Yeah, that's not exactly a good image for this country.
Apparently the figure of 270,000 is not going to met anyhow, at least not to the hunters.
Climate change is apparently thinning the ice and making seal pups drown.
As for the hunters, allow me to play the devil's advocate here but I wouldn't necessarily villianize them so easily. I saw this in a documentary somewhere, these people were probably the same people that were involved in the lucrative fishing industry a while ago until overfishing made the salmon in the East Coast an endangered species. It wasn't their fault however, the government pretty much treated the industry like it was a gold rush and let any idiot with a boat and net acquire a fishing license fishing as much as they want for however ever long as they want. Naturally there was a huge influx of new fishers that didn't know a damn thing about fishing and didn't give the salmon a chance to re-populate so they pretty much sucked everything dry. The government was not smart to forsee this happening.
In any case the fishing industry never recovered and the most of the Atlantic Coast of Canada has been largely unemployed and accepting government aid since. I think this is their only source of revenue, particularly with the smaller villages.
I'm not an apologist, nor am I trying to be one. I just see where they are coming from.