Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses. It certainly was valuable to have you here to speak to us and to provide us with your expertise and your experience on this issue. I thank you for coming before us.
What you had to say pretty well speaks for itself. You put it together quite professionally, and while at times you were passionate about it, it is obviously in balance with the evidence that's been put before you as well, so all committee members have to respect your point of view and appreciate the way you put it. That was done very well. I don't really have very many questions on any of your presentations. They speak for themselves.
I want to ask for your expertise to help resolve a bit of a new issue that's come before us. Through the work of some of the armchair quarterbacks who sit around this committee, we've been able to discover a communiqué of September 28, 2007, from NAFO, which says:
Further to the 2006 precautionary closure of four seamounts in international waters, this year NAFO decided to also close to bottom fisheries a large area on the Grand Banks for the next five years.
Testimony we were given by DFO scientists confirmed that the area that NAFO closed to bottom fisheries is indeed on the Grand Banks outside of 200 miles but on the continental shelf. It is closed to bottom fisheries. I immediately raised the concern that in closing bottom fisheries, probably for the purpose of protecting corals and sponges, NAFO has now closed the scallop fishery prosecuted exclusively by fisherman from Canada. In fact there was an arrest of two American scallop draggers and an American crabber for fishing sedentary species outside of 200 miles on the Canadian continental shelf, showing that jurisdiction is exclusively Canada's as a result of the UNCLOS convention. Canada is now banned from fishing scallop and crab on its continental shelf in the area of the closure that NAFO declared when they banned bottom fisheries.
However, the minister, in a letter today in the Telegram, disputes what I have to say. She says that--and I don't understand this--“the water column above the extended shelf is high seas and that, under UNCLOS, other states have the right to fish on the high seas.”
Mr. Dean, are scallop and crab fished in the water column or on the bottom using bottom fisheries?