Before answering the specific question, I think it's important to note that the provinces and the federal government worked together to help establish the council. We provided some start-up funding to support the Lobster Council in the amount of $90,000 since 2009.
We at Fisheries and Oceans Canada have been clear with the council that this was start-up funding, with a view to the council's working with its members—the lobster industry, on both the harvesting and the processing side—to come up with some mechanism for taxing their members and getting some funding for the organization.
The issue of the levy itself is not a concept we have thoroughly reviewed, so my comments today are really preliminary views.
The matter of collecting fees from members is really up to an organization and its members. Off the top of my head, there are a couple of ways you could secure that funding. You could either do it through contracts or agreements with your members or you could do it through legislation. The Lobster Council would need to seek some advice to determine the best way for it to proceed to get that membership due.
It would seem impractical to go the contract or agreement route, given that there are 10,000 fishing enterprises across Atlantic Canada and Quebec. As far as I know, there is no federal legislation that enables the collection of the levy from the Lobster Council members to be provided to the Lobster Council. There certainly aren't any provisions in the Fisheries Act, under Fisheries and Oceans Canada, that will allow that kind of levy or fee.
It's not immediately obvious either that this kind of levy would fit within the mandate and core role of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which is to manage and control fisheries. In fact, it may be more clearly linked to the provinces' roles with respect to marketing seafood across Canada and outside Canada.
Having the government adopt legislation to collect those fees sounds a bit like a tax. If we were to look into this, we would need to look at it in that context.