Protesters took to the streets in several Canadian cities and dozens of countries around the world Tuesday, in an international demonstration against the commercial seal hunt in Canada.

The Canadian rallies -- part of The International Day of Action Against the Canadian Seal Hunt -- were held in Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver.

They come just weeks before many hunters take to the ice floes for the hunt. The season actually runs from Nov. 15 until May 15, but most hunting is done in the spring.

About 30 people, carrying signs and chanting slogans, marched outside the Halifax-area office of federal Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan.

They tried to deliver letters and a petition to the minister's office, but found that the doors were locked.

Barry Crozier, who organized the protests, says he thinks Regan's officials deliberately avoided contact with the protestors.

In Toronto, about 150 protesters marched in a downtown square objecting to the seal hunt. About the same number turned out on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

The protesters are trying to call attention to the "cruel and needless slaughter of harp and hooded seals in Canada."

They claim fishermen on the East Coast will kill 300,000 harp seals between late March and the middle of May.

"Canada's commercial seal hunt is the largest and cruellest slaughter of marine mammals on earth," said Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive officer of the Humane Society of the United States.

On the eve of the protests, retired French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot had harsh words for Regan and Prime Minister Paul Martin.

"You are jerks!" she said, in a telephone interview with Sun Media.

"I wrote for years to all Canadian prime ministers, but it hasn't done anything to stop it. Nothing!''

The 70-year-old Bardot now walks with a cane and can't make a trip to Canada to join the protests -- a fact she told the newspaper that she regrets.

When Bardot visited Canada in 1976 to protest the seal hunt, almost 130,000 seals were killed.

Today, government quotas allow the hunting of 360,000 seals.

The government argues that the seal hunt is humane, and that it boosts the economy of coastal towns and villages where few other economic opportunities exist.

"I believe there is in excess of five million seals in the herd right now," Brian Underhill, a spokesman for Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan, told the Globe and Mail. "And that does provide an income for numerous families in areas where there's not too much in terms of economic activity."

Ottawa introduced a three-year seal management plan in 2003, that would allow fishermen to kill a total of 975,000 seals over that time period.

"DFO sets quotas at levels that ensure the health and abundance of seal herds," the website for Fisheries and Oceans Canada says.

With files from the Canadian Press