It's not over yet.
Despite losing out by an agonizing five votes in the House of Commons, MP Fin Donnelly has vowed to carry on his fight to ban shark fin imports to Canada.
The NDP's Donnelly has spent the last year on a private member's bill that attracted cross-party support and would have gone a long way to curtailing Canada's role in the illegal and barbaric practise of shark finning.
But his bid to get his bill beyond second reading and into an arena where it would have been fully investigated fell short Wednesday by a vote of 138 for and 143 against.
"Obviously I'm disappointed and it was a close call," said the MP for New Westminster-Coquitlam.
"But it has brought a lot of world-wide attention to the issue and has gotten everyone talking about it.
"This is not going to go away, however, and will come back because the world is looking at this."
The sale of shark fins is a big issue in Richmond, where more than half the population is of Asian descent - the fins are considered a delicacy and status symbol in Asian culture.
Richmond City Council recently shied away from entertaining a ban on the sale of shark fins.
The Harper government, in an apparent nod to public concern over the shark-finning industry, said Monday it will consider regulatory changes to block the importation of fins from countries that permit cruel shark hunt practices.
Donnelly called Monday's announcement both surprising and an indication that the Conservatives are concerned about public opinion polls suggesting support for his bill.
The Conservatives, he said, may also have jitters about the negative backlash after Minister of State and Richmond MP Alice Wong took part in an all-Chinese publicity event at which she enjoyed shark fin soup at a restaurant in the city centre last October.
However, Donnelly called the Tory proposal inadequate, since countries like Costa Rica prohibit shark finning but, according to media reports, are unable to stop Taiwanese organized crime figures who are engaged in widespread illegal shark finning to feed demand for shark fin soup, a costly delicacy in high-end restaurants.
He also said there is no practical way that Canadian inspectors can prevent the importation of shark fins taken from species listed as threatened or endangered.
"You can't determine once those fins come into a country like Canada whether it came from a threatened or endangered shark without doing DNA testing. And I don't think any country is going to use DNA testing - it's not practical," Donnelly said.
The Humane Society International/Canada said it was deeply disappointed the government "failed to listen to the overwhelming majority of Canadians who wanted Parliament to protect sharks and our oceans."
Targeted for their highly valuable fins, tens of millions of sharks are killed each year to feed the global demand for shark fin soup, and many species are now threatened with extinction.
Shark finning is the process of cutting the fins off a shark, often while the shark is still alive, and then throwing the rest of the animal back into the water to die a slow and painful death from suffocation, bleeding and predation from other species.
Many sharks are apex predators, meaning that they are at the top of ocean food chains and help to regulate all other species.
- With a file from the Vancouver Sun
