Last year hunters culled a record 307,000 juvenile seals, almost all of them harp seals. Until now Ottawa has set annual limits but said it had changed to a three-year system to help the sealing industry.

Thibault said the cull was being expanded because the harp seal population had hit a record 5.2 million animals, up from 1.8 million in 1970. If all 975,000 seals were killed, the population in 2006 would be 4.7 million, he said.

"Seals are in abundance ... seal management is founded on sound conservation principles to ensure harvest opportunities now and in the future," he told a news conference.

Gory pictures of helpless young seals being beaten to death on ice floes have turned the annual hunt into a public relations nightmare for the federal government, which is also under pressure from the sealing industry.

Ottawa says the cull protects depleted fish stocks and provides jobs in economically depressed Newfoundland. The province's prosperous cod fishery collapsed a decade ago and some fishermen say seals are partly to blame.

The seal hunt, which usually begins in mid March in the Gulf of St Lawrence and continues for another two months, is by far the largest cull of marine mammals in the world.

Thibault dismissed complaints from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) that increasing the cull would devastate the seal population.

"There are no signs to that effect," he said, prompting IFAW campaigners to announce they would be launching a new overseas effort to focus attention on the cull.

"We are outraged," IFAW seals campaigner Rebecca Aldworth told Reuters. "He (Thibault) has turned his back on the international condemnation this slaughter has brought upon this country.

"Certainly this is not a decision based on any existing science...We're not going to stand by and watch the harp seal population wiped out for political reasons," she said, accusing the government of trying to deflect attention from Ottawa's alleged mismanagement of fish stocks.

Last month the IFAW said the ice cover off the Atlantic coast, where seals give birth, was rapidly thinning and cited evidence that mortality rates were rising.

Sealers welcomed Thibault's decision, saying it would help bring stability to the industry.

"I think we've got something now we can really work with... this announcement is breathing some new life into where we're going with the sealing industry," Canadian Sealers Association executive director Tina Fagan told reporters.

One bright spot for environmentalists was that Thibault rejected a request from sealers to scrap a 15-year-old ban on hunting some very young seals.