Thank you for the question, Mr. Finnigan.
I will speak personally. But I have no objection to my colleagues filling out my remarks in order to provide the committee with information. They have much more expertise in the details of how the act is applied than I do.
You asked me why we just did not go back to the 2012 or 2013 text of the act, that is, before the most recent amendments were made. We preferred not to do simply that. I know that some, including some scientists, have suggested that it would be better to copy and paste and use what was there before the act was amended. However, we believe that we can do a little better than that.
The Prime Minister's mandate letter mentions modern safeguards. Since the text of the act that the previous government amended had been in existence since the 1970s, for 40 or so years, and since measures were included in the act, it could, 40 years later, be appropriate to add to the interpretation of what modern safeguards mean to fish habitat, such factors as climate change and the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples.
We also preferred to listen to the voices of Canadians and to hear what experts, the fishing industry and farmers have to tell us. We have all heard past stories of how a country music festival had to be cancelled because of a problem with the Fisheries Act. We want to understand examples like that, because they clearly concern us. But we also wanted to hear the opinion of parliamentarians and of Canadians through this committee and through other consultations.
We will not be amending the Fisheries Act frequently. We will not do so in an omnibus bill. We will work transparently and I hope that your committee will continue to be part of the discussion.
We believe that we can bring in safeguards appropriate for 2016 and 2017 and not for 1976 and 1977. For us, what existed previously is the baseline. We want to make sure that we have a modern plan at least as solid as the one we had beforehand. But there are probably aspects that we can add or improve.
In our view, some aspects of the 2012-2013 reform were positive. We do not just want to discard what was done, but we want to keep and improve some aspects of the reform that seem to have been positive.