Yes, Mr. Hayes, I will speak to that.
One of the interesting things about Great Lakes fishery management—for the MPs who represent coastal ridings on the east or west coast, this might be a little different—is that in the Great Lakes region the state and provincial boundaries go right to the middle of the lake. They go right to the centre, and fishery management is the responsibility of the individual state jurisdictions. On the U.S. side the tribes have management responsibilities. It's different in Canada. The Province of Ontario has the primary management responsibility.
What our treaty did was it very much called for the fishery commission to make sure that all of the jurisdictions are talking to each other, because up until the 1950s, each jurisdiction managed in their own little piece of the lake, which doesn't make a lot of sense, especially when Canadian and American jurisdictions sometimes had wildly different opinions about how management should occur. Some wanted to regulate and some didn't. So our treaty said the fishery commission needs to establish these working arrangements, and we've been doing that since 1964. But it always needs to be better because each jurisdiction has its own suite of political considerations, has its own laws, has its own constituencies, and very often, has its own policies, procedures, and objectives that they want to do. It's always a challenge to keep those partnerships strong and those jurisdictions on the same page.
That's just fishery folks talking to fishery folks. The other partnership work we need to do—in this era of having to do more with less and also having to make sure that we establish connections with ecosystems—is to make sure that the people who are involved in fishery management are also talking to the people who are involved, say, in water quality management or water quality improvements or the rehabilitation of areas of concern in the Great Lakes. What that means is that we can manage our fisheries, but it's vitally important that the people who are managing fisheries also understand why it's important to improve water quality, improve habitat, and so on.
Those are the partnerships that we are trying very hard to strengthen. It's to maintain those relationships, but we can always do more to strengthen them. There's not enough talking we can do to make sure that our policies are all on the same page.