No. The Canadian government and sealing industry have, at various times, tried to claim that the harp seal population has "tripled" over the past three decades, or that the harp seal population is "exploding," or that seals are overpopulated.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The harp seal population in the Northwest Atlantic is the world's largest—it is supposed to number in the many millions. This is a migratory population that spans the distance between Canada and Greenland.
In the 1950s and 1960s, over-hunting wiped out close to two-thirds of the harp seal population. By 1974, the population was considered to be in serious trouble, and senior government scientists recommended the commercial hunt be suspended for at least ten years.
In the early 1980s, the European Union banned the import of whitecoat seal skins, effectively removing the principal market for the hunt at the time. For the next decade, the numbers of seals killed in the hunt dramatically declined, and the harp seal population began to recover.
However, according to the last survey conducted by the Canadian government in 1999, the harp seal population stopped recovering in 1996 (when the commercial seal hunt was reintroduced) and began to decline. With more than a million seal pups killed over the past three years alone, we can only wonder what the impact will be on the harp seal population over the coming years.