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. In his past roles Kehoe participated in backroom discussions with industry and government players across Canada, and engaged with local community members in rural and coastal Newfoundland and Labrador seeing in real-time the impacts of anti-sealing activism, federal and provincial responses and the first European ban (European Economic Community) on seal products in 1983 and activism against sealing thereafter.

Conception Bay North residents warned the RCMP about a serial arsonist weeks before the Kingston Fire burned nearly 200 homes. They say nobody listened.

Seals, Stigma and Survival seeks to engage and reflect sealer/hunter/fisher views on the legacy of anti-sealing activism, the impacts of stigma against sealing and seal hunters, the implications of the European Union’s ban against the import of seal products based on moral objections to sealing for peoples on the ground and the importance of sealing to their cultures, economies and ecosystems.