I think Bill C-45 is here because the department lacked the policy framework to correct Larocque. The Fisheries Act, I think, is here not because it's been well thought out nor because it's had a broad consultative process. There's been no consultation—zero. There's been no consultation. They pulled it off the shelf. It had been a failed bill in the previous government, and they said we need to give the minister the authority to take fish from the public and use it without an appropriation from Parliament to pay for these things. It's the only reason that I can see that a new government would come forward without consulting.
Bill C-45 gives a mechanism for the government to do something that is questionable at best and that Larocque said the minister does not have the authority to do. I don't think we should easily give those authorities to the crown. I think you have to be very cautious when you impinge on the public right to fish; the resource is not a crown resource, but a public resource, and that's vastly different. This bill tries to talk about a whole bunch of other things, but the crux of the bill is to absolutely do that. That is something I'm fundamentally opposed to, and so are most fishermen.
The problem is that they've not only funded science and management through this nefarious process, but they have also funded associations, so we have associations of fishermen out there who now have no mechanism to run their operations. Some in the department are going around trying to get support for Bill C-45 by saying that if you pass it, forget all the bad things, because we can amend it to be good things. As a former chairman of this committee, I think that's an impossibility, but they're saying that if you do it, there would be a mechanism to fund your association. I find that a particularly weak argument to support a bad bill.
The fundamental thing is that in the absence of policy coming out of the government, and in the absence of legislation that I think is supportable, we have a funding shortfall of probably $30 million in a very fragile industry. Some of the weak fisheries will not survive, or, if they do survive, we will be penalized in the marketplace because we will not be able to prove, as Christina said, that we are fishing sustainably.