The International Fund for Animal Welfare is doing its best to assure Northern seal-hunters that its latest anti-sealing campaign has nothing to do with what goes on up here.

The new campaign is called Canadians Against The Commercial Seal Hunt (a phrase that conveniently produces the clever CATCSH acronym), and its spokespeople are careful to emphasize that it's only what Newfoundland hunters are doing that bothers the activists.

All well and good. But we're not convinced the distinction will be clear to average Canadian, American or European consumer, who will see the pictures of the seals being skinned alive and join another international boycott. The last one 20 years ago pretty well killed the market for seal furs, and the industry is only now getting back on its feet.

The organizers of other consumer boycotts know a simply message is the one that gets across. That's why Greenpeace and its allies launched a boycott of all tuna products in the 1980s, as part of a campaign to protect dolphins that were killed in nets used to catch some -- but not all -- species of commercial tuna.

There was no point in trying to make clear to consumers that only certain kinds of tuna-fishing were bad. The most effective way to campaign was to ask for a boycott of all tuna.

That campaign was a success. Changes were made to the way the industry catches tuna so as to reduce dolphin deaths. But tell that to the tuna-fishers who never got anywhere near dolphins. They had to suffer the economic hardship of a depressed market for several years. It was a case of guilt by association.

If the North's seal hunters don't want to suffer the same fate -- again -- they can't sit quietly on the sidelines, as they have so far. Aggressive marketing campaigns can be a dirty business, but sometimes they're necessary.

The mining industry has chosen an odd time and manner to raise concerns about the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, legislation that transfers environmental assessment responsibility to land claims organization in the Western Arctic.

The act has been in the pipeline for years and Ottawa is required by the land claims themselves to produce the act.

Industry would be better served by focusing on the precise details of the act, and not the underlying principles, which are set in stone.