The reason I say that, Mr. O'Neill, is that members of Parliament won't be affected by this, our constituents will be. If Canada is going to negotiate agreements, in the WTO Doha discussions, on fisheries issues as well as a myriad of other issues, such as agriculture, we would like to know who you consulted with. I personally contacted a whole whack of people myself, and not one of them had been called on this issue; in fact, they're quite surprised by it.
So if you have 300 names and associations where discussions were ongoing, I'd sure love to know who they were. That's the first thing.
Mr. Emerson, on the chair of the WTO who drafted this, you have to go back and ask why he did this. If the rationale is that there are too many boats chasing too few fish--which really means too many fishermen chasing too few fish--then how do you rationalize the industry to protect the ecosystems of our oceans around the world? If you're starting on that premise, that's not a bad argument, but the question is this: who gets hurt when you do this?
In our own country, as you know, we have many people suffering, from the west coast to the east coast, in terms of price for their products and availability of the resource itself. Salmon on the west coast has been in trouble, as have the lobster prices on the east coast. We continuously hear that there are too many fishermen and not enough fish. Yet when we ask for particular programs to exit fishermen out of the industry with dignity--buyout packages for their enterprises or whatever--we always get a bit of a reluctance. But when I look at this, I think, “Hmm, WTO can do that for you.”
I know that agriculture is a very important issue in this country and around the world, as are other issues. But my feeling--and I get the sentiment from my colleagues here as well--is that fisheries is a sidebar, not the main issue at the forefront of all of this.
I remember when John Solomon, a former MP, met the French agriculture minister in 1988 over a glass of wine in Vienna. He was told that if he thought, for one second, that the French were going to ignore their farmers, he was out of his fricking mind. So I know you're in a tough battle when it comes to agriculture and these other discussions.
Can you tell us for sure that fisheries will not be a sidebar issue and that, if you get an agreement on agriculture and other areas, fisheries won't just get lumped into that vacuum? My fear is that this may happen, and I want your assurances that it won't.