Thank you very much.
Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
Thank you very much for allowing me to appear here to answer your questions and explain how our international activities fit together.
With respect to how our activities fit with the activities of those who lead very specific files, I would start by saying that what we need to do in order to achieve sustainable fisheries, to achieve sustainable oceans and biodiversity, and to achieve a fair trading system--the three areas where I would be more specifically responsible at the multilateral level--is to build a system of governance that fits together. That's from the broadest set of laws, through to very specific laws, through to implementing activities such as guidelines and other kinds of laws, and then it gets into management applications. It's a system that all works together, and it also makes sure incentives are aligned.
The part that lays out the enabling framework--the norms, the policy frameworks, the agenda-setting, and all of that in a multilateral sense--is what I am responsible for in those kinds of areas.
The negotiation of the operational regulatory management, especially at the regional and bilateral level, would, in the fisheries area, be under David Bevan. I also don't have specific responsibilities for any of the seal fishers, who are also in David's area. That's how we would fit together. We work very closely, and our stakeholders understand how we work together.
Just before I answer your very specific question about specific activities, I'll describe our strategy. We started to build our strategy in 2005 and made it permanent in 2008. It is a strategy that aligns the department behind a common vision. It builds a very coherent, competent, united team that can play for those issues coherently across all sorts of forums. That's what is going to give us international influence, because we want buy-in to our vision on these issues.
To answer your very specific question about things I'm proud of, I feel I've played a very major role in a number of activities, but you raised the one of subsidies, so maybe I should start there.
It is true, of course, that right now the international negotiations are going through a very, very slow track in the Doha Round in Geneva. The subsidies negotiations are part of that round, and the fisheries subsidies are just a small part of, or just an annex on, the rules negotiations.
That's not where it started. It started quite a long time ago, although the negotiations have been going on for seven years. It started in an area where I could say I did play a role. You've met some of my staff for now at the negotiations, but I don't go to those negotiations specifically. I'm not a detailed trade expert, but we knew this Doha Round was coming, and we needed to make sure our interests were protected. That meant getting international agreement on some parameters of that discussion, parameters that would be very important to us when the time came.
I was chair of the OECD fisheries committee for six years. That gave me a tremendous amount of influence in terms of getting items onto the agenda and getting outputs that would have a huge impact on the way the world saw those negotiations when they came.
At the time this was happening, in the early 2000s, the U.S. and some other countries had a very strict resolution that they wanted ministers to adopt. It basically said that all fisheries subsidies were bad and all fisheries subsidies had to be eliminated. We knew this idea was not in our interests, so we organized a program of work over a period of years that resulted in publications that are available from the OECD, the think tank for fisheries issues. They got buy-in to the concept of different kinds of subsidies, and we laid out an organizing framework to think about them. We started to collect data on them to show that maybe it's not such a simple picture.
I moved from that into a project on trade liberalization that showed where we really needed to fix things, and then started to take it apart, and then moved into some more analysis, which again was published, to show how to think about certain components. That's the kind of work that gets buy-in to a certain framework, which we can now rely on when we get into those negotiations. While I'm not at the table, the kinds of things that we agree, with the points that have been made here, ought not to be in the chair's text, we can now, in the way he's taken the negotiations, refer back to that literature to make our case.
That's how we got ahead of some issues, and I'm quite proud we did it. It's true as well in other areas, but I won't take up any more time in answering.