Thank you, Mr. Chair.
So far, one inherent message here is that this is fraught with peril no matter how you look at it, but the biggest peril is dumping, not to adapt and understand the fact that the marketplace, and indeed jurisdictions, governments, are responding to the need for some sort of assurance that seafood is handled in a certain way.
The question here is what is the appropriate way? How is it labelled? How is it certified, or some combination of the two? You're telling us that Canada, specifically, did some very good work in directing and driving the FAO in its original template for certification back in 2005.
The question now for us as a committee, if we choose to study this further, is to examine what has happened since then in terms of whether we have still maintained that leadership role. It seems to me we've got these private, jingo-driven labels that are the biggest threat to us because they're not accountable. They are more populist driven. There's no good transparency as to how they do business, but yet they're going to pass judgment on every one of our primary fisheries producers. I think that's the biggest threat we have.
So if I'm leaning in a direction, it is toward those that certify using the FAO doctrine. Why haven't we been a little more active in promoting or at least communicating, educating our big retailers like Loblaws that this is the approach to take?
It seems our industry has gravitated to the tougher, more difficult standard called certification. You're telling us our industry is saying certification is the way to go, that the MSC is really the way to go, and I think they're probably very threatened by the jingoistic populist labels, because they're unaccountable and they cannot be budged per se once they get something in their mind.
Would you think it may be a reasonable conclusion that the Government of Canada should have an education process supporting that certification we helped craft as opposed to the jingo-driven labels?