Nunavut lawmakers vote to ban European booze in seal row

(OTTAWA) - Nunavut lawmakers voted to ban European alcohol in the northern Canadian territory in symbolic retaliation for an EU ban on seal products, a government official told AFP on Wednesday.

However, the motion is unlikely to become law, said Emily Woods, spokeswoman for Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak.

The members of the legislative assembly voted 9-0 in favor of the ban. Aariak and her cabinet abstained over concerns it breaches international trade rules.

"It may also be unhelpful to Canada's WTO (World Trade Organization) complaint with respect to the European ban on seal products," Aariak said in a speech to the legislature.

Figures on how much French wine or British beer are sold annually in Nunavut were not immediately available. But government-run liquor stores sell an estimated total of 1.4 million dollars worth of booze annually, said officials.

Many northern communities are also "dry," meaning it is illegal to bring in or consume alcohol there.

Around 6,000 Canadians take part in seal hunting each year along the Atlantic coast, and 25 percent of their sales came from exporting products to Europe.

The 27 European Union states in July 2009 adopted a ban on seal products, ruling the goods could not be marketed from 2010.

Inuit or northern peoples' much smaller traditional hunts are exempted, however the Inuit have lamented they have been impacted nonetheless by the loss of a key market.

In November, Canada filed an official complaint at the World Trade Organization against the EU ban on imported seal products, saying it violated trade rules.

Canada and Greenland account for more than 50 percent of the 900,000 seals slain in the world each year. Other seal-hunting countries include Norway, Namibia, Iceland, Russia and the United States.