Sure. I think there are many places in the Fisheries Act where you could specifically insert consideration of cumulative effects.
There's the idea that I believe we just heard about: the notion of the guiding principles. For example, you could specifically insert into the discretion to authorize harm to habitat an express requirement. As an example, we'll use the existing structure that you have in the act right now. We have section 6, which currently sets out just four criteria a decision-maker thinks about when they make a decision to authorize serious harm to fish.
Let's assume that there's a provision such as that for decisions to authorize harm to fish habitat, which, as I've said before, is a provision that we think should be a stand-alone provision in the act. The things you would have to consider when doing this would include that consideration of the cumulative impact to fish habitat. We also think there should be some other thing—either it's a provision or maybe it's in a regulation or another stand-alone provision—that deals expressly with cumulative impacts.
The real challenge is that you also must have criteria or some way to evaluate that whole cumulative effects idea, because in the abstract it's kind of overwhelming, like, what does that even mean? That's why we're recommending that DFO.... This is something that we talked about under the specific heading that you should consider cumulative impacts. DFO should, before they turn to individual authorizations, have something to measure those authorizations against. That would be a watershed level assessment or an ecosystem level assessment that would say, look, here's what this watershed can handle and here's the place we think the threshold is. When you consider cumulative effects in that section 35 authorization it has to be measured against some work we've already done to assess what is the threshold, that is, how far can we go before we're affecting the way this thing functions?
Is that clear? I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it's specific enough.