It starts, Mr. Chair and Madam Duncan, with my belief that the federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans is the only elected responsible minister in all of Canada with a fiduciary and constitutional duty to uphold the provisions of an act that has 144 years of history, and that ought to remain as such.
When another member talked of the Swiss cheese metaphor that I've used, in fact, all of this downloading has very alarming potential consequences. If any of you have worked with provincial governments as we have and I did as minister of fisheries, we were the watchdog, the guardian at the door when it came to dealing with the forest, mining, and other industries in British Columbia—all of which came under provincial constitutional jurisdiction.
If you download responsibility for fisheries to those provincial agencies, which have had their budgets stripped, they don't have the scientific or enforcement capacity, they don't have the legislative capacity. Yet we're saying that we can go into administrative arrangements. I'm really especially alarmed by clause 134, which essentially is the “downloads to the province” clause, which is essentially the federal government opting out. It actually says in either that clause or a nearby one that where provincial equivalency can be shown, the federal government is going to vacate the field. The federal government is going to step away and let the province take over the administration. It says also, if they don't do a good job, we'll take it back. But that's too late.