Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Mr. Hearn. We go back a long way, politically, to our days when we were both in opposition in different parties in the Newfoundland legislature.
I want to commend you for your role, along with my colleague, Mr. Stoffer, for achieving a unanimous committee report from this committee some years ago on the very issue of custodial management. I testified in St. John's along with a number of others during that committee hearing.
I'm not going to get into any political banter here, but I just want to put before you what we were told by two people you know very well, David Vardy and Les Dean. I guess you'd call them experienced senior Newfoundland fisheries bureaucrats. They are senior public servants who are very experienced.
They talked about the notion of custodial management and the custodial state. I'm not going to go into details; it's all on the record of how we would ensure--recognizing the historical rights of others--that the management of the stock was done properly, and not done through this horse-trading and all of the other notions that prevail in NAFO. They also laid out very strongly what Canada could do, and still could do, if it didn't ratify this treaty.
Placed alongside of that we have Mr. Applebaum and Mr. Rowat and others involved in federal fisheries who are saying that this treaty in fact--and particularly the possibility of NAFO management inside--is not a step towards custodial management, but it's a step away.
Mr. Applebaum, for example, said that even if the provision was that Canada could manage in the NAFO area on the straddling stocks, that would at least be a step towards custodial management that we might be able to build on down the road. But they saw this as a backwards step and recommended against ratification.
They also said--and this is important, I think, for all of us who look at these things long term, and I think Mr. Vardy and Mr. Dean talked about this--that if we ratify this treaty now, we are stuck for a very, very long time with these provisions and the possibility of changing them is extremely limited. So we're back to another long, long time before we can seek to reform NAFO.
I take it from what you're saying that you have absolutely no qualms about this convention. I know that the conservation of stuff certainly sounds positive, and the ecosystem-based management was there, frankly. That's not part of this convention. That didn't come about as a result of this convention. That's been there for some time.
So the ratification process is really an opportunity for a sober second thought as a country. Can we not say that we can't ratify this treaty right now? There are provisions that are unacceptable to Canada as a whole. That's regardless of what Newfoundland said along the way. Newfoundland has taken a very strong position. Mr. Williams has written a letter to the Prime Minister. We've had the Minister of Fisheries here.
Regardless of what happened in the past, is it not a realistic and rational response at this time? We can say that we did not achieve what we wanted to achieve and we can't ratify this convention now. We need to seek different changes.