Minister, I want to join with my colleagues in welcoming you here and thanking you for being here. You've been a minister for less than a year; I've been an MP for only a year, and I know I have lots to learn.
I want to say that what I come here with is some assumptions: certainly that a man's word is his bond; that in politics, as in anything else, when you take a public stance on something, it means a lot; and that in the world of international treaties, where Canada is required to work with our international partners to preserve our fisheries because we can't do it alone, we have to depend on the provinces and the federal government working coherently and cooperating if these treaties are to be negotiated to make sense. Those are assumptions that I come with.
I want to recite to you a chronology of events that has been revealed to me, based on my research, going back to 2005, when there was a conference in St. John's, well before you were minister. At that conference it was held that NAFO reform was a key plank in an effort to modernize Canadian fisheries. The governments of the day were the Williams government provincially and the Martin government federally.
Then we move to 2006 and 2007. Our party forms the government, and Minister Hearn pushes to modernize NAFO “to give it teeth”. The negotiation team, like every other group that represents Canada at NAFO, consists of DFO bureaucrats and scientists, industry representatives, as well as representatives from the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Isn't that right?