I dont have any exclusive information or anything. I do know that the number to be killed was raised from 320 000 last year to 325 000 this year.
My opinion is available at this website that I designed: http://www.canadiansealhunt.com (hoping to seo it for the keyword Canada)
It is pretty barbaric, since like you said there is no environmental reason behind this. I was sort of hoping that this would stop once the convervatives came into power but of course that was wishful thinking.
Yes the killing of whitecoats is now illegal… but all that means is that they have to wait until the animal is of 3 weeks of age before killing it.