No, I don't look at this as belabouring; I look at this as there being a reason that our commercial stocks haven't returned since the shutdown in 1992.
The reason is because our commercial stocks and migratory stocks migrate from inshore to offshore. They don't notice that 200-mile limit in the ocean. They don't pay any attention to that—stupid old fish. They don't. In a lot of cases with our migratory stocks, the reason they haven't regrown since 1992 is that while fishing stopped completely for the most part inside the 200-mile limit, it didn't stop outside. They continued fishing.
It's only been in recent years where the clampdown has really been put on the illegal fishing. The number of citations has gone down. Part of the reason why the number of citations has gone down is that there are fewer fish to catch. In terms of the numbers, the fish caught outside of the 200-mile limit, I'm not belabouring this because this kind of stat is critical to addressing the problem of foreign overfishing. Foreign overfishing is a big reason why our domestic fisheries for groundfish, species such as cod, have not returned.
When we have a bill such as this, which may do something—not a whole lot, but maybe something towards addressing overfishing—I would feel more comfortable with statistics.
The point I'm getting at now is a question, Mr. Chair.
Will we have an opportunity to ask DFO officials again for some of this data? I had no answers on stats when they were here before.
Are they going to appear before the committee? Can we ask questions? Can we put it to them again?