I don't think I agree with that. I can assure the committee that this has been carefully considered by the Department of Justice, as well as the experts at DFO.
To clarify a question that was raised earlier, Bill S-3 is about amending the Coastal Fisheries Protection Act, and although it's true, as Angela said, that the act did not have any import prohibitions in it, it did have prohibitions in it. For example, subsection 4(2) of the Coastal Fisheries Protection Act states:
No person, being aboard a foreign fishing vessel or being a member of the crew of or attached to or employed on a foreign fishing vessel, shall fish or prepare to fish for a sedentary species of fish
and it continues. That's just one of the sections.
So there are the prohibitions about fishing in Canadian waters, obviously, and that's what the Coastal Fisheries Protection Act is largely about. There are penalties similar to the ones we see here in Bill S-3 that relate to those offences. They're in section 18 of the Coastal Fisheries Protection Act.
We're introducing new prohibitions about importing undocumented fish and putting in place these penalties that are similar, I think. Maybe Angela can comment more intelligently on that. For example, in that section that I just read to you, the penalties section says:
Every person who contravenes paragraph 4(1)(a), subsection 4(2) or section 5.2 is guilty of an offence and liable (a) on conviction on indictment, to a fine not exceeding seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars; or (b) on summary conviction, to a fine not exceeding one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Then there are some other penalties that are similar to the $500,000 that we've seen here. I don't see the problem that's being raised here, but perhaps Angela has some additional comments.