Well as I said, I will answer that for you.
First of all, there are two major issues. There is NAFO and there was the inability of NAFO, as it existed at the time, to deal with a problem that was facing the country. But when I say “the country” here, it's more or less our province, Newfoundland and Labrador. And let me say to you that for every decision made in relation to our dealings with the fishery or with NAFO, we had Newfoundland's problems in mind because Newfoundland was the prime beneficiary of any changes, or if they were the wrong, they would be hurt most.
If you ask me, do we have custodial management, as you just did, my clear-cut answer to you is that it depends. And why I say that is it depends on what custodial management is. I don't know what your definition of custodial management is. I have never seen one. I have not seen a definition from your party of what custodial management is, so how can we judge whether we have it or not? I do know that in international law there is no definition. I couldn't find it, and I don't think anybody can, and I've heard some top-notch lawyers say there is no definition of custodial management. So when you ask somebody, do we have it or do we not, it sort of depends on what you're talking about.
I'll read very briefly a definition given by a former colleague of yours, and the Liberal lead on the committee, Mr. Matthews, when he said, “If we could get all contracting partners of NAFO to fish under the same system, especially one that was acceptable to Canada, then we pretty much would be where we wanted to be”--in relation to custodial management.
If that is custodial management, my answer to you would be, yes, we can say we have custodial management.
For this very committee, the definition was:
The essential purpose of custodial management would be to establish a resource management regime that would provide comparable standards of conservation and enforcement for all transboundary stocks, inside and outside the 200-mile limit. In other words, precisely the kind of regime promised by UNFA but delivered by Canada rather than NAFO. By implementing such a regime, we would impose no greater burden on others than on ourselves nor would we demand less of others than ourselves.
If you wanted to dig into that, you could say yes, we've achieved that or are pretty close to it if we haven't fully achieved it.
There are other definitions, including one from Tom Rideout, and including at least two...or however many times Minister Hedderson appeared here, you have a different definition. So there are some. Under many of them, we have achieved custodial management.
Is this what people think custodial management is? Complete control? In other words, have we supplanted NAFO? Can we go out there and take charge? Of course we can't. We are not there yet. Can we ever get there? Maybe.
But let me say one thing to you, as members of the committee. Mr. Blais and Mr. Stoffer are here. These guys were there when we debated some of this. In the two years that we were in government, we made more progress in reforming NAFO and in improving NAFO, and in improving their surveillance and the way we treated those who broke the rules out there, than others had done in the 20 years previous to that.