By Barry Stagg
March 1998
FASHIONABLE SEALING
The "Ice Storm" that crippled vast populations in Quebec and Ontario this January brought back a sense of subordination to the elements. Ice and snow have regained that blank, brutish quality well known to our ancestors in the days of wood stoves and oil lamps. Now we have to get the sidewalkers to remember what animal skins were used for in the days of yore. Hint: they kept people warm.
Seals have a wondrously utilitarian makeup. They can be eaten. They can be used to feed other domestic animals . They can induce aphrodisiac fantasies in the fanciful. Best of all, they provide wonderful fur coats.
Fur coats are the way to the salvation and elevation of the seal industry. Selling fabulous fur at Holt Renfrew and the like is as lot more profitable than selling cans of seal meat to the rest of us. The task before the happy band of sealer supporters is to get the best part of Ontario and Quebec wearing really expensive seal fur coats. After the freezing cold that some put up with for weeks during the " Glitterfest", it should take a straightforward and sensible sales pitch.
In the last few years the colonial outpost of York, now known as Toronto, has returned to a more practical relationship with fur. A lot of people who can afford to buy fur garments are doing just that. They are also becoming quite adept at repelling the fanatics with spray paint who still try to introduce a lunatic fringe to the luxury of a full length fur. Reports of aggressive fur wearing are filtering in to the local media just as frost and ice have crept back into the living rooms of so many this powerless winter.
The Downhomer has maintained its presence in the nether regions of Canada. Your humble servant and scribe mans the Toronto outpost for Downhomer World Headquarters. One of his tasks is to view and report on local customs especially as they relate to the commercial trades so essential for the central economy of our homeland. This task is being tackled with relish and it is heartening to report that the locals are showing promising signs of an economic revival as far as the fur trade is concerned.
Toronto is still getting over being bypassed when the masters of the fur trade picked Montreal as the main trading post for fur back in the heyday of the inland fur business. Three hundred years is a long time to bear a mercantile grudge but from all present reports the townfolk of Toronto are getting over it and are about to get even with Montreal by usurping the role of lead trading town in the new marine fur trade. That means the seal skin trade folks. Down in the production and procurement towns in and around Downhomer Headquarters we have lots of these expensive pelts to craft into really pricy clothing. Toronto's three-hundred year envy is our invitation to healthy Canadian commerce.
The mutual fund industry that has been the gleaming bauble of Toronto commerce for at least the past decade is going to have a stiff run for its money from the seal skin traders of Spadina Avenue and Bloor Street. Where once Torontonians looked on in envy at the rich, cosmopolitan traders of Montreal, we will now have a moribund Montreal population peering west at the splendidly clothed and wealthy sealskinners of downtown Toronto. The prospect of a revelatory story in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business is no doubt imminent and overdue.
The essence of the rebirth of the fur industry and fur wealth in Toronto is the realization by the seal harvesters that they must sell their product on the highest market available. After all when the cattle industry sells beef it sells leather and filet mignon before it auctions off stew meat. This has been the genius of our new economic tigers of the fur trade. They are fully aware of the leather trade and all its profitable implications. Seal skin coats and wondrous seal leather are making a new generation of filthy rich fur traders. A resurgence of the wealthy traders of Water Street based on the fur trade is welcome and is also a basic example of the Canadian economy working at its finest and most profitable. Let wealth and commerce lead the way to prosperity. The fur trade is born again.