Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have a deck that I believe is being distributed to the members, and I'll just briefly speak to that.
I guess the choice before us with respect to NAFO is between the revised convention and the old convention of 1978. There is no opportunity to choose other options; the solutions would not be realistic. We have to either accept the new convention or we'll have the old one as the alternative.
The 1978 convention is fatally flawed. It is a convention that was designed with the sovereignty of Canada as one primary objective, and to achieve that, we put in place the objection procedure. That was put in at our request. So we have a convention now that permits objections with no constraints, that has no dispute settlement procedure because we didn't want to be bound by a dispute settlement process in order to maintain our freedom to operate. Decisions are based on votes, which creates winners and losers, and that was the means by which decisions were taken in NAFO for a long period of time. There's only a single species management, so we were voting on TAC and quota in the course of these meetings.
We created winners and losers, but the losers had an alternative. They objected; they set unilateral quotas. The fishing was above the scientific advice, and the actual fishing, because of non-compliance, was above what was unilaterally set. In those circumstances, the outcome was almost inevitable, and a collapse of the stocks resulted.
The objectives for NAFO reform were to protect our quota shares. We and the EU hold the vast majority of quotas in the NAFO regulatory area. We wanted to constrain the use of objections by making objections part of the decision-making process, whereby the onus is on the state wishing to object. In other words, a state would have to explain why it was objecting, and we wanted to have in place an effective mechanism to resolve disagreements, in particular those over allocations.
We have had tremendous progress over the last few years in improving the monitoring control and surveillance scheme in NAFO, and we'll talk about non-compliance and how the incidence of non-compliance has been dramatically reduced as a result of the changes made in 2006 to the NAFO conservation and enforcement measures.
More broadly, our international strategy has moved forward with a multi-faceted approach to stop overfishing. NAFO reform is one aspect of that, but we worked the multilateral processes to help create the conditions for change. I'm not going to pretend that NAFO was suddenly moved to take steps to protect the vulnerable marine ecosystems or corals or seamounts. That only happened as a result of the work done by my colleague, Ms. Ridgeway, in terms of the UN General Assembly and an alternative to banning bottom-trawling--which supports 14,000 Canadian jobs--and finding a better way to manage the impact of fishing on vulnerable marine ecosystems.
By and large, we have strong bilateral relationships with Spain, Portugal, and Russia--we have some current issues with Russia--and that's been a key component to getting action in NAFO and getting action, more importantly, on the high seas.
Compliance in NAFO has changed quite significantly. As a result of ongoing enhanced enforcement presence, and significant improvements in the NAFO conservation and enforcement measures that were adopted in 2006, there's been a steep decline in serious infringements in NAFO. That is reflected in the data we have, where we had 13 serious infringements in 2005, seven in 2006--the year the measures came in--one in 2007, and zero in 2008.
In the global context, we see dynamic change is occurring at an increasing pace. That's reflected in measures to reform all of the RFMOs. The UN General Assembly resolution adopted in 2006 called for the protection of vulnerable marine ecosystems from bottom-contact fisheries. The RFMOs have to report back to the General Assembly this year, so NAFO, along with others, will be going back to the General Assembly process and reporting the progress made to date.
In the U.S.A. we have the Magnuson-Stevens renewal act. That has serious implications for Canada's ability to access the U.S. market, in that the new American law requires the Americans to stop overfishing within two years, and they must ensure that the fish they're importing into the United States, our most important market, are coming from sustainable fisheries. That means that their conservation measures could be applied to countries that are shipping that fish to the United States.
The EU is also moving ahead in January 2010 with measures for tracking and traceability so as to avoid importing into the EU illegal, unregulated, and unreported fish. We have a commitment from the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization ministers that there will be a stop to IUU and an end to misreporting. So there is growing transparency and accountability.
I would point out that in the North Atlantic we had a problem years ago with IUU fishing in the NAFO regulatory area. It ended with the arrest of several vessels in that area. But we had continuing problems in the oceanic redfish fishery up until a few years ago. NAFO, NEAFC, and the North Atlantic fisheries ministers agreed to implement port measures, and those port measures in the North Atlantic have virtually eliminated IUU fishing there. Half the vessels were scrapped, and the other half, unfortunately, have moved to other parts of the world to continue that activity. But they're no longer in the North Atlantic.
The key results we've achieved since 2006 have been improved monitoring, control, and surveillance measures. Those are measures that require vessels to be pulled from the NAFO regulatory area to port for inspection under certain conditions. In 2007, we amended the convention text and adopted measures that met Canadian objectives in the areas of application, protection of Canadian quota shares, and constraints in the use of objection procedures. Canada attained agreement to safeguard provisions in the NAFO measures that reinforce the protection of Canadian quota shares. That is to say that it now takes an active vote to change the quota key. In other words, the quota key stays the same unless there's an agreement to change it.
In 2008 the French version of the text was adopted, and now the convention text can be ratified.
On the NAFO enforcement measures, there has been some thought that UNFA was stronger than the current measures in NAFO. That's not the case. The UNFA measures allow the inspecting people to remain on board the vessel for 72 hours and to then take it to port in their country and await the presence of the flag-state inspectors. There is no provision in UNFA that allows boarding inspectors to take action outside the authority of the flag state. That's not the case. Portraying UNFA as a means by which we can pull a vessel off the high seas into Canada and apply Canadian law to that vessel is not accurate. I think it's clear that this is the situation. As soon as the flag state takes control of the vessel--