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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

>... Canada is the largest importer of shark fins outside of Asia.

Wow, TIL. Thank goodness then, that's likely a substantial cut.

Worth nothing tho that the USA, also a G20 country, has had arguably similar bans since either 2000 or 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_finning#United_States

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Thanks for sharing that wiki link. This paragraph was particularly interesting to me.

> In 2010, Hawaii became the first state to ban the possession, sale and distribution of shark fins. The law became effective on 1 July 2011.[95] Similar laws have been enacted in the states of Washington,[96] Oregon,[97][98] California,[99] the territory of Guam[100] and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.[101] California governor Jerry Brown cited the cruelty of finning and potential threats to the environment and commercial fishing in signing the bill.[99] Opponents charged the ban was discriminatory against Chinese, the main consumers of shark fin soup, when federal laws already banned the practice of finning.

Why is there a market for shark fins in Canada to begin with ?

Canada has a relatively large (~5%) Chinese and Chinese-Canadian population. A large immigration event happened during the 90s due to the uncertainty surrounding the UK handover of Hong Kong[1] and many resettled in Vancouver.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_immigration...

A long time back (i.e. when I was a kid, which was a long time back), you could get a visa to come to Canada if you invested a certain amount of money into a company and ran that company for a few years (2 was the minimum, I think). For relatively well off people in China this was a great opportunity and basically the default thing to do was to open a Chinese restaurant. Lots of these restaurants went under after the proprietors got permanent residence status, but a suprisingly large number of them stuck around. My good friend's father was one of those immigrants and he said that he had no interested at all in running a restaurant, but after doing it for a few years he found that he really enjoyed it. So historically there have been a lot of Chinese restaurants in Canada and a large population of Chinese Canadians. Over time, quite a few of these restaurants have gotten very good and the owners hire famous chefs from China to come over and cook in them (at one time that was a thing you could do... I'm not so sure any more). Because of this, famous Chinese dishes started to appear in the restaurants. Again, when I was a kid, most restaurants had 2 menus: one in Chinese and one in English. The English one had "Chinese Canadian" food like sweet and sour pork balls in neon red sauce, while the Chinese menu had actual Chinese cuisine. As Canadians became more aware of this, they started preferring the Chinese menu. By the time I was in University, everybody I knew wouldn't dream of ordering off the English menu (I grew up in Winnipeg, which had a very good set of Chinese restaurants at the time). Again, over time, Canadians started to appreciate fine Chinese cuisine. One of the dishes that is popular is shark fin soup. That's basically the long and the short of it as far as I can tell.

The number of Chinese immigrants to Canada cannot be underestimated. There are whole cities where Chinese constitute more than 50% of the population [1].

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[1] http://www.richmond-news.com/news/chinese-reach-majority-in-...

Large Chinese population.

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