Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for coming. I think you've made an important contribution to our analysis of this issue.
Let's return again to this thorny issue of custodial management. I agree with you that it's been defined in a number of different ways. By the most obvious definition, it's a difficult one to achieve.
Let me give you a couple of others. This one is from this committee's report in 2003, a report on custodial management, actually:
By custodial management, the Committee did not intend that Canada should claim sovereignty over or exclusive rights to the resources of these regions of the ocean but that Canada should assume the role of managing and conserving the fisheries resources of the NAFO regulatory area in a way that would fully respect the rights of other nations that have historically fished these grounds.
Then in 2002 in a report on overfishing we said:
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.
One of the notions of custodial management has to be this notion of conservation. If, by having as its goal custodial management, the government means--and I think it does--that we need to do something that brings foreign overfishing to an end, do you think we're closer to achieving that through what we've achieved through NAFO since 1978, and in the changes we're proposing to NAFO, and in the way NAFO is operating today? Obviously conservation and sustainability need to be important concepts here, rather than having every country keep its share. Do you think we're closer to that?