Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank Mr. Blais for his comments. I think he's summarized the issue quite well.
I think we based our lack of support for this motion on process. We did some work, we put together a work plan that involved some things at the steering committee, and then the committee decided what was of importance to us.
This was raised at the last meeting, I think by Mr. Donnelly, and he was quite right. At the time we did mention the possibility that west coast issues, particularly aquaculture, and perhaps its relationship to wild salmon populations, could come before us after we heard more information, and that we could decide after we heard from some other witnesses, and that might be an area that we felt compelled to look at.
So we have eco-certification that's still sort of hanging out there in limbo. We've now started down the aquaculture path. We heard some things that were quite interesting, to me at least, and I would like to find out more about what's going on there, who's right, and what the truth is on some of these issues. Now we're throwing in this crab study without any limits on it. All decisions that were made were certainly within the legal, lawful powers of the minister and so on. We're going to go back and look at allocation and TAC issues, if we go there.
There's all of that, and also the Fisheries Act is coming to us sooner, I think, rather than later. As Mr. Blais said, I think this could be an interesting case study when we get to the act and look at the sections of the bill that describe a new allocation, a new licensing regime, from the old one, and maybe look at issues like this and see how they would have been dealt with differently in the new act.
So I'm not opposed to that, as we hear witnesses and travel, probably, looking at the Fisheries Act. But to interrupt our two studies.... You know, we're schizophrenic already, and we probably need to limit it to two, I would say. I think aquaculture is probably something we need to do a little more work on before we can leave it aside.
Based on those things, we're not prepared to support this motion.