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OTTAWA — One of the biggest celebrities on Parliament Hill Wednesday capitalized on the opportunity to speak out against Canada’s seal hunt.

Clad in a powder blue T-shirt with an image of a seal pup drawn on it, Sarah McLachlan condemned Canada’s commercial sealing industry, calling it “perverse and sick.”

McLachlan, the musical headliner at the Canada Day festivities in Ottawa, told CTV news she sees no reason that the hunt should persist.

“It’s terribly inhumane,” she said. “It’s archaic and horrible and I want it to stop.”

Lindsay Rajt, a spokeswoman with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the organization was “absolutely thrilled” to see McLachlan perform in one of its “Save the Seals” T-shirts around the same time PETA members across the world were preparing to demonstrate against the Canadian seal hunt.

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said by »www.dosomething.org/blog/celebsg···ian-hero :

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[Sarah Mclachlan] is known for her humanitarian contributions to charities and organizations both nationally and internationally that often uses music to promote social change.

In 1997, Sarah founded the Lilith Fair, a touring concert festival that showcases and promotes women in music and has since raised over $7 million for charities and women's shelters across North America. In 1999, she founded the Sarah McLachlan Foundation to help bring music to young Canadians, especially in underprivileged areas; and in 2003 she created the first Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach that offers students free high-quality music lessons, educational workshops, and mentorship and support networks to encourage children to explore music and learning. Lastly in 2004, Sarah created a Grammy Award nominated video for the single "World on Fire," which donated $150,000 of its production budget to 11 charities including CARE, Engineers Without Borders, Help the Aged, and Warchild and Heifer International.

And who could forget Sarah's emotional TV ad that featured her multiplatinum hit song "Angel" to promote the BC SPCA's animal adoption campaign? Since 2006, Sarah has been a spokesperson for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, raising awareness for animals that have suffered abuse and neglect.

"I am honored and humbled to receive the Alan Waters Humanitarian Award," Sarah said of the soon-to-come accolade. "I feel so lucky and blessed in my life and giving back feels right and good--it's the best way I know to thank the universe."

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ONE evening last week, almost every seat was occupied at Au Cinquième Péché, a bistro in the bustling neighborhood called the Plateau. And almost every table was sampling an appetizer plate that included a specialty of the restaurant’s French-born chef, Benoît Lenglet: a seared, rare loin, dark red in color, with a texture and taste akin to beef tenderloin. But the meat was not beef. It was seal.

Across town, at Les Îles en Ville, Andrée Garcia, an owner and chef, has elevated seal from an occasional specialty to a regular feature. The most frequent preparation there, Ms. Garcia said, is a filet-mignon-style cut of seal that is pan-seared, then roasted briefly in the oven and finished with a cranberry sauce. She has noticed a pattern among the customers who order it: many are tourists from France. “The French are against seal hunting,” Ms. Garcia said, “but when they come here, they want to eat it.”

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"It's archaic and horrible and I want it to stop.”

I know exactly how Sarah McLachlan (for these are her words on the subject of the seal hunt) feels. I have felt precisely the same, down to the very syllables, if I may put it that way, whenever I have fallen within ear-hurt of a folk music concert. Lord, years ago, how common they were, whining on about - well, I'm not going to start the list. They whined on about everything. That's what folk singers did. They whined. Three chords on an out-of-tune flat-top guitar and whine.

They looked serious, so serious - and sad, so sad - and they whined. I remember distinctly, over and over again, whenever the mischiefs of fate decreed that I be dragged to a folk music concert, or lived too close to some of the poor addicts of the form, whenever Dylan or Donovan (oh God, still the memory - Donovan) held the car radio hostage or the dreaded triple-headed Demogorgon Peter, Paul and Mary blistered the eardrums and sank my soul - I remember my piercing outcry: “It's archaic and horrible and I want it to stop.”

No one listened to me, of course. Why should they? Who was I, after all, to call a halt to such a tidal wave of whining twaddle? Others, obviously but inexplicably, liked it. C'est la vie.

I was sick of John (Steel-Drivin' Man) Henry, sick of This Land is Your Land , and sick to the very heart every time some dopey-eyed, long-haired sad sack, guitar in hand, came out on some television variety show to bleat about Michael rowing that damn boat ashore. And what else, precisely, was he going to do with it? All boats, eventually, having been rowed out from shore, are rowed back to it.

It was all so archaic and horrible and, Lord, did I want it to stop. But it didn't, and I never really expected it would or, for that matter, should. Other people liked this stuff and, it is dimly possible, still do. So my feelings on the matter have no special standing, and I sure as hell wouldn't take advantage of some public occasion - say, a Canada Day celebration - to elevate my private taste to public protest, hijack a moment of the nation's birthday to bleat about a “personal” cause.

Sarah McLachlan, obviously, is not as much of a fan of diversity as I am. She came to Canada Day wearing a PETA T-shirt. Whatever else PETA is, most sensible people will agree it is tasteless, vulgar and vile. It has had some of the very crudest and most insensitive exercises in the history of so-called protest, of which I will cite only “the Holocaust on your plate” campaign, which, in my judgment, reached the level of a blasphemy against the memory of the six million Jewish people exterminated in Hitler's death camps.

How crude that was you may easily measure for yourself: It featured a picture of a starving man in a concentration camp next to the picture of a starving cow. I wrote “crude” just now, but that word is far too feeble to convey the abject, garish viciousness of such a juxtaposition. A PETA T-shirt, as this example demonstrates, is not the banner of a serious moral sensibility.

Once again, Ms. McLachlan's own words on the seal hunt this Canada Day are far more descriptive of PETA's outrages than anything she is protesting. “Perverse and sick” is how she described the hunt. Well, I'm not so sure. Exploiting the memory of six million dead for cheap publicity, putting a “cow” in any equivalence with history's greatest crime, that is “perverse and sick.”

Actually, I think putting on a PETA T-shirt might be one signal that you've surrendered any moral leverage you may vaguely possess to lecture anyone about anything. And calling the traditional lifeline of some of Canada's northern aboriginals “perverse and sick” might suggest the person doing the calling is less familiar with the concepts of tolerance and diversity than most would hope. As does slandering those on the East Coast who have found the hunt a needed resource for more than a century and a half.

But Ms. McLachlan does have Pamela Anderson in her corner – and what is time and native culture against that bulwark? A queen of soft-core porn and PETA: There's an alliance.

Ms. McLachlan could learn a lot on this issue from a far more worthy source. Our own Governor-General, who, by her gesture of respect to the hunt a near month ago, showed more class and understanding than PETA and its camera-hungry devotees - on Canada Day or any other - can ever hope to approach.

And, yeah, pushing the cause on Canada Day was just tacky.

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