Ottawa

Alice Wong enjoys a bowl of shark fin soup

While apparently appearing before only Chinese-language media, Conservative MP Alice Wong demonstrated her support for shark fin soup last week.

Reached by phone on Friday afternoon, Wong told the News that the banning of shark fin products, including the soup – considered a delicacy in Chinese culture – is a federal responsibility and is not for the cities to consider. She said she’s confident the current federal import regulations are strong enough to stop the shipment into Canada of produce that’s been harvested illegally – namely, the act of finning, where poachers catch a shark, slice off its fin and dump it back in the ocean to bleed to death, thus threatening many species with extinction, according to activists.

Canada allows shark fins to be imported, as long as they’ve been harvested from a shark that’s not endangered and is not just caught for its fin. However, she had no idea if the soup she ate came from an endangered species and the restaurant owner, David Chung, himself admitted previously he did not know either … Many labels, however, on imported shark fin products do not say which species the fin came from and there’s no way for the importer to know if it was actually caught legally or not.

The NDP’s Fin Donnelly is unimpressed.

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