I'm not necessarily saying that it should be done first but I think they need to go hand in hand. From my perspective I have a lot of sympathy for how the fishing industry and even the food fishery feels. If you're fishing an endangered species and we don't make a decision to list it under the Species at Risk Act, then we do nothing essentially. If there was a stronger Fisheries Act that required rebuilding, it would allow us to say, look, we actually have the legal tools under the Fisheries Act to do this. It's going to take us a while to get cod right. It's also probably going to take a little while to get the Fisheries Act right. I think the problems with cod, and the fact that, again, we have 15 species in the critical zone with no rebuilding plans is because there's no legal requirement to do so. This is a real sense of conflict for the department in terms of the only legal way we can recover marine species is by listing them under the Species at Risk Act. We've listed wolffish but then we gave out 9,600 permits for allowable harm. I don't think we want to be doing that with cod or many other marine fish.
I really encourage you to think about how the Fisheries Act can fix the problems that have existed with northern cod. We need to ask why we don't have a rebuilding plan 25 years after the collapse, and what kind of legal structure would make it so that this no longer happens.
I know your scope is fairly narrow on the Fisheries Act, but I don't think you can sort out the northern cod and the other species in the critical zone without really taking a look at the Fisheries Act and making sure there is a precautionary, ecosystem approach for those things that are in the UN fish stocks agreement with a commitment to rebuilding and reporting back. I encourage you to look at what the U.S. government has to do to report to Congress. It's quite good. We need some sense of accountability. Why is it we've gotten this far with no rebuilding plan? Who's accountable? Without a strong Fisheries Act to actually require this things slip through the cracks.