgary leg of Marr’s motorcade.
"Canada kills 325,000 seals every year. This is a big number. It’s a number people usually shelve into some obscure corner of their left brain and it doesn’t hit you on the gut level," says Marr. "But, if I present it to you this way: Canada kills 325,000 seals, and at one metre per seal, if you lined them up along the highway from Calgary west, 325,000 seals would cover a distance of 325 kilometres… anyone driving this distance would be horrified," says Marr.
Marr wants the Canadian government to ban seal hunting, saying it is threatened by global warming, which is melting the sea ice that they depend on.
"It is just out of sight and out of mind for the general public and we want to bring these issues to them, to their own newspapers, so they will at least think about it," says Marr.
Marr is asking supporters to boycott any seafood coming from Newfoundland in order to protest the seal hunt.
On July 15, Marr’s motorcade will arrive in Banff at 8:15 a.m., then stop in Canmore and Cochrane before arriving in Calgary at noon. He will also give four presentations on his work around the world as an animal rights activist at the W.R. Castell Central Library from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Don’t stop the presses, plead publishers
Alberta-based book publishers say their industry is in decline, and are calling for "meaningful support" from the Alberta government.
The announced sale of Edmonton-based Duval House Publishing — one of Alberta’s largest publishers — to the Toronto-based Thomas Nelson publishing company does not bode well for Alberta writers, says Katherine Shute, executive director of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta.
"When companies are based here, they have an interest in publishing Alberta writers and bringing in an Alberta perspective," says Shute. "When you have, in the past five or six years, six companies that have been sold, that immediately limits the opportunity for Alberta writers."
While four of those six companies remain in Alberta, Shute says their mandates have changed to reflect their parent companies and are thus less interested in local talent.
Alberta ranks well below other provinces in terms of funding to publishing companies, which gives publishers outside of Alberta a considerable market advantage, harming Alberta’s competitiveness in a very competitive industry, Shute says.
The Alberta government’s support of book publishers has declined from just over $560,000 in 1988 to $280,000 this year, while British Columbia publishers received $2.75 million in subsidies.
The BPAA has lobbied the government for several years to establish a $5 million per year Alberta publishers fund, similar to the $13.5 million it pays out to the local film industry.
The organization also states that many local publishers are considering relocation to other provinces where the government funding structure is more appealing.
Currently, Alberta is home to 30 publishing houses, 13 of which are large enough to receive grants from the province. |
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