On October 9th, 2025 “Seals, Stigma and Survival” secondary investigator Jim Winter, a retired award winning CBC journalist, conducted an interview with Mike Kehoe. Kehoe previously worked for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador as a director of marketing support services navigating the province’s challenges with the fallout for anti-sealing activism on the fisheries industry.
Given its length, this interview is broken up into two parts. You can access Part 1 of the interview here. This is Part 2 of the interview between secondary investigator Jim Winter and Mike Kehoe.
Jim Winter: In essence, you’re looking at two realities from your point of view, the federal bureaucracy within DFO and bureaucracy within the international trade and the PMO [Prime Minister’s Office] and so on. On the one hand, they are really not committing to doing anything about this, but then on top of it is the politicians and of course the politicians keep changing while the bureaucracy is always the same. So in effect you’re saying that the decisions were being made to basically throw the baby out with the bathwater on those levels, both levels in the bureaucracy and in the political realm. And what people were seeing was essentially smoke and mirrors.
Mike Kehoe: Yes, that’s a good way to put it. Not to be overlooked in this is the absolute failure of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador to seize the issue and say, you know what, we represent these people. These are our people. This is us. We’re not butchers and barbarians and we’re not going to cave into threats and intimidation and establish and put into place an organization built as a collaborative of people from within the province impacted by this issue behind the scenes. So really the province of Newfoundland and Labrador badly let down the coastal people and Aboriginal people in Newfoundland and Labrador, not by what it’s done, but by what it’s failed to do. I believe this still. I don’t know how many may still be alive, a lot of them may have passed on since, but in those communities, the hate mail and that TV coverage that they were slammed with every night had a huge impact on them, on their self-worth, their self-esteem that they didn’t deserve. Nobody else would tolerate that if you were a business and somebody was attacking you, but because you’re living in a small coastal rural village, a fishing village, you’re fair game and the people that could have, and should have, stood up for them didn’t. Once the narratives of the activists and the normalization of what they did to coastal communities started, it stayed really good and people found out it was beneficial to play the game with manipulation through the selective application or denial of grants and subsidies. .
Winter: You’ve alluded a couple of times to the division within the communities in Quebec, Newfoundland, Nunavut. You’ve also alluded to the way that disinformation was spread, in other words, through media. What is your take on the on the role of media in this whole process over the years based on the experiences that you’ve had?
Kehoe: Yeah, well, the media, the publishers and the directors and things like that, even CBC, a friend of mine to this day, retired from there now, they understood it was fine clickbait. I mean, the subject was so ready for getting ratings. I get that. There are even stories in the States, for example, where the reporter reported on something claiming to be present when she wasn’t there, you know, it was exposed to being a con. So anytime the media was fed this by, you know, International Fund for Animal Wealth or Paul Watson’s people at Sea Shepherd, the people who were responsible got exposed for what got printed, they laughed it off. It was the original, and I hate to use this term because it’s abused so much lately, but fake news. It didn’t make any difference. The best thing about it is that they knew that Canada wouldn’t do anything about it. And they knew these people in the small villages were just surviving, struggling to survive, and couldn’t do anything about it. And so the media were story whores, really work.
Winter: You’re saying they were complicit?
Kehoe: In my opinion, yes, to some degree they were. And of course, you know, if you said that to them, they’d response, oh no, we’re not, we’re giving this investigation and we going to run with the story. But they didn’t really check out what they were giving. If we use a fishing analogy what activists were doing was trolling a shiny lore in front of a fish, a fish being the media. So anything these fundraisers wanted to do, they learned that they just needed to show something that was shiny and the media lapped at it all. And it’s the way it was. As I said, there were volumes around of these newspaper clippings in my former department. I actually saw them, held them, read them and learned what was going on in different media in different places in the world. It overwhelmed me. So yeah, it is what it is. People were screwed over badly but it was Newfoundland and Labrador, and quite frankly, federal bureaucrats couldn’t get a shit, really could care less.
Winter: Was that type of attitude which led to the splitting of the various groups, in your opinion? In other words, they focused on Newfoundland and Labrador as it that allowed them then to say oh well, we’re not talking about the Inuit in Nunavut, or we’re not talking about the Quebecers in the Magdalene Islands; that they deliberately allowed the issue to be focused as a Newfoundland issue, not as a Canadian issue?
Kehoe: That’s what it was. It was easier to leave it as a Newfoundland problem. Later on in the process, some groups, like Greenpeace, issued an apology of sorts to Aboriginal groups, but they didn’t say anything to what their work did to coastal people who were surviving through the worst kind of winters and worst kind of fishing. Read books like “Death on the Ice” to learn about their experiences. They didn’t receive apologies for what they suffered, because in the protest industry it was known when it comes down between Greenpeace and Brown Peace, Brown Peace being Aboriginal pro-fur protestors, Brown Peace wins every time because these groups knew very quickly that if they were to take that on, aboriginal groups became really organized and they weren’t going to be pushed around. They would go down and they would occupy offices. The general public would not take well for activists to go after Aboriginal people. So some groups issued these apologies of sorts, but never with much detail to Aboriginal peoples, and to this day, they’re still keeping Indigenous people apart.
If you look at the structure of the organization that’s now been targeted for grants and subsidies, we put up some tokenism like the Northeast Coast Sealers Co-op, they were working on old Second World War equipment. And you know, the end of a war was in the middle of freezing in the middle of the dead, really bad equipment. They did a great job of what they had to work with, but it was terrible that there was no centralized marketing system and when the market collapsed, that’s all, we all came together and formed an agency, the Canadian Saltfish Corporation and had success, but there was never anything done like that for products that were highly nutritious and really valid products from seals. Everybody was scared.
Winter: You alluded to the science a little earlier. I’m taking it that you weren’t referring to the scientists themselves, but rather to the science management, that it was manipulated by the powers that be, whether it was in within the bureaucracy or within the political reality to
make the case that it might be a good idea to give up sealing.
Kehoe: Yes, I think that sometimes there was credible work done at science, but it never really got anywhere. It got up maybe to a regional area or something, but it was quickly buried if it was anything positive. I don’t think it got up there to be worked with politically. But then the fundraisers, the animal rights groups, they had their own science, sort of adopt a scientist type of programs. They gave them large amounts of money to do studies and the studies, of course, were advocacy studies. So you got what you wanted to hear and they had no problem with that. And that’s the way science was manipulated. It was very badly manipulated.
Winter: Do you think, given your experience, your background, and your exposure to the various sides of things, that this is a question of it’s all over now, Baby Blue, as Bob Dylan would put it, or is it a question that people like yourself and others need to articulate the fact that this was all improperly done. This was all a propaganda campaign, and dignity demands we stand up. It’s not about profit and loss, but it’s about right and wrong.
Kehoe: Yes that’s the way it should be but I don’t see that happening, not in the current system we have, will change. The issue needs a champion, somebody who could communicate effectively. Somebody who can, you know, use science in a manner that protesters use it. Someone who can call out the media manipulation. I don’t see that being around at the moment. I think at some point in time as we continue to pillage the ocean resources, that it may become impossible for people to say, wow, look at what we’ve taken out of the seals we’re getting in the nets?! Some people say, well, they were here before you were, so go home out of it. But that’s not the way life works. But I am cautiously optimistic we’ll start to approach this subject differently, but not hopeful.
Winter: But you’re not preferred to walk away.
Kehoe: The thing about rights, you know, is that it gets into you. When it bothers you, you should speak up, but there’s a price to be paid for that. If you advocate, you don’t get invited to the table. They did, as you know. The stakeholders are identified by DFO. The people in the room are the animal rights groups masquerading as environmental groups and people of like-minded goals as DFO, for example. So if you advocate, you’ve got to be prepared to say, well, at some point in time somebody will build on that. But when these documents, a lot of these documents become open, I think that we see what cabinet did federally, provincially, what monies were paid out that we don’t know about. Maybe then it might be better. Advocates right now speaking on that, if I speak to some of the groups that are out and there are very few groups, you know, I think you may have experienced it yourself that if you speak to them, they don’t want to see you. They don’t want content.
Winter: Well said. Thanks a lot, Mike. That’s illuminating. I really think you’ve articulated a lot of things that people were not aware of and hopefully this will help them form an opinion based on a broader base of facts. So thanks a million.
Kehoe: And thank you. Most people don’t know the real work that you did and others before this, but you were the ones in the front trenches trying to deal with this wave of hate and for what you had to work with and I’m aware that internally in the bureaucracy they did not want you there.
I know that I have been in those meetings, but you and some others with you did a great job and are to be commended.
Winter: Oh, we could probably end in saying we’re both persona not grata in certain areas.
Kehoe: We won’t get our invites to the meetings, absolutely.
Winter: I really enjoyed listening to your observations.
Seals, Stigma and Survival 