I was really disappointed in the testimony from the minister and the parliamentary secretary for a couple of reasons because the words “farmer” and “municipalities” were not mentioned in either of your testimonies.
When I heard the latest comments on agriculture and farming, farmers being charged under the Fisheries Act is something I think they should be worried about. I know the farm groups—and I'm very close to all of them across the country—are very concerned about what the government is possibly doing to the Fisheries Act.
I should make the point as well, and I'm going to go on the record, that this notion that there are no habitat protections in our new Fisheries Act is completely disingenuous. The act says in section 35 that:
No person shall carry on any work, undertaking or activity that results in serious harm to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational or Aboriginal fishery, or to fish that support such a fishery.
Serious harm is defined as “the death of fish or any permanent alteration to, or destruction of, fish habitat”, with fish habitat defined a certain way. To suggest there are no habitat protections in the revised Fisheries Act is not quite correct. I would quote from one of the officials in the room here, Mr. Kevin Stringer, who on November 6, 2012, when questioned in our committee regarding habitat said:
Yes, that's correct. That's still the case under section 35, because if you look at the definition of serious harm, which is in section 2, serious harm to fish is defined as the death of the fish or the permanent alteration or destruction of habitat.
It's quite clear that at the official level in the department there was no suggestion that there were no habitat provisions in the act whatsoever. The habitat provisions in the act are still there.
I have a question. What quantitative evidence is there, and when I say quantitative evidence I mean values and numbers, that suggests that the alterations, the changes, to the Fisheries Act had any measurable effect on any fish population or community in Canada?
I'm specifically asking for numbers. What effect did the changes have on fisheries populations in Canada?