In late June the Montreal Symphony are hosting a TV Special to salute Buffy Sainte-Marie's 50th year making music. I am honored to be asked to take part. I first bought a Buffy Sainte-Marie record when I was 12, and her music has always remained with me. In the 1960s, as a political activist, Buffy's lyrics were fearless, and I'm very grateful for all the risks that she took.
I am also pleased to be asked to join the bill at the V Festival at the Thunderbird Stadium in Vancouver, and also at Fort Calgary in Calgary.
However, as we all know, the psychologically and constitutionally sickening Canadian seal-kill has started and is once again in full-cry.
The horror of the Canadian seal-kill is untranslatable, and although I fully realize that highly concentrated evil exists in other countries - Japan's dolphin slaughter, Iceland's newly-revived whaling, the cat-skinning trade in Switzerland, and China with just about every injustice imaginable - there is something especially menacing about Canada's seal-kill.
Loyola Sullivan (Canada's Ambassador for Fisheries Conservation) is a man of glacial coldness who claims that the seal-kill is "humane" - a view he might alter if his own skull were cracked open with a spiked axe.
The fact that the seal-kill provides a livelihood for fishermen is an insultingly dim excuse for it to take place - after all, the German gas chambers of World War 2 also provided work for someone.
The seal-kill takes place to satisfy greed for fur-pelts, and this Canadian government is happy to drag the global image of its own country down, and make it a place that people such as I couldn't bear to visit.
MORRISSEY, 29 March 2008.
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